robertogreco + howweteach 472
David F. Noble: A Wrench in the Gears - 1/8 - YouTube
"Documentary about the later professor, critical historian and anti-corporate activist David F. Noble. www.revivalfilms.ca"
[Full playlist (trailer and all eight parts):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjSpVmQJimhdKIR392skWxQCcI27P824Z
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGMotwh46dw
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xCEMOHLtCk
Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3XULHldXE
Part 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a4YNN4IRS4
Part 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptC5z0M7Ttg
Part 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qplQYuq4VNE
Part 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEVv23F1Ewo ]
[via: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2017/09/20/when-someone-shows-you-who-they-are-believe-them-the-first-time/ ]
davidnoble power education progressive corporatism highered highereducation documentary rules schools schooling deschooling unschooling cv learning howwelearn howweteach teaching activism authority abuse academia resistance canada us lobbying israel criticalthinking capitalism experience life living hierarchy oppression collegiality unions self-respect organizing humanrights corporatization luddism automation technology luddites distancelearning correspondencecourses history creditcards privacy criticaltheory criticalpedagogy attendance grades grading assessment experientialeducation training knowledge self self-directed self-directedlearning pedagogy radicalpedagogy alienation authoritarianism anxiety instrinsicmotivation motivation parenting relationships love canon defiance freedom purpose compulsory liberation
2 days ago by robertogreco
The Book That Made Me: An Animal | Public Books
"The Lives of Animals was the first book I read in college—or at least the first book I read in a strange, amazing seminar that rewired my brain in the first semester of freshman year. The course was about animals, and I signed up for it probably because it was a course my dad, who had been advising me on all things college, would have taken himself. He kept animal effigies all over the apartment: portraits of a donkey and a marmot in the bathroom; a giant poster of "The External Structure of Cock and Chicken" in the living room; dog figures of many breeds; pigs, his favorite, in all shapes and sizes, in every single nook and cranny. In the dining room he had a huge pig sculpture made of leather, which in retrospect was a strange and morbid combination: one animal skinned to make an image of another. Our cocker spaniel had chewed its face beyond recognition by the time my mom got around to throwing it out.
My dad passed away in 2016, two years after they got divorced, and I faced the monumental task of disposing of his menagerie. I kept many things, of course, but couldn't keep them all. It was so easy to throw out or donate clothes, housewares, furniture, even books. I didn't know what to do with the creatures, who seemed to contain his spirit more than anything else. I laughed when I found a key chain in a random drawer: a little brass effigy of one pig mounting another. That was his humor. That was his mind, his way of seeing, his culture—which was based, like all cultures, in certain ideas about nature. Frankly, he was a difficult man to know even when he was alive. The animals offered me a way in, as they probably did for him.
Anyway, he was the one who saw the listing for a course named "Zooësis" and thought I might like it. And I really did, from the moment our indefatigably brilliant professor, Una Chaudhuri, asked us to read J. M. Coetzee's weird, hybrid book. The Lives of Animals is a novella, but Coetzee delivered it as a two-part Tanner Lecture at Princeton in 1997, and it centers, in turn, on two lectures delivered by its aging novelist protagonist, Elizabeth Costello. During her visit to an obscure liberal arts college, she speaks hard-to-swallow truths about the cruelties we visit upon animals, making a controversial analogy between industrialized farming and the Third Reich. But the content of her lectures is almost less important than the reactions they generate and the personal consequences she incurs, which Coetzee shows us by nesting the lectures within a fictional frame. People get incensed; the academic establishment rebukes her argument, her way of arguing, everything she represents. Even her family relationships buckle under the weight of a worldview that seems to reject reason.
Her first lecture is about the poverty of philosophy, both as a basis for animal ethics and as a medium for thinking one's way into the mind of another kind of creature. But her second lecture is about the potential of poetry, and it's captivating in its optimism about the ability of human language to imagine radically nonhuman forms of sensory experience—or, perhaps more radically, forms of sensory experience we share with other species.
As a person who has worked within the field commonly known as animal studies but has never worked with real animals (unlike so many great boundary-crossing thinkers: the late poet-philosopher-veterinarian Vicki Hearne, the philosopher-ethologist Vinciane Despret, et al.), I often find myself bummed out by the inadequacy of representation: Specifically, what good are animals in books? Are they not inevitably vessels of human meaning? In Flush, her novel about the inner life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, Virginia Woolf has another way of putting the problem: "Do words say everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies beyond the reach of words?" To which I would add: Do they not destroy, or at least ignore, the creature beyond the symbol as well?
Coetzee has a different view. Or Costello, at least, has some different ideas about what poetry can do. She celebrates poems like Ted Hughes's "The Jaguar" and Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Panther"—"poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead the record of an engagement with him." She finds value in poems that try to capture the fluid complexity of a moment of contact across species, rather than try to preserve an imagined essence of the animal in amber. She also defends the human imagination as something more powerful than we give it credit for. My favorite line from the book is her response to Thomas Nagel's famous essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Nagel insists that it's impossible for a human to know the answer to his titular question. Costello rebuts: "If we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?" I think it takes an effort of heart, more than mind, to follow her train of thought.
The novella reflects her resistance to the imperious voice of human reason—and her embrace of the messiness of the subjective imagination—on many levels. She's uneasy at the bully pulpit, as was Coetzee himself. For the longest time I thought that the narrator was omniscient—an impersonal God figure aligned with Coetzee's own position at that Princeton lectern. But then I read the novella again, preparing to teach it in a lit class where we were also reading Jane Austen. I realized that the narrator filters everything through the perspective of John Bernard, Costello's son, who has a strange tendency to obsess over his mother's body (paging Dr. Freud: "Her shoulders stoop; her flesh has grown flabby") and profoundly ambivalent feelings about her. He is torn between sympathy and repulsion, connection and alienation. He is torn, also, between her perspective, which persuades him to an extent, and the perspective of his wife, Norma, a philosophy professor who loathes her and has no patience for her anti-rationalist message.
The question this novella raises is always that of its own construction: Why is it a novella in the first place? What does Coetzee communicate through fiction that he couldn't have communicated through a polemic? I think the technique of focalization, which grounds everything in John's perspective, shows us exactly what an abstract polemic about animals couldn't: the impossibility of speaking from a position outside our embodiment, our emotions, our primordial and instinctual feelings toward kin. In other words, the impossibility of speaking about animals as though we were not animals ourselves.
Every time I read the book—definitely every time I teach it—the potentialities of its form grow in number. I find new rooms in the house of fiction that reveal how grand a mansion it is. I display it proudly, in the center of a bookshelf lined with animal books like Marian Engel's Bear, Woolf's Flush, J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, Kafka's stories, and John Berger's Pig Earth. The shelf is my own version of my father's menagerie, brimming with all manner of complex and contradictory creatures. All of them are representations, but that doesn't make them feel any less real, or any less alive.
I regard my father with some of the ambivalence that John, the son in Coetzee's story, feels toward his own mother and her thoughts on animals. But I encounter the creatures he left behind with warmth, solidarity, and hope."
via:timoslimo jmcoetzee multispecies morethanhuman senses writing howwewrite language whywewrite fiction animals bodies unachaudhuri philosophy elizabethbarrettbrowning virginiawoolf vincianedespret animalrights vickihearne rainermariarilke tedhughes narration thomasnagel imagination messiness janeausten perspective novellas kafka johnberger marianengel jrackerley hope solidarity communication embodiment emotions persuasion mattmargini canon books reading howweread teaching howweteach farming livestock sensory multisensory animalstudies poetry poems complexity grief literature families 2019
15 days ago by robertogreco
▶ Audrey Watters | Gettin' Air with Terry Greene
"Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) is an ed-tech folk hero who writes at Hack Education @hackeducation where, for the past nine years, she has taken the lead in keeping the field on its toes in regards to educational technology's "progress". Her long awaited and much anticipated book, "Teaching Machines", will be out in the new year."
2019 audreywatters edtech terrygreene bfskinner technology schools education turnitin history learning behaviorism cognition cognitivescience psychology automation standardization khanacademy howweteach liberation relationships agency curiosity inquiry justice economics journalism criticism vr facebook venturecapital capitalism research fabulism contrafabulism siliconvalley archives elonmusk markzuckerberg gatesfoundation billgates
Building an Inclusive Campus
[via: https://twitter.com/Jessifer/status/1128104712316825601
bracketed parts from Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/Jessifer/status/1128111041177694208 ]
"Scaffolding can create points of entry and access but can also reduce the complexity of learning to its detriment. And too often we build learning environments in advance of students arriving upon the scene. We design syllabi, predetermine outcomes, and craft rubrics before having met the students. We reduce students to data.
["I'm increasingly disturbed when I see compassion, respect, and equity for students being mislabeled with the derogatory word "coddling."
"We need to design our pedagogical approaches for the students we have, not the students we wish we had." @Jessifer @saragoldrickrab https://www.chronicle.com/article/Teaching-the-Students-We-Have/245290 ]
5 things we can do to create more inclusive spaces in education:
1) Recognize students are not an undifferentiated mass.
2) For education to be innovative, at this particular moment, we don't need to invest in technology. We need to invest in teachers.
3) Staff, administrators, and faculty need to come together, across institutional hierarchies, for inclusivity efforts to work. At many institutions, a faculty/staff divide is one of the first barriers that needs to be overcome.
4) The path toward inclusivity starts with small, human acts:
* Walk campus to assess the accessibility of common spaces and classrooms. For example, an accessible desk in every classroom doesn't do much good if students can't get to that desk because the rooms are overcrowded.
* Invite students to share pronouns, model this behavior, but don't expect it of every student.
* Make sure there is an easy and advertised process for students, faculty, and staff to change their names within institutional systems. Make sure chosen names are what appear on course rosters.
* Regularly invite the campus community into hard conversations about inclusivity. For example, a frank discussion of race and gender bias in grading and course evaluations.
5) Stop having conversations about the future of education without students in the room."
[""Critical formative cultures are crucial in producing the knowledge, values, social relations and visions that help nurture and sustain the possibility to think critically..." @HenryGiroux
The path toward inclusivity starts with small, human acts.
"You cannot counter inequality with good will. You have to structure equality." @CathyNDavidson
"The saddest and most ironic practice in schools is how hard we try to measure how students are doing and how rarely we ever ask them." @fastcrayon" ]
teaching howweteach jessestommel 2019 scaffolding syllabus syllabi pedagogy inclusivity inclusion humanism cathydavidson henrygiroux measurement assessment differentiation coddling compassion respect equity outcomes standardization learning howwelearn ranking metrics norming uniformity accreditation rigor mastery rubrics performance objectivity education highered highereducation grades grading bias alfiekohn hierarchy power paulofreire pedagogyoftheoppressed throeau martinbickman
9 weeks ago by robertogreco
Here's What Teens Say They Need
"Educators are trained to provide students with the help they need to thrive both academically and socially. We even have the firsthand knowledge and experience of having been teenagers ourselves. It's important, however, to recognize that our experiences may be, and most likely are, very different from what our students experience today. For that reason, we must ask students about their experiences and use their perspectives to inform our approach to teaching and leading. I recently interviewed over 40 teens in grades 6 through 12 and asked them, "What do you need from schools to feel supported both academically and socially?" I share their responses, both honest and illuminating, here.
Finding #1: Teens want explicit proof that the adults in their lives know them as individuals.
Teachers who take the time to learn about their students as individuals send a clear message that they care about them. Students say the best teachers " really care … and actually want to help the students rather than just stand up and give a lesson," (11th grader). "I know I learn better with teachers I like, teachers I feel I can trust," (9th grader). Recommendations related to this finding include the following:
• Teens want teachers to know about their learning styles, their interests, and what causes them stress. Differentiation and flexibility are key components of classrooms where students feel like the adults in their lives have their best interests at heart.
• Teens want teachers to work together as a team; they want adults to talk to each other about the amount of work that is expected in each class. "We have seven or eight hours of school, then after-school sports, and then we have three hours of homework" (9th grader). Teens want schools to intentionally create and maintain structures that lead to a more balanced workload.
• Face-to-face communication is the most powerful way to build relationships. Teens want adults to initiate regular check-ins with them.
• Teachers must demonstrate they believe in their students. "Don't stereotype kids … keep an open mind," (9th grader).
Finding #2: Teens want easily accessible resources.
Students said knowing where and when to find help was a key component in feeling supported. One senior said being able to "get connected with who you need and having a lot of resources" was one way his school helped him succeed. The following recommendations are related to this finding:
• Schools should have designated and well-advertised physical spaces for students to go to when they need help. Teens appreciate help centers that are staffed with adults who can assist before, during, and after school hours with homework, friend issues, and other problems.
• Schools should build time into the schedule for students to meet with teachers outside of regular class time.
• Teachers should provide online resources for all classes so that students who need additional support can access the information. This was especially important for students when they had been absent from class.
• Adults should step in when they see students struggling if the teens do not initiate the conversation. "I'm really bad about going to an adult and saying, 'I need help with this' because it feels like I'm asking too much," (7th grader).
Finding #3: Teens demand authentic, meaningful work.
Teens are savvy. They know when an assignment is busy work. "They [teachers] should give you more important homework that actually focuses on the topic," (8th grader). Recommendations related to this finding include the following:
• Problem-based learning makes a greater impact on depth and retention of learning. Teens want more hands-on activities and assignments where they can explore creative endeavors.
• Work should employ multiple strategies and allow for individuality. Teens want teachers to spend time exploring the different strategies so that they can feel confident about deciding which strategies to use and when.
• Classrooms need to be interactive and teacher lecture needs to be kept to a minimum; otherwise, "they're just saying things at you," (11th grader).
• Teenagers want adults to focus less on grades. "Instead of focusing on the process of learning, they [teachers] only care about the execution and grade you receive about it," (9th grader).
Finding #4: Teenagers crave human interaction.
Between schoolwork and busy schedules, "there's not a lot of time hang out with your friends," say several 9th graders. Recommendations related to this finding include the following:
• Teens want more time for collaboration and group work with their peers.
• Social media means teens have many friends online, but younger teens say they struggle to socialize with those same friends face-to-face and want schools to teach them this skill.
• Schools should create structured opportunities for teens to socialize with the entire school community and to "bond" with students outside their typical social groups.
Finding #5: Teens want the opportunity to fail.
"Kids have to learn how to do it themselves. When we go out into the real world, we're not going to have adults there helping us. We're going to have to do it ourselves," (7th grader). The following recommendations are related to this finding:
• Adults should create safe spaces, activities, and opportunities that allow teens to work through a process independently.
• Adults should avoid stepping in too soon, or too often, to assist struggling students, because teens need the time and practice to learn to work together.
Whether the thoughts of my students or your own inform your practice, remember: if we're really doing what's best for teens, then we need to listen to their voices. Just asking teens, "how can I help?" or "what do you need from me?" is the first step in determining what teens need from schools.
teens youth 2019 jodymarberry relationships respect teaching howweteach authenticity work learning howwelearn social socialmedia failure howwlearn education schools middleschool highschool
The Pedagogy of Design in the Age of Computation: Panel Discussion - YouTube
"I wish y'all could teach designers without using any Adobe products." —@tchoi8 (9:11)
"Michael Rock, would say that ideally the things that you are learning in a school setting should stick with you […] throughout your entire career. […] I think critical thinking, historical references, […] space, time, community — that's much more valuable." —@mind_seu (12:48)
In response to "Can you teach curiosity?" @mind_seu: "…this sinking feeling that the more that I learn, the less that I know. On the one hand, it's exciting & it makes you more curious to go into this worm holes, but on the other side it brings you into this state of insecurity"
In response to the same @tchoi8: "… curiosities can be stolen away from an individual when there's a discouragement or peer pressure in a toxic way. I think people, including myself, lose curiosity when I feel I can't do it or I feel less equipped than a student next to me. In technical courses, it's very easy to create a dynamic in which the start student, who probably has done the technical exercises before, end up getting most attention or most respect from the class. We [at @sfpc] try to revert that [discouragement] by creating homeworks that are equally challenging for advanced and beginner students and that opens up dialogues between students. For example, [goes on to explain an assignment that involves transfer of knowledge (at 22:22)]"
In response to "Can you teach autonomy?" @mind_seu: "Whether you can teach someone autonomy or not, again is maybe not the right question. Why do we want to solve problems by ourselves? I think it's trying to work with people around you who know more than you do and vice versa, so you can work together to create whatever project you're trying to implement. But going into a tutorial hole online to do something on your own? I don't know if we actually need to do that. These tools… we're trying to build collectives and communities, I think, and maybe that's more meaningful than trying to do something on your own, even if it's possible." [YES]
[See also:
Mindy Seu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM9mRYpnD7E
Taeyoon Choi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfThnEo5xgE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-URUDBItB8
Rik Lomas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uk_XYIkyZM ]
towatch mindseu design computation 2019 atifakin riklomas coding publishing digital history education adobe designeducation howweteach art creativity programming decolonization tools longview longgame ellenullman accessibility access inclusivity inclusion craft curiosity imagination learning howwelearn insecurity exposure humility competition unschooling deschooling comparison schools schooliness resistance ethics collaboration cooperation community conversation capitalism studentdebt transparency institutions lcproject openstudioproject emancipation solidarity humanrights empowerment activism precarity curriculum instruction
10 weeks ago by robertogreco
Intrinsic motivation in the classroom is key – but schools kill it
"Intrinsic motivators can be key to student achievement – but extrinsic motivation dominates classrooms"
"Destiny, 18, is like most students in the United States. Surveys reveal a steady decline in student engagement throughout middle and high school, a trend that Gallup deemed the "school engagement cliff." The latest data from the company's Student Poll found that 74 percent of fifth graders felt engaged, while the same was true of just 32 percent of high school juniors.
One of the key components of engagement is students' excitement about what they learn. Yet most schools extinguish that excitement.
It all comes down to motivation. In many schools, students do their work because their teachers tell them to. Or because they need to do it to get a certain grade. For students like Destiny, getting a good grade and outshining their peers – not learning itself – becomes the goal of school. For other students, they need minimum grades to be on sports teams or participate in extracurricular activities or please their parents, and that becomes their motivation. Students who do their work because they're genuinely interested in learning the material are few and far between.
But that's exactly backwards.
The teacher demands, the grades, the promise of additional opportunities – they're all external rewards. Decades of research, both about educational best practice and the way the human brain works, say these types of motivators are dangerous. Offering students rewards for learning creates reliance on the reward. If they becomes less interesting to the student or disappear entirely, the motivation does, too. That's what happened to Destiny in middle school when she no longer got the reward of being celebrated as the top of her class.
Inspiring students' intrinsic motivation to learn is a more effective strategy to get and keep students interested. And it's more than that. Students actually learn better when motivated this way. They put forth more effort, tackle more challenging tasks, and end up gaining a more profound understanding of the concepts they study.
Still, Deborah Stipek, a Stanford University professor of education and author of the book "Motivation to Learn: From Theory to Practice," is pragmatic about the role of extrinsic motivation.
"I think most realistic people in the field say that you've got to have both," Stipek said. "You can rely entirely on intrinsic motivation if you don't care what children learn, but if you've got a curriculum and a set of standards, then you can't just go with what they're interested in."
The problem is that the balance, in most schools, is way off. While some schools around the country are trying to personalize learning and, in doing so, to tap into students' interests, Stipek estimates that most teaching minimizes students' internal desire to learn.
In traditional schools, it's easier to offer a steady stream of rewards and punishments to keep students in line. And preparing students to succeed on state tests tends to discourage the lessons that let them explore their own interests. Teachers who want to inspire intrinsic motivation have to swim against the current.
That's not the case everywhere, though. Destiny's trajectory of diminishing engagement took a turn in high school. Instead of getting increasingly uninterested and disconnected from school, she became more engaged. That's because she enrolled in the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a public high school district in Rhode Island that goes by 'The Met.' She is now a senior.
The Met is at the extreme when it comes to tapping into intrinsic motivation. Students don't take traditional classes. They spend virtually all of their time learning independently, with support from advisors or at internships. Students all have individual learning plans and accumulate credits toward traditional subject areas through projects, self-directed study, internship experience and dual enrollment with local colleges. Almost everything they do, all day, connects to a personal goal or something they're interested in.
That's what inspired Destiny to enroll at The Met. "I thought, oh my God, I have all this power to choose what I want," she remembers.
Education researchers have been studying student motivation for decades, identifying the best classroom strategies to promote an intrinsic drive to learn. The Met puts many of them to use. Students learn through real-world, hands-on problem-solving; they tackle open-ended assignments that require sustained effort; they get the power to choose what and how they learn; they finish projects with something to show for their learning in portfolios and concrete products; they set their own academic goals; they need never focus more on a grade than the process of learning because they don't get traditional grades. All of these things come straight out of playbooks for inspiring intrinsic motivation, including Stipek's. And the impact on students can be profound.
Destiny started high school with the academic zeal she left middle school with – meaning very little. Her freshman-year report card reflected that. While The Met doesn't give out traditional grades, students do get assessed on their mastery of the goals they set for each subject. The dominant note on Destiny's report card from ninth grade is "meeting expectations." She had very few instances of "exceeding expectations" and in some subjects, her mastery was only "in progress." In her sophomore year, things started to shift, and "exceeding expectations" started to become a more common assessment. By junior year, Destiny exceeded expectations in almost every subject and "in progress" was nowhere to be found on her report card. Gone was the middle schooler who didn't want to be in class. In her place was a driven young woman who again liked school.
Destiny's experience is common for Met students. On state surveys, these students report being more interested in their coursework, more convinced that what they're learning will matter to their futures, and more supported at school than their peers in almost every other district in Rhode Island. She and other students at The Met continually bring the conversation back to how much difference it makes to be in control of their learning."
"It tends to take a little while for students to rise to the challenge, though.
Beccy Siddons, Destiny's advisor, considers watching that trajectory to be one of the most exciting parts of her job. As the main contact for an "advisory" of about 16 students who stay with her for their entire time at The Met, Siddons guides students through their internships, all of their academic work and, eventually, their college applications.
"Ninth graders who have spent their whole life being told what to learn, some of them don't even know what they're interested in because they haven't been given the opportunity," Siddons said.
That was Destiny as a freshman. Her first internship was at an elementary school in a bilingual classroom, a safe, familiar choice for the native Spanish- and English-speaker. Looking back, she's grateful that experience made her realize she didn't like teaching. But at the time, she didn't know what to try next. As a sophomore, she saw another student present about an internship at the New England Aquarium, and it piqued her interest. She first worked there as a junior and quickly discovered a deep love of sea life. She now has a favorite creature she didn't even know existed before: the puffer fish. And she has a career interest she otherwise might not have found until college, if ever: environmental science.
Siddons routinely oversees such meandering paths, and a key part of her job is helping students discover passions they didn't know they might have. The freshmen she welcomes to The Met are a far cry from the seniors she sends out into the world.
The early part of that transformation does take work, though. And while it isn't typical for schools to orient themselves around intrinsic motivation, hundreds do attempt it. Next Generation Learning Challenges has grown into a network of about 150 schools, all of which focus on tapping into students' intrinsic motivation in one way or another. The Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools represents 102 school districts doing similar work; EdLeader21 has another 300 districts, many of whom aim to inspire students' intrinsic desire to learn. And the Big Picture Learning network, built around the success of The Met, now counts more than 60 schools in the U.S. (and another 100 abroad)."
instrinsicmotivation motivation schools schooling schooliness extrinsicmotivation grades grading 2019 taragarcíamathewson deborahstipek education teaching howweteach howwelearn learning rhodeisland providence deschooling unschooling deprogramming interestdriven
Mαtt Thomαs on Twitter: "Gonna try to live-tweet @Jessifer's talk at @uiowa today: "Designing Assignments: Redesigning Assessment.""
"Gonna try to live-tweet @Jessifer's talk at @uiowa today: "Designing Assignments: Redesigning Assessment."
.@Jessifer begins by talking about some personal stufff, as a deliberate tactic to situate himself as a human being amongst other human beings. Something to also do on the first day of class, etc.
.@Jessifer says he doesn't use the LMS at his school because he doesn't want students to encounter and interface with it before him, a person.
.@Jessifer points out that today syllabuses are often generated from required, stock, auto-generated templates. This sort of "scaffolding," however, presumes a lot of things about how learning happens that might not be useful.
For instance, many of us (read: teachers) are designing courses and assignments for students we don't even know yet. To bring in the work of @saragoldrickrab, we need to design for the students we have, not the students we wish we had.
What happens, for instance, when you learn that 1 in 2 students face food insecurity issues? How might that change how you design courses/assignments?
.@Jessifer moves on to talk about grades. They're not some universal constant, but rather a technology that we have to learn to use, or perhaps not use.
Grading reduces learning to a transaction instead of a set of human relationships.
College teachers have often internalized ways of grading that they can perhaps free themselves from. @Jessifer says we need to "raise a critical eyebrow" at our own grading practices — e.g., our rubrics. He argues against scale, for a return to subjectivity!
In the gradebook students are reduced to rows, in the rubric reduced to columns.
Especially important things to think about, @Jessifer points out, now that almost all colleges have adopted Learning Management Systems, course "shells," and standardized syllabuses.
.@Jessifer has recently moved to shorter-worded assignments that ask for non-traditional products. Reconceptualize the internet using analog tools, re-order the words of a poem — then document your process!"
jessestommel mattthomas 2019 rubrics grading teaching syllabus assessment howweteach howwelearn colleges universities highered highereducation humanism lms templates standardization writing howwewrite form alternative syllabi
april 2019 by robertogreco
Project MUSE - On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales
"Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is "scalable," the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent "nonscalability theory" that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises."
"How is scalability created? It is not a necessary feature of the world. People stumbled on scalable projects through historical contingencies. They cobbled together ways to make raw materials (for both goods and knowledge) selfcontained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European sugarcane plantations, the natives were wiped out; exotic, coerced, and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because the general mess of extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability.
Do we live in a world of scalable nonsocial landscape elements—nonsoels? Yes and no. The great "progress" projects of the last several centuries have built on the legacy of the colonial plantation to make scalability work in business, government, and technology. But scalability has never been complete. In recent years, changes in global capitalism have challenged the assumption of scalability for labor and natural-resource management, and at least some theorists in the social sciences have pointed out the malevolent hegemony of precision. Meanwhile, critics of scalability have raised distress signals about the fate of biological and cultural diversity on earth. It is an important time to develop nonscalability theory as a way to reconceptualize the world—and perhaps rebuild it."
[PDF here: http://www.lasisummerschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Tsing-2012-On-nonscalability.pdf ]
[via:
"I can't say enough how good Anna Tsing's essay on nonscalabilty is. "On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales." Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (September 19, 2012): 505–24. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485828/pdf "
https://twitter.com/samplereality/status/1098610615969562626
"Scalability is the enemy of difference. (Page 507)
"On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing"
https://twitter.com/dantaeyoung/status/1108070233670123521 ]
""On Nonscalability" of teaching and learning"
https://www.jonbecker.net/on-nonscalability-of-teaching-and-learning/
annalowenhaupttsing scale scalability slow small 2012 difference diversity capitalism knowledge expansion growth degrowth culture technology progress labor work biology humanism humanity sustainability environment sugar teaching learning howweteach howwelearn unschooling deschooling antigrowth
Art + Life Rules from a Nun - YouTube
"Sister Corita Kent was a master printmaker and teacher, and her rules for artists and teachers are legendary - let's break them down."
[vi: https://austinkleon.com/2019/03/26/camus-and-corita/ ]
sistercorita coritakent art design 2019 rules teaching howweteach via:austinkleon howwelearn education screenprinting benshahn losangeles cv pedagogy play work plork discipline self-discipline charleseames rayeames eames film life living howwework buckminsterfuller saulbass alfredhitchcock johncage making make failure mistakes persistence accessibility egalitarianism process creativity analysis learningbyheart brainstorming productivity production quantity ideas ideation happiness classideas critique socialjustice protest criticism wisdom inspiration messaging advertising remixing religion catholicism mercecunningham readiness reading video collecting looking seeing noticing meaning meaningmaking openness openended open-ended
march 2019 by robertogreco
A Middle-School Cheating Scandal | The New Yorker
"In an era of high-stakes testing, a struggling school made a shocking choice."
"The first teacher he approached was Lewis, who was resistant. Lewis told him, "Fuck the test. Our students are doing hot. We know they are learning." But after several months, Lewis said, Waller "chewed away at me." Waller reminded him that Parks was a "sanctuary," a "safe haven" for the community. If the school didn't meet its targets, Waller explained, the students would be separated and sent to different schools, outside Pittsburgh. Lewis said he felt that "it was my sole obligation to never let that happen.""
"In 2007, Parks had to score even higher to surpass its falsely achieved scores from the previous year. According to statements later made by teachers and administrators (obtained through Georgia's open-records act), the cheating process began to take the form of a routine. During testing week, after students had completed the day's section, Waller distracted the testing coördinator, Alfred Kiel, by taking him out for leisurely lunches in downtown Atlanta. On their way, Waller called the reading coördinator to let her know that it was safe to enter Kiel's office. She then paged up to six teachers and told them to report to the room. While their students were at recess, the teachers erased wrong answers and filled in the right ones. Lewis took photographs of the office with his cell phone so that he could make sure he left every object, even the pencils on Kiel's desk, exactly as he'd found them.
Lewis dreaded the process. It felt to him like "a bad date where you've had too much to drink." He woke up the morning after erasing answers and thought, I shouldn't have gone that far. He worried that, because of the cheating, students wouldn't develop "the feeling you get when you take a test and know whether you did all right or whether you knocked that shit out of the park," he said. He also felt guilty that other teachers were deprived of feedback. Lewis never told his wife that other teachers were correcting her students' answers. One year, she got the highest scores in the building. Lewis said, "I wasn't going to burst her bubble. I was, like, 'Good job. Keep going strong.' ""
"Of a hundred and seventy-eight educators named in the cheating investigation, Lewis was the first to be fired. "I felt like someone had hit me with the butt end of an axe," he said. He shaved off his dreadlocks, which, in Rastafarian tradition—a culture with which he sporadically associated—signalled the loss of a child. What troubled him most, he said, was that "I was fired for doing something that I didn't even believe in."
He applied for jobs at charter and alternative schools, community centers, and jails, but he didn't get any of them. "Education let me go," he finally concluded. He broadened his search, applying for positions that required manual labor. In interviews, he promised employers that he had the "persistence and tough skin of a middle-school teacher to bring to the workforce." He applied for a job installing cable, and, after getting a nearly perfect score on the applicant test, he daydreamed about how he would use his teaching skills to help employees streamline the process. But a few days later the company told him that he didn't have enough experience.
His house was foreclosed on and his car was repossessed. Old friends came to him with alternative methods of earning money. "They had some of the most illegal propositions," he said. "They were, like, 'Man, remember when we used to take that trip to St. Louis? Don't you want to take over that run?' " He supported his wife, their newborn son, and his daughter from his previous marriage by working as an auto mechanic.
At first, he was glad to see the district attorney bring charges against Christopher Waller, Beverly Hall, and thirty-three administrators and teachers, but he became troubled by the portrayal of their crimes as mercenary. On April 2, 2013, on the evening news, he watched his colleagues, nearly all of them black, report to the Fulton County Jail in an event that was described in the media as a "perp walk." They were charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute—used to apprehend criminal organizations like the Mafia—and accused of conspiring in order to receive the bonuses tied to high test scores. Hall, who earned more than five hundred thousand dollars in bonuses, faces up to forty-five years in prison.
More than half of the defendants, including Christopher Waller, pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Now the senior pastor at a church three miles from Parks, Waller agreed to serve five years of probation, pay forty thousand dollars in restitution, and testify as a witness for the prosecution. He told me that he was offended by the idea that he would cheat in order to get what amounted to five thousand dollars in bonuses. He and other teachers at Parks spent their own money to buy groceries, H.I.V. medications, furniture, and clothes for students and their mothers, and this continued even after he was fired. "It wasn't because of the money—I can promise you that," he said.
In lengthy plea statements, Waller and the other defendants provided a miniature history of the past twelve years in education policy, describing how No Child Left Behind, in conjunction with the district's targets, created an atmosphere in which cheating came to seem like a reasonable option. One principal described a "toxic culture throughout APS where all that mattered was test scores, even if ill-gotten." Another said that the district's "primary focus . . . became meeting targets instead of focusing on the needs of the students."
In statements sent to me through their respective lawyers, Hall and Michael Pitts both denied wrongdoing and said they were confident that a jury would find them innocent of the charges. Hall wrote, "I did not order, request, or condone cheating to meet targets nor did I have knowledge of cheating." She explained that in setting targets she had "relied on APS educators to behave with integrity." She also said that, compared with the objectives set by No Child Left Behind, Atlanta's targets were "decidedly more incremental in nature," and the sanctions less "draconian." (Many of her employees disagree; the district was unusual in that it required a certain percentage of students to exceed targets each year.)
Since the investigation, the stakes for testing in Georgia have escalated. Although the state is replacing the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test with a more comprehensive method of evaluation, this fall Georgia is implementing a new teacher-evaluation program that bases fifty per cent of a teacher's assessment on test scores. The program, along with a merit-pay system, is required as a condition for receiving a four-hundred-million-dollar grant from President Obama's Race to the Top program. Tim Callahan, the spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, which represents eighty-four thousand teachers, told me, "The state is going down the same path as Atlanta, and we are not exactly enthused." He said that many teachers have become so demoralized that they're retiring early or transferring to private schools. He told me, "Our teachers' best qualities—their sense of humor, their love for the subject, their excitement, their interest in students as individuals—are not being honored or valued, because those qualities aren't measurable.""
[though I'd bookmarked this when it came out, but doesn't seem to be in my collection]
2014 testing standardizedtesting cheating atlanta education schools schooling incentives rachelavivrttt nclb high-stakestesting us scandal howweteach teaching learning
Yong Zhao "What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education" - YouTube
"Proponents of standardized testing and privatization in education have sought to prove their effectiveness in improving education with an abundance of evidence. These efforts, however, can have dangerous side effects, causing long-lasting damage to children, teachers, and schools. Yong Zhao, Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, will argue that education interventions are like medical products: They can have serious, sometimes detrimental, side effects while also providing cures. Using standardized testing and privatization as examples, Zhao, author of the internationally bestselling Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World, will talk about his new book on why and how pursuing a narrow set of short-term outcomes causes irreparable harm in education."
yongzhao 2018 schools schooling pisa education testing standardizedtesting standardization china us history testscores children teaching howweteach howwelearn sideeffects privatization tims math reading confidence assessment economics depression diversity entrepreneurship japan creativity korea vietnam homogenization intolerance prosperity tolerance filtering sorting humans meritocracy effort inheritance numeracy literacy achievementgap kindergarten nclb rttt policy data homogeneity selectivity charterschools centralization decentralization local control inequity curriculum autonomy learning memorization directinstruction instruction poverty outcomes tfa teachforamerica finland singapore miltonfriedman vouchers resilience growthmindset motivation psychology research positivepsychology caroldweck intrinsicmotivation choice neoliberalism high-stakestesting
In Praise of bell hooks - The New York Times
In 1987, I was a sophomore at Yale. I'd been in the United States for 11 years, and although I was a history major, I wanted to read novels again. I signed up for "Introduction to African-American Literature," which was taught by Gloria Watkins, an assistant professor in the English department, and she was such a wonderful teacher that I signed up for her other class, "Black Women and Their Fiction."
Gloria — as we were allowed to address her in the classroom — had a slight figure with elegant wrists that peeked out of her tunic sweater sleeves. She was soft-spoken with a faint Southern accent, which I attributed to her birthplace, Hopkinsville, Ky. She was in her mid-30s then but looked much younger. Large, horn-rimmed glasses framed the open gaze of her genuinely curious mind. You knew her classes were special. The temperature in the room seemed to change in her presence because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. It wasn't just school then. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again.
She didn't assign her own writing, but of course my friends and I went to the bookstore to find it. Gloria Watkins published her first book, "Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism," under her pen name, bell hooks, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Watkins wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas.
Gloria Watkins was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Stanford University when she wrote her first draft of "Ain't I A Woman," and she published the book when she was 29 years old, after she received her doctorate in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since then she has published three dozen books and teaches in her home state of Kentucky at Berea College, a liberal arts college that does not charge tuition to any of its students. She is the founder of the bell hooks Institute and is recognized globally as a feminist activist and cultural critic. For nearly four decades, hooks has written and published with clarity, novel insight and extraordinary precision about art, media, race, gender and class.
For this now canonical text, hooks took her title from a line in the 1863 published version of Sojourner Truth's speech in favor of women's suffrage, which she gave in 1851 in Akron, Ohio. As in Truth's political activism, hooks asserts that one cannot separate race from gender, history and class when considering a person's freedom.
Now, 38 years after its publication in 1981, "Ain't I A Woman" remains a radical and relevant work of political theory. hooks lays the groundwork of her feminist theory by giving historical evidence of the specific sexism that black female slaves endured and how that legacy affects black womanhood today. She writes, "A devaluation of black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years." The economics of slavery, which commodified human lives and the breeding of more enslaved people, encouraged the systematic practice of rape against black women, and this system established an enduring "social hierarchy based on race and sex."
hooks's writing broke ground by recognizing that a woman's race, political history, social position and economic worth to her society are just some of the factors, which comprise her value, but none of these can ever be left out in considering the totality of her life and her freedom.
For me, reading "Ain't I A Woman," was as if someone had opened the door, the windows, and raised the roof in my mind. I am neither white nor black, but through her theories, I was able to understand that my body contained historical multitudes and any analysis without such a measured consideration was limited and deeply flawed.
I was 19 when I took hooks's classes, and I was just becoming a young feminist myself. I had begun my study of feminism with Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among other white women, and perhaps, because I was foreign-born — rightly or wrongly — I had not expected that people like me would be included in their vision of feminist liberation. Women and men of Asian ethnicities are so often neglected, excluded and marginalized in the Western academy, so as a college student I'd no doubt internalized my alleged insignificance. bell hooks changed my limited perception.
Her book of theory taught me to ask for more from art, literature, media, politics and history — and for me, a Korean girl who had been born in a divided nation once led by kings, colonizers, then a succession of presidents who were more or less dictators, and for millenniums, that had enforced rigid class systems with slaves and serfs until the early 20th century, and where women of all classes were deeply oppressed and brutalized, I needed to see that the movement had a space for me.
In fostering a feminist movement, which can include and empower women from all different races and classes, hooks calls for an honest reckoning of its history. She indicts the origins of the white feminist movement for its racist and classist treatment of African-American women and repudiates its goals of imitating the power structure of white patriarchy. That said, she does not support a separate black women's movement, and in fact, sees that as counterproductive to the greater power a well-organized collective women's movement can have. hooks wrote in "Ain't I A Woman": "Without a doubt, the false sense of power black women are encouraged to feel allows us to think that we are not in need of social movements like a women's movement that would liberate us from sexist oppression. The sad irony is of course that black women are often most victimized by the very sexism we refuse to collectively identify as an oppressive force."
I am 50 years old now, and I worry when I hear that feminism is anything a woman chooses, because I don't think that's true. If a woman chooses to hurt another person or herself in the guise of feminism, surely that cannot eradicate sexism. bell hooks asserts that freedom "as positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way can only be a complete reality when our world is no longer racist and sexist." This is very true, I think, and I wonder if today we are considering what is "most healthy and communally productive" for all of us, not just for some of us.
In college, I did not imagine that I could be a fiction writer. The wish to make art seemed like some incredibly expensive store I could never enter. Nevertheless, no matter what I would do with my life after graduation, "Ain't I A Woman" allowed me to recognize the dignity and power of living privately and publicly as an immigrant feminist of color. At the time, I did not yet know of Kimberle Crenshaw's brilliant term "intersectionality," or Claudia Rankine's vital concept "racial imaginary" — complementary and significant theories for understanding present day lives, but as a young woman, through hooks's work, I was just beginning to see that everyone needs theory, and we need it like water.
bell hooks: A Starter Kit
'Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center' (1984) Considered a follow-up to "Ain't I A Woman." A smart analysis of the future of the women's movement.
'Talking Back: Thinking, Thinking Black' (1989) Anthology of essays about feminism and finding her material and voice as a writer, including "to Gloria, who is she: on using a pseudonym" and "Ain't I A Woman: looking back."
'Black Looks: Race and Representation' (1992) Anthology of essays, including the knockout, "Eating the Other," and film-studies canon essay, "The Oppositional Gaze."
'Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom' (1994) An exciting and liberating work of practical pedagogy for teachers and students.
'Outlaw Culture' (1994) Anthology of cultural criticism, including film, music and books. A terrific essay on rap music, "Gangsta Culture — Sexism and Misogyny," which my friend Dionne Bennett, another former student of bell hooks and an anthropologist at City Tech, teaches because "There is no better essay on this topic," says Dionne.
'We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity' (2004) Anthology of insightful cultural criticism of how white culture marginalizes and represses black men."
bellhooks 2019 minjinlee feminism race racism sexism writing teaching howweteach patriarchy freedom history art literature media politics class whitesupremacy whiteness whitefeminism oppression
Gnamma #7 - The Teacher's Imposition
"The world is full of bad teaching. And somehow we all get on with it, of course.
Still, I have found it typical that people perk up when they think of their favorite, electrifying teachers. These are people we think about for the rest of our lives, largely because they inform our interests and ways of looking at the world (ontology, value systems, networked ideas, etc) at early ages. Let's talk about teachers, and I want to be clear: everyone directs teachable moments in life (especially guardians and managers). I'm referring to people in explicitly assigned roles to teach. (This thus puts these thoughts largely outside of the realm of unschooling [https://www.are.na/roberto-greco/unschooling ], I think, but I do not know enough to say—would love to understand more in this realm.)
"Why Education is so Difficult And Contentious" [https://www.sfu.ca/~egan/Difficult-article.html ]: TL;DR because when we say education we mean indoctrination, and everybody—teacher, parent, politician, etc—has different opinions on how people should be. It's touchy to talk about forced indoctrination because it both engenders fascism and is the founding idea behind of public education. There are obviously gradients of imposition on the student. Illich supports the need for the pedagogue to connect student to resources, but not much more—a fairly "hands-off" view of the teacher by today's standards. Still, the connective moments are going to reflect the ideology of the pedagogue.
Are teachers necessary for learning? No. Learning is between the student and the world. A quippish phrase I heard a couple times working at RenArts [https://www.renarts.org/ ] was "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think." But education (structured learning with others) requires teachers, basically by definition. Teachers "lead to water" and apply social pressure to encourage partaking.
What makes for a good teacher? Well, I maintain the chief goals of structured learning are to build agency and cultivate awareness in the student (and maybe share specific skillsets). So, what kind of teacher builds agency in the student and cultivates awareness to the extent possible? Some modes of teaching quickly follow: I believe the teacher needs to support open-ended, coherent, and honest activities.
Without open-ended-ness, we lose exploratory and self-actualizing potential. Without coherence, students can get mired in lack of knowing where to start or end (but a little ambiguity isn't bad). Without honesty we lose touch with the world and how to work with our lived realities. By "honesty" here, I mean to be honest about application of material, about history of thought, and about context of the activity itself; as such, the best teaching acknowledges and works with its own context (/media) and the needs of the people in the room.
I am trying to recall where I heard the phrase that "teaching is making space." The teachers frames the room, the activities, the needs, the expectations, the discussions. In doing so, they embed indoctrination into the teaching. In the effort of honesty in the classroom, these framing decisions needs to be made explicit for the students. The effective teacher must constantly wrestle with their internalized epistemologies and ego in seeking to constantly be aware of and share their own framings of the world. (When I ran a workshop for the Free School of Architecture in Summer 2018 on alternative learning communities, I mostly brought with me a long list of questions to answer [https://www.are.na/block/2440950 ] in seeking to understand how one is framing a learning space.)
This need for constant "pariefracture" (a breaking of the frame, expanding the conceptual realm, or meta-level "zooming out"—my friend D.V.'s term) in teaching gave me quite a bit of anxiety, as a teacher, until reading Parker J. Palmer's book "The Courage to Teach," in which he outlines six paradoxes of teaching. [https://www.are.na/block/1685043 and OCRed below ] I like these paradoxes in themselves, but the larger concept that resonated with me was the ability to treat a paradox not as a dead end (as one does in mathematics, generally) but rather as a challenge that can be pulled out and embraced as the dynamo of an ongoing practice. Teaching never resolves: you just wake up tomorrow and give it another shot.
I think what I'm circling around, here, is how much of learning from a teacher involves inheriting their ways of looking, concurrent with the teacher's ways of looking being in constant, self-aware flux. We inherit snapshots of our teachers' worldviews, blend them together over our own substrate of grokking the world, and call it education."
[From Parker J Palmer's "The Courage to Teach":
"When I design a classroom session, I am aware of six paradoxical tensions that I want to build into the teaching and learning space. These six are neither prescriptive nor exhaustive. They are simply mine, offered to illustrate how the principle of paradox might contribute to pedagogical design:
1. The space should be bounded and open.
2. The space should be hospitable and "charged."
3. The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.
4. The space should honor the "little" stories of the students and the "big" stories of the disciplines and tradition.
5. The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.
6. The space should welcome both silence and speech.
I want to say a few words about what each of these paradoxes means. Then, to rescue the paradoxes and the reader from death by abstraction, I want to explore some practical ways for classroom teachers to bring these idea to life."
lukaswinklerprins teaching howweteach parkerpalmer education paradox 2019 indoctrination ivanillich exploration boundaries openness hospitality individualism collectivism community silence speech support solitude disciplines tradition personalization unschooling deschooling canon
february 2019 by robertogreco
Jeff Sharlet en Instagram: "Wednesday night I worked on my father's obituary. Thursday, in class, I pulled up on the projector this photograph, "Hyeres, France, 1932,"…"
"Wednesday night I worked on my father's obituary. Thursday, in class, I pulled up on the projector this photograph, "Hyeres, France, 1932," by Henri Cartier-Bresson. We'd read a book called H is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald, a memoir of her grief for her late father. He was a photographer. It was he who taught her how to look, to have the patience to see what Cartier-Bresson called a "decisive moment." "Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you," wrote Cartier-Bresson, "and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. The moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever." // Because I was tired, because before I knew my father would die I had assigned this book about grieving a father—because for some reason I had assigned, across two courses, three books about lost fathers—I mentioned my own writing assignment of the previous evening. An obituary. I told my students the book we had just read was an obituary. An obituary, I said, should not be a recitation of facts; rather, a remembrance of decisive moments. Click. // He's 18, in a campus movie theater with his football teammates. On screen: subtitles. The movie is French, Cocteau's Orpheus. Bob Sharlet has never "read" a movie before. He has never, he thinks, really read at all. Now he'll never stop reading again. // Christmas, 1991, Cairo, at a vegetable stand, seeing on a little tv at the back of the stand the Soviet flag being lowered, the end of the U.S.S.R., to which he had devoted his scholarly life—his life—and realizing, suddenly, that now he could read about anything. // A month ago Saturday.We've told him his prognosis—terminal, soon. He'd said he'd sleep an hour. Now he lifts his sleeping mask. He opens his eyes. "Okay," he says. // Today, sifting through his boxes of photographs, I found this postcard. Blank. He kept it for the picture. The picture I taught Thursday. // I imagine—as I think my father imagined—Cartier-Bresson descending the stairs, noticing the rail, the steps, the curve. Stopping, stepping back. He thinks he's waiting for a walker. Then comes the bicycle, circles and triangles and spokes. Click. And then it's gone, forever."
jeffsharlet writing reading howwewrite life living howweread 2019 bobshartlet photography bricolage moments death henricartier-bresson teaching howweteach intution memory memories change decisivemoments
Let's Be Clear: Sudbury Valley School and "Un-schooling" Have NOTHING in Common | Sudbury Valley School
[See also this response: "SVS/Unschooling Controversy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22N5WaTXNrc ]
"All in all, the contrasts—perhaps better labeled as "contradictions"—between the principles underlying homeschooling and those of Sudbury Valley lead to an important outcome, that is well worth recognizing: for the most part, any marriage between the two ends up in an unpleasant parting of ways. From a recruitment point of view, it is always best for those involved in the admissions process at SVS to do their best to discourage unschoolers from enrolling, or at least warn them of the possible pitfalls of such a move. From the point of view of unschooling families thinking about finding an "unschooling school" where their children could spend time away from home, while still being basically homeschooled in the way the family would like them to be, it is always best to look somewhere else.
Actually, the most concise summing-up was given by the person who made homeschooling famous: John Holt. Here is what Pat Farenga, a leading advocate for homeschooling/unschooling, reported he learned from his mentor:
I've been asked to define unschooling since 1981. The simple answer I learned from John is unschooling is NOT school.
And, as John Holt himself informed us directly when he looked into our school at the time of its founding in 1968, unschooling is most certainly NOT Sudbury Valley School."
unschooling deschooling sudburyschools education 2016 johnholt self-directed self-directedlearning patfarenga schools schooling learning howwelearn howweteach children parenting homeschool sudburyvalleyschool lcproject openstudioproject sfsh tcsnmy
january 2019 by robertogreco
SVS/Unschooling Controversy - YouTube
"This is a commentary on the currently controversial article by Daniel Greenberg https://sudburyvalley.org/article/lets-be-clear-sudbury-valley-school-and-un-schooling-have-nothing-common . The article is not summarised during the commentary so it will be necessary to read it before listening. Further discussion is available to join on the forums at www.self-directed.org.
"Differences Between Self-Directed and Progressive Education" can be read here https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/comment/924407 . This commentary is offered by Jeanna L Clements in her private capacity and does not represent any other individual or collective. Please feel free to share. Thank you."
education schools schooling sudburyschools self-directed self-directedlearning progessive petergray je'annaclements howwelearn howweteach teaching learning unschooling homeschool deschooling montessori northstar agillearningcenters agilelearning tcsnmy lcproject openstudioproject sfsh jeannaclements individualism collective collectivism parenting danielgreenberg children 2018 johnholt patfarenga sudburyvalleyschool agilelearningcenters
david silver en Instagram: "Every time a new semester rolls up and I scramble to prepare another syllabus, I think of the wise words of Mary "Molly" Gregory, faculty…"
"Every time a new semester rolls up and I scramble to prepare another syllabus, I think of the wise words of Mary "Molly" Gregory, faculty of woodworking (and so much more) from 1941-47 at Black Mountain College. "How," to paraphrase Molly Gregory, "can you design a course before getting to know your students and their skills?""
davidsilver blackmountaincollege bmc education syllabus cocreation teaching howweteach marygregory 1940s howwelearn listening maryemmaharris syllabi
John Warner on Twitter: "I see defenses of the five-paragraph essay which describe the template as "training wheels" for developing writers. I unpack this in "Why They Can't Write" arguing that training wheels are not a help in developing essential skills
"I see defenses of the five-paragraph essay which describe the template as "training wheels" for developing writers. I unpack this in "Why They Can't Write" arguing that training wheels are not a help in developing essential skills, but a hack to prevent academic disaster.
This is true of training wheels on bikes. Research has shown that training wheels actually prevent the development of the most important skill for bike riding...balance. The training wheels function as a guard against children cracking their heads when supervision isn't available
Those bike training wheels may be a necessity so children can get around on a bike without being in physical danger, but experts now recommend children learning on "balance bikes" where their feet touch the ground from a young age. When it's time for a pedal bike, they're ready.
I believe one of the reasons we see the 5PE as a useful set of training wheels is because we fear (with justification) what happens if students have to practice the writing equivalent of balance (making choices) from the get go. None of this is the fault of teachers.
When students are being judged against standardized assessments from an early age, and teachers are judged on student performance, turning to the 5PE is a way of preventing potential disaster. It's sensible, rational, but I argue, it's not helping students learn to write.
IMO, writing is thinking, so anything that keeps students from developing their thinking and making choices ultimately delays or prevents their development. The 5PE is part of a system that punishes exploration, choice, freedom, because of an obsession with "assessment."
The 5PE has a long history that's always tied to assessment. It hasn't always been a part of schooling, however. I'm 48 and wasn't introduced to the 5PE until high school when it was introduced as a hack for AP exams. The saving grace is I'd already learned to think like a writer
When teachers say that students "need" the 5PE, I always want to know what they need it for, and it's almost always driven by a particular assessment, an assessment which may not be well-aligned with the experiences which help writers develop. This disconnect is at every level.
For a good chunk of my own teaching career, I enforced the disconnect by giving students more sophisticated versions of the 5PE in order to prevent disaster in "college" writing. Over time, came to believe I my prescriptions were hurting long term development more than helping.
My own big pedagogical shift came when I decided to look at my approach not as helping them do well on the assignment at hand, but looking more longterm, helping students develop their writing "practices" (knowledge, skills, attitudes, habits of mind of writers).
Taking that longer view often resulted in student writing artifacts that were not as accomplished as when I used more prescriptive methods. That was hard to swallow. But...I could see students engaged with a more challenging and ultimately rewarding struggle. That seemed worth it
As I became more familiar with the research on writing for transfer, I saw I'd stumbled on something lots of folks were already studying. Building a writing practice is just one framework for thinking about how experiences in writing transfer from one occasion to another.
Importantly, I had the freedom to make this shift. Even as a contingent college instructor, no one was breathing down my neck and I wasn't beholden to my students' performances on high stakes assessments. K-12 teachers are not allowed this same freedom.
Ultimately, this is why I decided that the front part of Why They Can't Write would have to examine the systemic problems underlying the teaching and learning of writing. Pedagogy is not a fix by itself. It isn't even the most important factor.
As long as we have a system which privileges compliance and conformity and constrains teacher and student freedom and agency, the 5PE will be useful. When it's a route to AP credit or college admission, it could be malpractice not to teach it.
But this is not the same as teaching students to write. It's training them to pass assessments, assessments which may be important, but which hold little meaning, particularly to students, which turns writing into something alienating, rather than liberating, a big problem IMO.
I do not criticize teachers who use the 5PE, but I will always question what's underneath that "need." Usually when we go looking, we see things that are actually not conducive to learning like standardization and surveillance, which inevitably lead to anxiety, or worse.
We must give K-12 teachers the freedom and power to work with the longterm development of their students in mind, rather than being beholden to these assessments which measure little that's meaningful. Without that freedom, we're stuck in this system.
To come full circle back to the training wheels theme, we have to make it so when students are developing their writing practices, they get to "fail" productively, rather than failure being something like flying over the handlebars and cracking a skull.
With writing, "mistakes" and error should always be occasions for learning, not punishment, and definitely not punishment of teachers. I spent years developing Why They Can't Write, and based on early readers, there's already stuff I'd change. That's exciting.
It's exciting because my ideas are being taken seriously by other people with similar concerns. My ideas matter to me, and them, and those ideas can be made better. Why wouldn't I want my students to have the same joy? It can be done, I believe.
Here is where I plug a forthcoming book which is my attempt to create the conditions under which students can experience similar pleasure with writing. Curriculum isn't going to save us by itself, but this is my best (current) attempt at living my values. https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Practice-Building-Confidence-Nonfiction/dp/0143133152/
And a coda. Here's a link to a dissertation by @jtdavisii which includes a deeply researched and fascinating history of the use of the 5PE. That part starts on P. 53 https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=english_diss "
Just got this important book in the mail... only a few pages in and I want every teacher who teaches writing (in other words, all teachers across all content areas) to read it. https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/1079043288596992001
@biblioracle: I see defenses of the five-paragraph essay which describe the template as "training wheels" for developing writers. I unpack this in "Why They Can't Write" arguing that training wheels are not a help in developing…
@triciaebarvia
Especially consider what @biblioracle says about the faulty 5PE=training wheels analogy. Training wheels don't teach balance. 5PE doesn't teach thinking. #DisruptWriting
I've also heard Ts say that 5PE is a scaffold. But scaffolds are temporary. A scaffold's purpose is literally to render itself unnecessary. Yet the 5PE is being perpetrated into the middle and upper grades. #DisruptWriting
Not to mention the fact that the 5PE, as a tool of standardization, is ultimately a tool that oppresses individual human voices—& by not making space for linguistic diversity & freedom, the 5PE is not culturally relevant pedagogy. (Or, I should say, it teaches culture but whose?)
@DulceFlecha
is #disruptwriting gonna be a thing??? online writing groups? sharing favorite mentor texts???
@edifiedlistener
Bring it. I'm ready. Still learning so much about process and potential. I still hold a lot of fear of experimenting which is why fiction writing stays out of bounds for me.
I'm currently reading a book on trauma and memoir writing and its funny how many of these writers started off trying to write fiction instead. it's funny how desperately we cling to genre.
and it's funny how desperately important the culture of a proofreader is. months ago I asked 5 (dope, wonderful) people to read a draft. only one caught the typo I made in the first sentence.
@TheJLV was the only Dominican. I forgot the A in tambora.
it made me wonder how student writing changes when their primary reader-- the reader they give the most weight to-- is probably a white, middle class woman. what slips by? what changes does the teacher recommend that a cultural, racial peer wouldn't?
when we prioritize the teacher as the most important reader-- the teacher grades, praises, deems finished or incomplete-- are we training kids to write for a white audience? and how can we disrupt that?
Yes, yes we are. And I'd argue that most of what we're doing in schools is teaching not just for a white audience but Whiteness itself. How to disrupt? Culturally relevant, responsive, sustaining pedagogy. I wonder how many Ts see their instruction as grounded in CSP, though...
who gets to judge what is culturally sustaining? might be the next question. educators. families. students. communities. some combination of the four?
Yes, definitely some combination. Too often it's the culture of the teacher/school (Whiteness) that is perpetuated under guises like "college and career ready."
my new site yaught me that the only expert on a kid's culture is the kid. which I think I knew personally? my mother and I did not react the same way to the Poet X.
but I didn't know it professionally until immigration shelters.
and now I'm always afraid, because the overwhelming majority of my kids are headed to U.S. schools. and there are so many aspects of culture we don't discuss in context of undocumented immigration."]
fiveparagraphessays writing howweteach teaching howwewrite teachingwriting eucation johnarner triciaebarvia sherrispelic ‏
december 2018 by robertogreco
We're Having the Wrong Conversation About the Future Of Schools
"Despite the rhetoric, modern movements to reform schools have had a devastating effect on education"
"As a full-time teacher, I don't have a lot of time to look up from the dailiness of the job to consider something as nebulous as the "future" of education. When I do, I feel a vague unease that too many non-teachers seem to have a lot of time to do this kind of thinking.
One thing in my favor is that education reform seems to take the same basic forms, year after year. There's the standards and accountability movement and the ongoing attempts to give it "teeth." Then there are the tech giants peddling autonomy and self-direction in lieu of soul-crushing activities like reading The Outsiders and using protractors. And though the latter reformers are often critics of the former, the two have a lot in common.
Both represent billion-dollar industries. Both frequently co-opt a rhetoric of liberation, autonomy, and empowerment. Both can barely disguise a deep disdain for teachers and schools, especially of the "sage on the stage" variety. And both are almost exclusively headed up by white men.
These are the kind of people setting a bold agenda for the future of education.
Admittedly, us unruly American educators would have a hard time coming up with anything coherent enough to compete with the brave visions set forth by the leaders of these two industries. The very fact that such an all-encompassing solution is needed testifies to their dominance in framing the narrative around American schools. Mired in the day-to-day challenges and complexities of actually caring for and educating children, many teachers exhibit a complete failure of imagination when it comes to sweeping monolithic initiatives with pithy acronyms, eye-catching logos, and font pairings that are straight fire.
But we do need to change. Beyond the usual Alice Cooper-type critiques, we teachers have been especially complicit in the widespread marginalizing, neuroticizing, and criminalizing of our most vulnerable students. Yes, we need to stop boring future white rockstars and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This is already well known. But, more importantly, we also need to stop harming children of color with our whitewashed curriculum, inequitable funding systems, and disparate use of punitive disciplinary measures.
Can today's reformers help us make progress toward these goals? Or do they exacerbate, perpetuate, and contribute to the very problems we face?
Trying to pin deception, manipulation, and violence on this rag-tag bunch leaves me feeling petty and mean-spirited. After all, they're often so upbeat and sincere, their rhetoric so humanistic and progressive. Ted Dintersmith, former venture capitalist and billionaire author of the book What School Could Be, recently teamed up with Prince Ea, who has made not one but two viral videos echoing the same message: schools must change. And on the standards and accountability side, David Coleman, "architect" of the Common Core and now CEO of the College Board, has boldly laid out a "beautiful vision" for American schools. In a field plagued by widespread mediocrity and entrenched inequities, shouldn't we applaud any moves toward a more inspiring, inclusive future?
The problem is that, despite all the rhetoric and good intentions, both these movements have had a devastating effect on education, all while continually escaping blame for their outsized impact. Any negative outcomes are used to justify further expansion and dominance. Poor test scores and persistent achievement gaps aren't seen as issues with the tests, but as misalignment and implicit bias on the part of teachers. Student attention deficit and boredom aren't seen as a function of technology addiction, but rather an occasion to blast schools for their inability to fully capitalize on the promise of the digital age.
Not surprisingly, this seeming unassailable innocence reveals close links to the logics of white supremacy culture, especially the values of individualism, objectivity, and so-called meritocracy. They additionally amplify neoliberal beliefs in the absolute goods of privacy and consumer choice, thus shifting the blame away from dominant elites under the guise of "empowerment." To borrow the central metaphor from Todd Rose's The End of Average, they ultimately seek to style us as fighter pilots in the "cockpits of our economy," where we must summon limitless initiative, grit, and resourcefulness just to survive.
Ultimately, their ideas are rooted in America's original "solutions" to the problems of pluralism, wherein subtle self-effacement and silencing became stratagems for consolidating power. All of this is part of a long tradition in the United States, one that dates back to colonial times, guiding both the "Strange Compromise" of 1789 and the founding of the Common School. Although these roots may be less obvious in our day, they are arguably more powerful and moneyed than ever before."
"Ultimately, the several silences of education reform have proven a powerful gambit for privatization and profit. These industries implicitly offer themselves as neutral alternatives to our fraught political climate, much as Horace Mann's enjoinder to "read without comment" secularized schools in a sectarian age. They also shift the onus of agency and ownership from themselves onto the student, who assumes full responsibility for finding and following their own educational path.
Whereas Mann, perhaps unconsciously, hoped to indoctrinate students into his supposedly doctrineless Unitarianism, these reformers peddle the so-called empty doctrines of individualism, personalization, objectivity, entrepreneurialism, and meritocracy—all while exacerbating inequities and deprofessionalizing teachers.
Resisting these trends starts by seeing them as two sides of the same coin. Anything that counsels and valorizes silence—before the text, the test, or even the individual student—may partake in this phenomenon. The primary effect is always to atomize: content into itemized bits, classrooms into individualized projects and timelines, and each of us into solitary individuals pursuing personalized pathways.
Among the many omissions implicit in this vision is the notion that each student has equal access to a pathway of choice. Once that false premise is established, you are truly on your own. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, find your own personal road less traveled, dive headfirst into the entrepreneurial shark tank. Unfortunately, far too many smaller-scale reform movements espouse a similar ethos, often flooding Twitter with a toxic positivity that ignores intransigent inequities and injustices."
"None of this is intended to romanticize the educational mainstays of the past: lectures, textbooks, worksheets. But we should note how these more modern trends themselves often devolve into regressive, behaviorist, sit-and-get pedagogy.
Confronted by daunting challenges like widespread budget shortfalls, inequitable funding, increasing school segregation, whitewashed curriculum, and racial injustice, it's no wonder we would reach for solutions that appear easy, inexpensive, and ideologically empty. At a time when we most need to engage in serious deliberations about the purposes and future of schools, we instead equivocate and efface ourselves before tests and technology, leaving students to suffer or succeed within their own educational echo chamber.
As appealing as these options may seem, they are not without content or consequences. Ironically, today's progressive educators find themselves in the strange position of having to fight reform, resisting those who would render everything—including their own intentions and impact—invisible."
arthurchiaravalli education edreform reform history invisibility progressive siliconvalley infividualism horacemann 2018 collegeboard individualism personalization commonschool us inequality justice socialjustice injustice race racism whitesupremacy reading hilarymoss thomasjefferson commoncore davidcoleman politics policy closereading howweread ela johnstuartmill louiserosenblatt sat standardizedtesting standardization tedtalks teddintersmith democracy kenrobinson willrichardson entrepreneurship toddrose mikecrowley summitschools religion secularism silence privatization objectivity meritocracy capitalism teaching howweteach schools publicschools learning children ideology behaviorism edtech technology society neoliberalism
The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2018)
"It's been quite a year for education news, not that you'd know that by listening to much of the ed-tech industry (press). Subsidized by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, some publications have repeatedly run overtly and covertly sponsored articles that hawk the future of learning as "personalized," as focused on "the whole child." Some of these attempt to stretch a contemporary high-tech vision of social emotional surveillance so it can map onto a strange vision of progressive education, overlooking no doubt how the history of progressive education has so often been intertwined with race science and eugenics.
Meanwhile this year, immigrant, refugee children at the United States border were separated from their parents and kept in cages, deprived of legal counsel, deprived of access to education, deprived in some cases of water.
"Whole child" and cages – it's hardly the only jarring juxtaposition I could point to.
2018 was another year of #MeToo, when revelations about sexual assault and sexual harassment shook almost every section of society – the media and the tech industries, unsurprisingly, but the education sector as well – higher ed, K–12, and non-profits alike, as well school sports all saw major and devastating reports about cultures and patterns of sexual violence. These behaviors were, once again, part of the hearings and debates about a Supreme Court Justice nominee – a sickening deja vu not only for those of us that remember Anita Hill 's testimony decades ago but for those of us who have experienced something similar at the hands of powerful people. And on and on and on.
And yet the education/technology industry (press) kept up with its rosy repetition that social equality is surely its priority, a product feature even – that VR, for example, a technology it has for so long promised is "on the horizon," is poised to help everyone, particularly teachers and students, become more empathetic. Meanwhile, the founder of Oculus Rift is now selling surveillance technology for a virtual border wall between the US and Mexico.
2018 was a year in which public school teachers all over the US rose up in protest over pay, working conditions, and funding, striking in red states like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma despite an anti-union ruling by the Supreme Court.
And yet the education/technology industry (press) was wowed by teacher influencers and teacher PD on Instagram, touting the promise for more income via a side-hustle like tutoring rather by structural or institutional agitation. Don't worry, teachers. Robots won't replace you, the press repeatedly said. Unsaid: robots will just de-professionalize, outsource, or privatize the work. Or, as the AI makers like to say, robots will make us all work harder (and no doubt, with no unions, cheaper).
2018 was a year of ongoing and increased hate speech and bullying – racism and anti-Semitism – on campuses and online.
And yet the education/technology industry (press) still maintained that blockchain would surely revolutionize the transcript and help insure that no one lies about who they are or what they know. Blockchain would enhance "smart spending" and teach financial literacy, the ed-tech industry (press) insisted, never once mentioning the deep entanglements between anti-Semitism and the alt-right and blockchain (specifically Bitcoin) backers.
2018 was a year in which hate and misinformation, magnified and spread by technology giants, continued to plague the world. Their algorithmic recommendation engines peddled conspiracy theories (to kids, to teens, to adults). "YouTube, the Great Radicalizer" as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it in a NYT op-ed.
And yet the education/technology industry (press) still talked about YouTube as the future of education, cheerfully highlighting (that is, spreading) its viral bullshit. Folks still retyped the press releases Google issued and retyped the press releases Facebook issued, lauding these companies' (and their founders') efforts to reshape the curriculum and reshape the classroom.
This is the ninth year that I've reviewed the stories we're being told about education technology. Typically, this has been a ten (or more) part series. But I just can't do it any more. Some people think it's hilarious that I'm ed-tech's Cassandra, but it's not funny at all. It's depressing, and it's painful. And no one fucking listens.
If I look back at what I've written in previous years, I feel like I've already covered everything I could say about 2018. Hell, I've already written about the whole notion of the "zombie idea" in ed-tech – that bad ideas never seem to go away, that just get rebranded and repackaged. I've written about misinformation and ed-tech (and ed-tech as misinformation). I've written about the innovation gospel that makes people pitch dangerously bad ideas like "Uber for education" or "Alexa for babysitting." I've written about the tech industry's attempts to reshape the school system as its personal job training provider. I've written about the promise to "rethink the transcript" and to "revolutionize credentialing." I've written about outsourcing and online education. I've written about coding bootcamps as the "new" for-profit higher ed, with all the exploitation that entails. I've written about the dangers of data collection and data analysis, about the loss of privacy and the lack of security.
And yet here we are, with Mark Zuckerberg – education philanthropist and investor – blinking before Congress, promising that AI will fix everything, while the biased algorithms keep churning out bias, while the education/technology industry (press) continues to be so blinded by "disruption" it doesn't notice (or care) what's happened to desegregation, and with so many data breaches and privacy gaffes that they barely make headlines anymore.
Folks. I'm done.
I'm also writing a book, and frankly that's where my time and energy is going.
There is some delicious irony, I suppose, in the fact that there isn't much that's interesting or "innovative" to talk about in ed-tech, particularly since industry folks want to sell us on the story that tech is moving faster than it's ever moved before, so fast in fact that the ol' factory model school system simply cannot keep up.
I've always considered these year-in-review articles to be mini-histories of sorts – history of the very, very recent past. Now, instead, I plan to spend my time taking a longer, deeper look at the history of education technology, with particular attention for the next few months, as the title of my book suggests, to teaching machines – to the promises that machines will augment, automate, standardize, and individualize instruction. My focus is on the teaching machines of the mid-twentieth century, but clearly there are echoes – echoes of behaviorism and personalization, namely – still today.
In his 1954 book La Technique (published in English a decade later as The Technological Society), the sociologist Jacques Ellul observes how education had become oriented towards creating technicians, less interested in intellectual development than in personality development – a new "psychopedagogy" that he links to Maria Montessori. "The human brain must be made to conform to the much more advanced brain of the machine," Ellul writes. "And education will no longer be an unpredictable and exciting adventure in human enlightenment , but an exercise in conformity and apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world." I believe today we call this "social emotional learning" and once again (and so insistently by the ed-tech press and its billionaire backers), Montessori's name is invoked as the key to preparing students for their place in the technological society.
Despite scant evidence in support of the psychopedagogies of mindsets, mindfulness, wellness, and grit, the ed-tech industry (press) markets these as solutions to racial and gender inequality (among other things), as the psychotechnologies of personalization are now increasingly intertwined not just with surveillance and with behavioral data analytics, but with genomics as well. "Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education," a NYT op-ed piece argued in July, perhaps forgetting that education's progressives (including Montessori) have been down this path before.
This is the only good grit:
[image of Gritty]
If I were writing a lengthier series on the year in ed-tech, I'd spend much more time talking about the promises made about personalization and social emotional learning. I'll just note here that the most important "innovator" in this area this year (other than Gritty) was surely the e-cigarette maker Juul, which offered a mindfulness curriculum to schools – offered them the curriculum and $20,000, that is – to talk about vaping. "'The message: Our thoughts are powerful and can set action in motion,' the lesson plan states."
The most important event in ed-tech this year might have occurred on February 14, when a gunman opened fire on his former classmates at Marjory Stone Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 students and staff and injuring 17 others. (I chose this particular school shooting because of the student activism it unleashed.)
Oh, I know, I know – school shootings and school security aren't ed-tech, ed-tech evangelists have long tried to insist, an argument I've heard far too often. But this year – the worst year on record for school shootings (according to some calculations) – I think that argument started to shift a bit. Perhaps because there's clearly a lot of money to be made in selling schools "security" products and services: shooting simulation software, facial recognition technology, metal detectors, cameras, social media surveillance software, panic buttons, clear backpacks, bulletproof backpacks, … [more]
audreywatters education technology edtech 2018 surveillance privacy personalization progressive schools quantification gamification wholechild montessori mariamontessori eugenics psychology siliconvalley history venturecapital highereducation highered guns gunviolence children youth teens shootings money influence policy politics society economics capitalism mindfulness juul marketing gritty innovation genetics psychotechnologies gender race racism sexism research socialemotional psychopedagogy pedagogy teaching howweteach learning howwelearn teachingmachines nonprofits nonprofit media journalism access donaldtrump bias algorithms facebook amazon disruption data bigdata security jacquesellul sociology activism sel socialemotionallearning
Laziness Does Not Exist – Devon Price – Medium
"I've been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I've witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I've seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I've watched PhD candidates take months or years revising a single dissertation draft; I once had a student who enrolled in the same class of mine two semesters in a row, and never turned in anything either time.
I don't think laziness was ever at fault.
Ever.
In fact, I don't believe that laziness exists.
I'm a social psychologist, so I'm interested primarily in the situational and contextual factors that drive human behavior. When you're seeking to predict or explain a person's actions, looking at the social norms, and the person's context, is usually a pretty safe bet. Situational constraints typically predict behavior far better than personality, intelligence, or other individual-level traits.
So when I see a student failing to complete assignments, missing deadlines, or not delivering results in other aspects of their life, I'm moved to ask: what are the situational factors holding this student back? What needs are currently not being met? And, when it comes to behavioral "laziness", I'm especially moved to ask: what are the barriers to action that I can't see?
There are always barriers. Recognizing those barriers— and viewing them as legitimate — is often the first step to breaking "lazy" behavior patterns.
It's really helpful to respond to a person's ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment. I learned this from a friend of mine, the writer and activist Kimberly Longhofer (who publishes under Mik Everett). Kim is passionate about the acceptance and accommodation of disabled people and homeless people. Their writing about both subjects is some of the most illuminating, bias-busting work I've ever encountered. Part of that is because Kim is brilliant, but it's also because at various points in their life, Kim has been both disabled and homeless.
Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When you're homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable. Whether you're sleeping under a bridge, in a tent, or at a shelter, it's hard to rest easy. You are likely to have injuries or chronic conditions that bother you persistently, and little access to medical care to deal with it. You probably don't have much healthy food.
In that chronically uncomfortable, over-stimulating context, needing a drink or some cigarettes makes fucking sense. As Kim explained to me, if you're laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep. If you're under-nourished, a few smokes may be the only thing that kills the hunger pangs. And if you're dealing with all this while also fighting an addiction, then yes, sometimes you just need to score whatever will make the withdrawal symptoms go away, so you can survive.
[image of cover of "Self-Published Kindling: The Memoirs of a Homeless Bookstore Owner," by Mik Everett with caption "Kim's incredible book about their experiences being homeless while running a bookstore."]
Few people who haven't been homeless think this way. They want to moralize the decisions of poor people, perhaps to comfort themselves about the injustices of the world. For many, it's easier to think homeless people are, in part, responsible for their suffering than it is to acknowledge the situational factors.
And when you don't fully understand a person's context — what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life — it's easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a person's behavior. All homeless people should put down the bottle and get to work. Never mind that most of them have mental health symptoms and physical ailments, and are fighting constantly to be recognized as human. Never mind that they are unable to get a good night's rest or a nourishing meal for weeks or months on end. Never mind that even in my comfortable, easy life, I can't go a few days without craving a drink or making an irresponsible purchase. They have to do better.
But they're already doing the best they can. I've known homeless people who worked full-time jobs, and who devoted themselves to the care of other people in their communities. A lot of homeless people have to navigate bureaucracies constantly, interfacing with social workers, case workers, police officers, shelter staff, Medicaid staff, and a slew of charities both well-meaning and condescending. It's a lot of fucking work to be homeless. And when a homeless or poor person runs out of steam and makes a "bad decision", there's a damn good reason for it.
If a person's behavior doesn't make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It's that simple. I'm so grateful to Kim and their writing for making me aware of this fact. No psychology class, at any level, taught me that. But now that it is a lens that I have, I find myself applying it to all kinds of behaviors that are mistaken for signs of moral failure — and I've yet to find one that can't be explained and empathized with.
Let's look at a sign of academic "laziness" that I believe is anything but: procrastination.
People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You're supposed to be doing something, and you're not doing it — that's a moral failure right? That means you're weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn't it?
For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it's typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being "good enough" or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.
When you're paralyzed with fear of failure, or you don't even know how to begin a massive, complicated undertaking, it's damn hard to get shit done. It has nothing to do with desire, motivation, or moral upstandingness. Procastinators can will themselves to work for hours; they can sit in front of a blank word document, doing nothing else, and torture themselves; they can pile on the guilt again and again — none of it makes initiating the task any easier. In fact, their desire to get the damn thing done may worsen their stress and make starting the task harder.
The solution, instead, is to look for what is holding the procrastinator back. If anxiety is the major barrier, the procrastinator actually needs to walk away from the computer/book/word document and engage in a relaxing activity. Being branded "lazy" by other people is likely to lead to the exact opposite behavior.
Often, though, the barrier is that procrastinators have executive functioning challenges — they struggle to divide a large responsibility into a series of discrete, specific, and ordered tasks. Here's an example of executive functioning in action: I completed my dissertation (from proposal to data collection to final defense) in a little over a year. I was able to write my dissertation pretty easily and quickly because I knew that I had to a) compile research on the topic, b) outline the paper, c) schedule regular writing periods, and d) chip away at the paper, section by section, day by day, according to a schedule I had pre-determined.
Nobody had to teach me to slice up tasks like that. And nobody had to force me to adhere to my schedule. Accomplishing tasks like this is consistent with how my analytical, hyper-focused, Autistic little brain works. Most people don't have that ease. They need an external structure to keep them writing — regular writing group meetings with friends, for example — and deadlines set by someone else. When faced with a major, massive project, most people want advice for how to divide it into smaller tasks, and a timeline for completion. In order to track progress, most people require organizational tools, such as a to-do list, calendar, datebook, or syllabus.
Needing or benefiting from such things doesn't make a person lazy. It just means they have needs. The more we embrace that, the more we can help people thrive.
I had a student who was skipping class. Sometimes I'd see her lingering near the building, right before class was about to start, looking tired. Class would start, and she wouldn't show up. When she was present in class, she was a bit withdrawn; she sat in the back of the room, eyes down, energy low. She contributed during small group work, but never talked during larger class discussions.
A lot of my colleagues would look at this student and think she was lazy, disorganized, or apathetic. I know this because I've heard how they talk about under-performing students. There's often rage and resentment in their words and tone — why won't this student take my class seriously? Why won't they make me feel important, interesting, smart?
But my class had a unit on mental health stigma. It's a passion of mine, because I'm a neuroatypical psychologist. I know how unfair my field is to people like me. The class & I talked about the unfair judgments people levy against those with mental illness; how depression is interpreted as laziness, how mood swings are framed as manipulative, how people with "severe" mental illnesses are … [more]
devonprice 2018 laziness procrastination psychology mikeverett kimberlylonghofer teaching howweteach howwelearn learning mentalhealth executivefunctioning neurodiversity discrimination stress anxiety trauma colleges universities academia unschooling deschooling depression mentalillness
Hay que reconciliar al cine mexicano con su público: Fernanda Solórzano - El Sol de México
"ENCONTRAR VIRTUD EN LO COMPLEJO
Otro tema que para ella es importante a la hora de dignificar las películas que se hacen aquí es revisar la idea de que el cine es sólo una forma de entretenimiento, útil nada más para el escapismo y la evasión, sin dar oportunidad a las producciones que no tienen un mensaje cerrado y que apelan a que el espectador abra su inteligencia a distintas posibilidades de mensaje.
"A mí me gustaría que en las escuelas mismas se promoviera entre los niños la idea de que no todos tenemos que entender de inmediato los relatos sino que entre más preguntas puedan provocar más pueden enriquecer. Que seas capaz de salir de una película y la puedas comentar con alguien que quizá tenga un punto de vista distinto al tuyo, justamente porque no se les dio un mensaje definido…"
Reconoce que es un trabajo lento y que puede durar varias generaciones, pero que no hay nada como encontrarle virtud a lo complejo y entender que una película que te permite tener varias lecturas puede resultarte quizá más satisfactoria que una que no va a permitir que alguien te cambie tu propio punto de vista.
Y remarca: "El cine que más disfruto es el que me saca de mis certezas; el que me hace pensar y repensar mi realidad. Me choca darme cuenta de que me están manipulando. Me gusta que confíen en mi inteligencia. A mí me gusta que los directores también confíen en la inteligencia del público y el público en su propia inteligencia".
LA COMEDIA ROMÁNTICA
Y de todo ese panorama destaca algo con lo que no está de acuerdo, la temática con la que se están haciendo algunas comedias mexicanas actuales, ya que le parece que refuerzan valores a los que como sociedad estamos tratando de oponernos, como el machismo o la homofobia, y que en este género suelen ser abordados como algo gracioso y normal.
"Voy a poner como ejemplo la cinta Qué culpa tiene el niño, cuya historia versa sobre una chica que en una fiesta queda embarazada, no sabe de quién porque estaba alcoholizada y entonces eso es presentado como chistoso, sin importar que es irresponsable que un hombre se aproveche de una mujer en esas condiciones".
No ve que este tipo de producciones sean tan terribles y bajas como las sexy comedias de los años 80, donde los hombres literalmente violaban a las mujeres y nadie decía nada y todos se reían, pero asumen los mismos valores. "Obviamente son más sofisticadas estas comedias, son más pulidas, pero los chistes son los mismos, apelan al mismo tipo de moral, lo que me parece triste".
LA ERA DIGITAL
Con respecto a los nuevos formatos de filmación y las modalidades de exhibición más allá de las salas cinematográficas, Fernanda percibe que ciertamente plantean nuevos problemas estéticos y económicos, lo cual también puede ser una oportunidad para que se abaraten las posibilidades de acceso para producir cine a quien actualmente no tiene los recursos para hacerlo.
"Al final lo importante es contar bien una historia y hacerlo estéticamente. Incluso hay historias que se pueden contar mejor en uno u otro formato. Por ejemplo, hay un director que filmó su primera película en iPhone, Tangerine, de Sean Baker, que fue muy premiada, y después decidió que su segunda producción se hiciera en 35 mm porque consideró que esa cinta no aguantaba lo digital y requería cierta profundidad. O sea hay narrativas para todo tipo de formato".
Sobre el formato de miniseries, predominante en los servicios de streaming on line, la crítica de cine también los califica de oportunidad interesante. "A mí me gustan muchísimo, yo no las veo como un producto menor. Creo que muchos directores de cine, ante la imposibilidad de tener un presupuesto tan alto, están experimentando. Y pongo cono ejemplo la serie Un extraño enemigo de Gabriel Ripstein, que me pareció muy buena, bien contada, bien narrada y muy acentuada, a pesar de que era muy difícil que una serie más sobre el 68 tuviera impacto"."
fernandasolórzano conemexicano education schools stories film filmmaking storytelling linearity ambiguity certainty complexity howwethink conversation interviews race racism homophobia digital 2018 literature children medialiteracy literacy teaching howweteach unschooling deschooling criticalthinking
Teaching for people who prefer not to teach | independentsunited
"Teaching for people who prefer not to teach is a manual that fits in your pocket.
It's a messy collection of ideas: contributions our friends and colleagues sent us, our own learning experiences and rumours we heard. You might ask yourself who this manual is for. Is it for teachers? Is it for students? Is it only relevant for teaching art? The answer is: Yes and No. We don't know. Probably both. As self-employed artists, we have become used to performing our services anywhere, for anybody who books us. One day we might be doing a happy crafty afternoon in a primary school, the next day a post-graduate seminar on exhibition-making, the day after we're making soup for the reading group we organised. And our methodologies need to work in all of these contexts' (from the editor's notes)"
teaching howweteach learning schools schooling unschooling deschooling art books
november 2018 by robertogreco
The Educational Tyranny of the Neurotypicals | WIRED
"Ben Draper, who runs the Macomber Center for Self Directed Learning, says that while the center is designed for all types of children, kids whose parents identify them as on the autism spectrum often thrive at the center when they've had difficulty in conventional schools. Ben is part of the so-called unschooling movement, which believes that not only should learning be self-directed, in fact we shouldn't even focus on guiding learning. Children will learn in the process of pursuing their passions, the reasoning goes, and so we just need to get out of their way, providing support as needed.
Many, of course, argue that such an approach is much too unstructured and verges on irresponsibility. In retrospect, though, I feel I certainly would have thrived on "unschooling." In a recent paper, Ben and my colleague Andre Uhl, who first introduced me to unschooling, argue that it not only works for everyone, but that the current educational system, in addition to providing poor learning outcomes, impinges on the rights of children as individuals.
MIT is among a small number of institutions that, in the pre-internet era, provided a place for non-neurotypical types with extraordinary skills to gather and form community and culture. Even MIT, however, is still trying to improve to give these kids the diversity and flexibility they need, especially in our undergraduate program.
I'm not sure how I'd be diagnosed, but I was completely incapable of being traditionally educated. I love to learn, but I go about it almost exclusively through conversations and while working on projects. I somehow kludged together a world view and life with plenty of struggle, but also with many rewards. I recently wrote a PhD dissertation about my theory of the world and how I developed it. Not that anyone should generalize from my experience—one reader of my dissertation said that I'm so unusual, I should be considered a "human sub-species." While I take that as a compliment, I think there are others like me who weren't as lucky and ended up going through the traditional system and mostly suffering rather than flourishing. In fact, most kids probably aren't as lucky as me and while some types are more suited for success in the current configuration of society, a huge percentage of kids who fail in the current system have a tremendous amount to contribute that we aren't tapping into.
In addition to equipping kids for basic literacy and civic engagement, industrial age schools were primarily focused on preparing kids to work in factories or perform repetitive white-collar jobs. It may have made sense to try to convert kids into (smart) robotlike individuals who could solve problems on standardized tests alone with no smartphone or the internet and just a No. 2 pencil. Sifting out non-neurotypical types or trying to remediate them with drugs or institutionalization may have seemed important for our industrial competitiveness. Also, the tools for instruction were also limited by the technology of the times. In a world where real robots are taking over many of those tasks, perhaps we need to embrace neurodiversity and encourage collaborative learning through passion, play, and projects, in other words, to start teaching kids to learn in ways that machines can't. We can also use modern technology for connected learning that supports diverse interests and abilities and is integrated into our lives and communities of interest.
At the Media Lab, we have a research group called Lifelong Kindergarten, and the head of the group, Mitchel Resnick, recently wrote a book by the same name. The book is about the group's research on creative learning and the four Ps—Passion, Peers, Projects, and Play. The group believes, as I do, that we learn best when we are pursuing our passion and working with others in a project-based environment with a playful approach. My memory of school was "no cheating," "do your own work," "focus on the textbook, not on your hobbies or your projects," and "there's time to play at recess, be serious and study or you'll be shamed"—exactly the opposite of the four Ps.
Many mental health issues, I believe, are caused by trying to "fix" some type of neurodiversity or by simply being insensitive or inappropriate for the person. Many mental "illnesses" can be "cured" by providing the appropriate interface to learning, living, or interacting for that person focusing on the four Ps. My experience with the educational system, both as its subject and, now, as part of it, is not so unique. I believe, in fact, that at least the one-quarter of people who are diagnosed as somehow non-neurotypical struggle with the structure and the method of modern education. People who are wired differently should be able to think of themselves as the rule, not as an exception."
neurotypicals neurodiversity education schools schooling learning inequality elitism meritocracy power bias diversity autism psychology stevesilberman schooliness unschooling deschooling ronsuskind mentalhealth mitchresnick mit mitemedialab medialab lifelongkindergarten teaching howweteach howwelearn pedagogy tyranny 2018 economics labor bendraper flexibility admissions colleges universities joiito
AnjiPlay (@anjiplay) • Fotos y vídeos de Instagram
"We have discovered that some teachers, if they really want to hear what children have to say, that their whole state of being is at ease, and they listen closely and that in the process of listening they discover that children are speaking a wealth of information, and these teachers will be receptive to the information that they are hearing. And then some teachers want to hear children say what they the teachers, deep down, want the children to say, things that they want to hear, and will unconsciously overlook what children are actually saying. They can't hear clearly and are unable to truly understand the child's expression. And you can see that their physical state of being is one of anxiety." —Wang Zhen, Vice Principal, Jiguan Kindergarten, Anji County interviewed by Dr. Chelsea Bailey on November 7, 2018.
wangzhen children childhood preschool anjiplay listening howweteach teaching pedagogy hearing attention presence receptivity
Alom Shaha on Twitter: "Have encountered a few people recently who've been enamoured with education research and how "science" can help us teach better. These people seem to confuse the explanatory and predictive powers of the physical sciences with
"Have encountered a few people recently who've been enamoured with education research and how "science" can help us teach better. These people seem to confuse the explanatory and predictive powers of the physical sciences with what social sciences can do.
This is not to disparage the social sciences - they are important and valuable. But it worries me that some in education seem to think "science" can help us teach in the same way "science" helps us build rockets.
There's a lot going on with the current enthusiasm for research in education, and it's great that it gives teachers a focus for discussion and sharing ideas, but it's not the panacea some seem to think."
alomashaha socialsciences science research education edtech metrics measurement 2018 misguided unschooling deschooling scientism teaching howweteach howwelearn learning
october 2018 by robertogreco
Silicon Valley Nannies Are Phone Police for Kids - The New York Times
[This is one of three connected articles:]
"Silicon Valley Nannies Are Phone Police for Kids
Child care contracts now demand that nannies hide phones, tablets, computers and TVs from their charges."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/silicon-valley-nannies.html
"The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected
America's public schools are still promoting devices with screens — even offering digital-only preschools. The rich are banning screens from class altogether."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/digital-divide-screens-schools.html
"A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
"I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.""
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html
"What the Times got wrong about kids and phones"
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/times-silicon-valley-kids.php
https://twitter.com/edifiedlistener/status/1058438953299333120
"Now that I've had a chance to read this article [specifically: "The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected"] and some others related to children and screen time and the wealthy and the poor, I have some thoughts. 1/
First, this article on the unexpected digital divide between rich and poor seems entirely incomplete. There is an early reference to racial differences in screen usage but in the article there are no voices of black or brown folks that I could detect. 2/
We are told a number of things: Wealthy parents are shunning screens in their children's lives, psychologists underscore the addictive nature of screen time on kids, and of course, whatever the short end of the stick is - poor kids get that. 3/
We hear "It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens," while wealthy kids will perhaps enjoy "wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction." 4/
Think about that and think about the stories that have long been told about poor families, about single parents, about poor parents of color - They aren't as involved in their kids' education, they are too busy working. Familiar stereotypes. 5/
Many of these judgments often don't hold up under scrutiny. So much depends upon who gets to tell those stories and how those stories are marketed, sold and reproduced. 6/
In this particular story about the privilege of being able to withdraw from or reduce screen time, we get to fall back into familiar narratives especially about the poor and non-elite. 7/
Of course those with less will be told after a time by those with much more - "You're doing it wrong." And "My child will be distinguished by the fact that he/she/they is not dependent on a device for entertainment or diversion." 8/
My point is not that I doubt the risks and challenges of excessive screen time for kids and adults. Our dependence on tech *is* a huge social experiment and the outcomes are looking scarier by the day. 9/
I do, however, resist the consistent need of the wealthy elite to seek ways to maintain their distance to the mainstream. To be the ones who tell us what's "hot, or not" - 10/
Chris Anderson points out ""The digital divide was about access to technology, and now that everyone has access, the new digital divide is limiting access to technology," - 11/
This article and its recent close cousins about spying nannies in SV & more elite parent hand wringing over screen in the NYT feel like their own category of expensive PR work - again allowing SV to set the tone. 12/
It's not really about screens or damage to children's imaginations - it's about maintaining divides, about insuring that we know what the rich do (and must be correct) vs what the rest of us must manage (sad, bad). 13/fin]
siliconvalley edtech children technology parenting 2018 nelliebowles addiction psychology hypocrisy digitaldivide income inequality ipads smartphones screentime schools education politics policy rules childcare policing surveillance tracking computers television tv tablets phones mobile teaching learning howwelearn howweteach anyakamenetz sherrispelic ipad
Why so many U.S. students aren't learning math | University of California
"Stigler has also analyzed how other countries — such as Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Czech Republic — teach math and science, which, he says, helps us understand U.S. teaching practices more clearly.
"American students think math is about memorizing procedures," Stigler said. "They're not learning in a deep way. They think learning is supposed to be easy. That's really not what learning is about. Students need practice in the things they can't learn by doing a Google search. They need to think and struggle — like when they are practicing a sport or a musical instrument."
In other countries, students are asked to work on a variety of problems. In the U.S., students work on many repetitions of, essentially, the same problem, making it unnecessary for U.S. students to think hard about each individual problem. We teach math as disconnected facts and as a series of steps or procedures — do this, and this and this — without connecting procedures with concepts, and without thinking or problem-solving.
"Don't just memorize it and spit it back on the test," Stigler said.
American eighth graders, for example, rarely spend time engaged in the serious study of mathematical concepts, Stigler said. Japanese eighth graders, in contrast, engage in serious study of mathematical concepts and are asked to develop their own solutions for math problems that they have not seen before.
Stigler thinks this memorization of facts and procedures applies to the teaching of many subjects in the United States.
Improving teaching has proven to be extremely difficult, and efforts to do so have achieved only limited success. But this disappointing record has not discouraged Stigler.
One of his projects, funded by a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, is to create and continually improve a university course. The course, which focuses on introductory statistics, includes an online, interactive "textbook" with more than 100 web pages and about 800 assessment questions.
Stigler began creating the course in 2015 in collaboration with Ji Son, a professor at Cal State Los Angeles, and Karen Givvin, a UCLA researcher and adjunct professor of psychology. He taught the course for the first time last spring and is doing so again this quarter.
As students work their way through the course, Stigler and his team collect all the data and can see what the students are learning and what they are not learning.
"Most professors don't realize how little information we have about how much students are learning," Sigler said. "I observed a professor once give a lecture where not a single student said anything. I asked him afterwards how he thought it went, and he thought it was great. But how could he tell if it was clear to the students without eliciting any information from students?"
With his interactive course, Stigler can get real-time information. He offers his statistics course for free to any instructor in exchange for getting access to the data showing what, and how, students are learning.
His goal is incremental improvement in teaching, believing that rapid, dramatic results are not realistic. "I want millions of students to get one percent better every year in what they learn," Stigler said.
Stigler and Givvin are playing leading roles in a new organization, the Precision Institute — created by National University to test innovative teaching ideas and collect data with the goal of helping to solve some of the most challenging issues in higher education. Stigler is one of the institute's first fellows. National University, a San Diego-based non-profit, offers more than 100 programs, both online and at more than two dozen locations in California and Nevada, and has more than 150,000 alumni.
Through the Precision Institute and its National Precision Research and Innovation Network, National University gets researchers to address its educational challenges, while researchers get to test their education theories in real time in a university setting.
Stigler hopes to add his statistics course to the National University curriculum. Ideas that work can be implemented at National University right away.
Students in the same course can be randomly assigned to use different materials, and Stigler and his team can analyze data and figure out which approach is more effective. Stigler will soon do this in his UCLA undergraduate statistics course and will bring this approach to the National University project as well.
"We're improving the course while students are taking the course," said Stigler, who believes strongly in the importance of collecting data to see what actually helps students learn. "We're trying to measure what they actually learn and figure out how we can help them to learn more."
Any academic content area could profit from this approach, and the intent of Stigler's research team is to broaden its application in the future.
"I don't know what the answers are and don't have an ax to grind," Stigler said. "I don't want to argue in the abstract about theories of education. Let's test ideas on the ground and see which ones help students."
Teaching is hard to change. Stigler and Givvin are struck by how similar teaching methods are within each country they have studied, and the striking differences in methods they observed across countries. While the United States is very diverse, the national variation in eighth grade mathematics teaching is much smaller than Stigler and Givvin expected to find.
"The focus on teachers has some merit, of course," Stigler said, "but we believe that a focus on improving of teaching — the methods that teachers use in the classroom — will yield greater returns.
"Even the countries at the top are trying to improve teaching and learning," Stigler said. "It is a central problem faced by all societies.""
math mathematics education teaching howweteach us learning children jamesstigler jison problemsolving memorization howwelearn
26 | Black Mountain College — Do Not Touch
"We're going back to school and learning about an arts college in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. For 24 years the college attracted famous teachers and produced students who would go on to achieve their own fame. I have two guests speaking to me about Black Mountain - Kate Averett from the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and Professor Eva Diaz from Pratt Institute."
bmc 2018 blackmountaincollege bauhaus annialbers johndewey art arts education highered highereducation alternative experimental unschooling deschooling democracy horizontality evadiaz kateaverett history arthistory pedagogy lcproject openstudioproject form exploration liberalarts roberrauschenberg willemdekooning abstractexpressionism howwework discipline self identity johncage mercecunningham self-directedlearning self-directed learning howwelearn howweteach teaching vision cognition expressionism expression music dance buckminsterfuller technique chance happenings anarchism ego spontaneity unknown improvisation radicalism transilience northcarolina transience hippies communes integration jacoblawrence almastonewilliams outsiders refugees inclusion inclusivity openness gender rayjohnson elainedekooining karenkarnes dorothearockburn hazellarsenarcher blackmountaincollegemuseum susanweil maryparkswashington josefalbers charlesolson poetry johnandrewrice
Black Mountain College: "The Grass-Roots of Democracy" - Open Source with Christopher Lydon
"Our guest, the literary historian Louis Menand, explains that B.M.C. was a philosophical experiment intent on putting the progressive philosopher John Dewey's ideas to work in higher education. The college curriculum was unbelievably permissive — but it did ask that students undertake their own formation as citizens of the world by means of creative expression, and hard work, in a community of likeminded people.
The college may not have lived up to its utopian self-image — the scene was frequently riven by interpersonal conflict — but it did serve as a stage-set to some of modern culture's most interesting personalities and partnerships."
bmc blackmountaincollege rutherickson louismenand teddreier theodoredreier sebastiansmee taylordavis williamdavis 2016 robertcreeley jacoblawrence josefalbers robertrauschenberg annialbers davidtudor franzkline mercecunningham johncage charlesolson buckminsterfuller johndewey democracy art music film poetry cytwombly bauhaus experientiallearning howwelearn education johnandrewrice unschooling deschooling schools schooling learning howelearn howweteach pedagogy christopherlydon abstractexpressionism popart jacksonpollock arthistory history arts purpose lcproject openstudioproject leapbeforeyoulook canon discovery conflict artists happenings openness rural community highered highereducation curriculum willemdekooning small control conversation interdisciplinary transdisciplinary mitmedialab medialab chaos utopia dicklyons artschools davidbowie experimentation exploration humanity humanism humility politics
"Minding the Gap," Reviewed: A Self-Questioning Documentary About What Happened to a Group of Young Skaters | The New Yorker
[Carol Black: https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/1052995478583836672
2-step lesson for teachers:
1. Watch this documentary about the kids who will NEVER adapt well to authoritarian environments like school. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Vm_Awe3bw
2. Read how this skater kid learned to make brilliant films through self-directed learning, mentorships, discovery.
Through a slow process of experimentation, improvisation, exploration, director Bing Liu evolved from a skater kid with a video camera into a deep, accomplished filmmaker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minding-the-gap-reviewed-a-self-questioning-documentary-about-what-happened-to-a-group-of-young-skaters
As a teen-ager, a decade ago, in the small city of Rockford, Illinois, Bing Liu filmed himself and his friends skateboarding. He shot much of his footage while skating alongside them, and, as a result, the skating sequences of his documentary "Minding the Gap" (which opens today in theatres and streams on Hulu) have a surging, gliding, soaring, joyously speedy energy that offers a hypnotic whirl and rush. Those images of skating, however, are merely the background and context for the film, and the diverting thrill that they offer is crucial to the film's substance. That substance—domestic trauma, systemic racism, and economic dislocation—is also the very stuff of society, and the near-at-hand intimacy gives rise to a film of vast scope and political depth.
Allowing his film to unfold over years of shooting and editing and re-editing, Liu uncovered the hidden depth and dimension in his subject matter.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minding-the-gap-reviewed-a-self-questioning-documentary-about-what-happened-to-a-group-of-young-skaters
"Minding the Gap" builds Liu's investigations, and the personal and ethical considerations that they entail, into the film. What he discovers—and films—of his friends' present-day lives disturbs him, and Liu grapples with his own conflicts even while filming himself grappling with them. The details of the film make for an exemplary work of reporting. Liu's clear revelation of specific yet complex events brings out psychological causality and logical connections but doesn't impose a narrative; rather, the drama crystallizes as the events unfold. It's a documentary in which the very nature of investigation is established—intellectually, aesthetically, and morally—by way of the personal implication of the filmmaker in the subject, of the filmmaker's own need to make the images, to talk with the participants, to get beyond the surfaces of the settings. "Minding the Gap" is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film's necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.
Learning technical skills from online forums and by emulating filmmakers who inspired him, Liu was then able to allow the personal, emotional story to emerge. https://filmmakermagazine.com/105737-i-had-a-moral-crisis-bing-liu-on-minding-the-gap-personal-doc-voiceovers-and-cycles-of-abuse/#.W8i8by-ZMWo
Filmmaker: I had seen part of a cut that you had about a year ago. What I remember is, there was a lot more voiceover and the structure was different. There was a scene in the first ten minutes where you're going to meet your mom to do the interview about you being abused by your stepfather, and you're being interviewed in the car on the way: "So how do you feel about this?" At a certain point, obviously a lot of those things changed. Documentary editing processes are inherently long and complicated, but I'd love it if you could talk about thinking through some of those changes.
Liu: I didn't begin the film wanting to be in the film. My background is, I got a camera to make videos when I was 14. I watched movies that inspired me, like Waking Life, Kids and Gummo. Some of my first shorts when I was a teen were this sort of Slacker plot where I follow people around Rockford as they interact with each other. The structure is based off of hand-offs, to give you a slice of community and the people in it. Anyway, I learned cinematography and editing through going to forums. There's this website called Skate Perception that was kind of the Reddit for skate media makers all over the country. This was in the 2000s, when the internet was still finding its identity in many ways. It no longer exists; forums aren't really a thing, for the most part.
"I didn't go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school, don't go to school for film." https://nofilmschool.com/2018/08/minding-gap-bing-liu-interview
NFS: How did you develop your unconventional aesthetics over time, starting from such a young age?
Liu: It was a mix of just emulating other creators and films that I was watching and also just going online and learning. By the time I was 16, I had a camera that I could set exposure and color temperature and with ND filters on it. By the time I was 17, I had a 24p camera and I was building my own dollies, so it was sort of just like exploring and emulation of what was happening at the time, which was a mix of the internet connecting more people, and also the DIY-style filmmaking that was growing with the advent of DSLR shooting video. I never really saw a career in film as a viable thing. I thought making films was just what I did.
"The Glidecam was freeing because you can run down stairs when you get good enough at it, and even jump over things with the cameras."
NFS: How did you transition to realizing that you could actually do this professionally?
Liu: It was when I got a job as a PA when I was 19 and I was like, "Oh, I can get paid $50 a day to like fetch coffee and carry heavy camera cases around for 14 hours." It was less about the $50 and more about the "Oh, you can do this."
NFS: That's what we're always telling people who want to break into the business: just get on set.
Liu: Yeah, I didn't go to film school, because everybody that I worked with in film was like: if you go to school. don't go to school for film, and so I went to school for literature.
bingliu mindingthegap film filmmaking documentary srg unschooling deschooling authority authoritarianism school schooling schools learning skating skateboarding self-directed self-directedlearning howwelearn canon video domesticviolence 2018 carolblack teaching howweteach schooliness online internet web domestictrauma economics rustbelt society childabuse children teens youth streetculture illinois rockford friendship parenting dropouts aesthetics filmschool emulation cinematography
'Minding the Gap': How Bing Liu Turned 12 Years of Skate Footage into the Year's Most Heartfelt Doc
bingliu mindingthegap film filmmaking documentary srg unschooling deschooling authority authoritarianism school schooling schools learning skating skateboarding self-directed self-directedlearning howwelearn canon video domesticviolence 2018 carolblack teaching howweteach schooliness online internet webapps domestictrauma economics rustbelt society childabuse children teens youth streetculture illinois rockford friendship parenting dropouts aesthetics filmschool emulation cinematography
"I Had a Moral Crisis": Bing Liu on Minding the Gap, Personal Doc Voiceovers and Cycles of Abuse | Filmmaker Magazine
Ein ganzer Ort macht Schule <br />Zwischennutzung in Feldkirchen an der Donau – Blog – schulRAUMkultur
[translation from: www.DeepL.com/Translator
"A whole place goes to school
Interim use in Feldkirchen an der Donau
Feldkirchen an der Donau is cheering and being cheered. A jewel of contemporary school construction and a committed pedagogical practice put this Upper Austrian community in the limelight. There are many reasons why this was successful. One of them was almost overlooked. The temporary use during the construction site period was an impressive feat of courage and cooperation on the part of civil society, preparing the team of female teachers for their practice in the cluster school unintentionally and, after almost 40 years, turning an advanced school concept from the 1970s into reality. The Feldkirchen hiking school is history again - but it has made history in Feldkirchen ...
The details can be read in the download. The text is the slightly revised version of my technical contribution in the magazine schulheft 163, which was published in autumn 2016. The building of fasch&fuchs.architekten, on everyone's lips, can in my opinion be understood more fundamentally, more profoundly, if the prehistory is also taken into account. This would almost be submerged in history. By a lucky coincidence I was able to salvage and secure it. It shows very well how meaningful spatial school development can be for the success of best architecture.
Meeting room of the parish in use as a school © parish Feldkirchen an der Donau
The use of architecture is a dance with habits. Architects understandably tend not to see the real (not imagined) use anymore. Usage is quickly invisible because "unseen", usage takes place after our creative phase. Therefore, both phases - phase 0, project development, and phase 10, settlement accompaniment - are relevant for school conversions that require laymen to act anew. I will report about it soon - in Leoben I was commissioned for phase 10 at the Bildungszentrum Pestalozzi - an experiment!
The reference to the original contribution in the school book 163: Zinner, Michael (2016): A whole place does school. Text contribution in: Rosenberger, Katharina; Lindner, Doris; Hammerer, Franz (2016, editor): SchulRäume. Insights into the reality of new learning worlds. schulheft 163; 41st year; StudienVerlag Innsbruck. 77–88
A whole place goes to school [.pdf]
http://www.schulraumkultur.at/perch/resources/170206-blog-zinner.michael-2016artikel.schulheft163-ueberarb-ein.ganzer.ort.macht.schule-seite77bis88.pdf "]
education schools schooldesign microschools community temporary sfh lcproject openstudioproject communities neighborhoods decentralization via:cervus architecture pedagogy teaching learning howweteach 1970 austria progressive tcsnmy
How Much Do Rising Test Scores Tell Us About A School?
"Reading and math scores have long been the currency of American schooling, and never more so than in the past two decades since the No Child Left Behind Act. Today, advocates will describe a teacher as "effective" when what they really mean is that the teacher's students had big increases in reading and math scores. Politicians say a school is "good" when they mean that its reading and math scores are high.
So, how much do test scores really tell us, anyway? It turns out: A lot less than we'd like.
For all the attention to testing, there's been a remarkable lack of curiosity about how much tests tell us. Last spring, for instance, researcher Collin Hitt, of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, and two coauthors examined the research on school choice and found a striking disconnect between test score gains and longer-term outcomes. They reported, "Programs that produced no measurable positive impacts on achievement have frequently produced positive impacts on attainment" even as "programs that produced substantial test score gains" have shown no impact on high school graduation or college attendance. More generally, they observe:
The growing literature on early childhood education has found that short-term impacts on test scores are inconsistent predictors of later-life impacts . . . Studies of teacher impacts on student outcomes show a similar pattern of results . . . It turns out that teacher impacts on test scores are almost entirely uncorrelated with teacher impacts on student classroom behavior, attendance, truancy, and grades . . . The teachers who produce improvements in student behavior and noncognitive skills are not particularly likely to be the same teachers who improve test scores.
You would think this disconnect would prompt plenty of furrowed brows and set off lots of alarm bells. It hasn't. And yet the phenomenon that Hitt et al. note isn't all that surprising if we think about it. After all, test scores may go up for many reasons. Here are a few of them:
• Students may be learning more reading and math and the tests are simply picking that up. All good.
• Teachers may be shifting time and energy from untested subjects and activities (like history or Spanish) to the tested ones (like reading and math). If this is happening, scores can go up without students actually learning any more.
• Teachers may be learning what gets tested and focusing on that. In this case, they're just teaching students more of what shows up on the test—again, this means that scores can go up without students learning any more.
• Schools may be focusing on test preparation, so that students do better on the test even as they spend less time learning content—meaning scores may go up while actual learning goes down.
• Scores may be manipulated in various ways, via techniques as problematic as cheating or as mundane as starting the school year earlier. Such strategies can yield higher test scores without telling us anything about whether students actually learned more than they used to.
It matters which of these forces are driving rising scores. To say this is not to deny the value of testing. Indeed, this observation is 100% consistent with a healthy emphasis on the "bottom line" of school improvement. After all, results are what matters.
But that presumes that the results mean what we think they do. Consider: If it turned out that an admired pediatrician was seeing more patients because she'd stopped running certain tests and was shortchanging preventive care, you might have second thoughts about her performance. That's because it matters how she improved her stats. If it turned out that an automaker was boosting its profitability by using dirt-cheap, unsafe components, savvy investors would run for the hills—because those short-term gains will be turning into long-term headaches. In both cases, observers should note that the "improvements" were phantasms, ploys to look good without actually moving the bottom line.
That's the point. Test scores can convey valuable information. Some tests, such as the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), are more trustworthy than others. The NAEP, for instance, is less problematic because it's administered with more safeguards and isn't used to judge schools or teachers (which means they have less cause to try to teach to it). But the NAEP isn't administered every year and doesn't produce results for individual schools. Meanwhile, the annual state tests that we rely on when it comes to judging schools are susceptible to all the problems flagged above.
This makes the question of why reading and math scores change one that deserves careful, critical scrutiny. Absent that kind of audit, parents and communities can't really know whether higher test scores mean that schools are getting better—or whether they're just pretending to do so."
frederickhess standardizedtesting 2018 education reform nclb rttt standardization policy measurement assessment attainment naep learning howelearn howweteach teaching publicschools schools schooling
september 2018 by robertogreco
Is The Big Standardized Test A Big Standardized Flop
"Since No Child Left Behind first rumbled onto the scene, the use of a Big Standardized Test to drive accountability and measure success has been a fundamental piece of education reform. But recently, some education reform stalwarts are beginning to express doubts.
There are plenty of reasons to doubt the validity of the Big Standardized Test, be it PARCC or SBA or whatever your state is using these days. After almost two decades of its use, we've raised an entire generation of students around the notion of test-based accountability, and yet the fruits of that seem.... well, elusive. Where are the waves of students now arriving on college campuses super-prepared? Where are the businesses proclaiming that today's grads are the most awesome in history? Where is the increase in citizens with great-paying jobs? Where are any visible signs that the test-based accountability system has worked?
Two years ago Jay Greene (no relation), head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, was writing about the disconnect in test scores-- if test scores were going up, wasn't that supposed to improve "life outcomes." Wasn't the whole argument that getting students to raise test scores would be indicative of better prospects in life? After all, part of the argument behind education reform has been that a better education was the key to a better economic future, both for individuals and for the country. Greene looked at the research and concluded that there was no evidence of a link between a better test score and a better life.
Here on Forbes.com this week, contributor Frederick Hess (director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank) expressed some doubts as well. AEI has always supported the ed reform cause, but Hess has often shown a willingness to follow where the evidence leads, even if that means challenging reform orthodoxy. He cites yet another study that shows a disconnect between a student's test scores and her future. In fact, the research shows that programs that improve "attainment" don't raise test scores, and programs that raise test scores don't affect "attainment."
Test scores can be raised with several techniques, and most of those techniques have nothing to do with providing students with a better education. Drill the test prep. Take at-risk students out of electives and make them take test-related courses instead. And have teachers learn, over the years, how to teach more directly to the test. But do you want higher test scores or better education? Because those are two unrelated things.
The end result is that the test scores do not tell you what they claim they tell you. They are less like actionable data and more like really expensive noise.
Hess and Greene represent a small but growing portion of the reform community; for most, the Big Standardized Test data is God. For others, the revenue stream generated by the tests, the pre-tests, the test prep materials, and the huge mountains of data being mined-- those will be nearly impossible to walk away from.
But there is one critical lesson that ed reform testing apostates should keep in mind. The idea that the Big Standardized Test does not measure what it claims to measure, the idea that it actually does damage to schools, the idea that it simply isn't what it claims to be-- while these ideas are presented as new notions for ed reformers, classroom teachers have been raising these concerns for about twenty years.
Teachers have said, repeatedly, that the tests don't measure what they claim to measure, and that the educational process in schools is being narrowed and weakened in order to focus on testing. Teachers have said, repeatedly, that the Big Standardized Tests are a waste of time and money and not helping students get an education. Teachers have been saying it over and over and over again. In return teachers have been told, "You are just afraid of accountability" and "These tests will finally keep you honest."
After twenty years, folks are starting to figure out that teachers were actually correct. The Big Standardized Test is not helping, not working, and not measuring what it claims to measure. Teachers should probably not hold their collective breath waiting for an apology, though it is the generation of students subjected to test-centered schooling that deserve an apology. In the meantime, if ed reform thought leader policy wonk mavens learn one thing, let it be this-- the next time you propose an Awesome idea for fixing schools and a whole bunch of professional educators tell you why your idea is not great, listen to them."
petergreene standardizedtesting testing standardization 2018 schools reform education measurement nclb rttt parcc sba frederickhess jaygreene teaching learning howwelearn howweteach policy schooling publicschools
lalitha vasudevan on Twitter: "Overhearing tutoring session between adult tutor & suburban hs student. I despair at the extensive focus on relatability (between student & text) as strategy for responding to comprehension questions and essay writing, where
"Overhearing tutoring session between adult tutor & suburban hs student. I despair at the extensive focus on relatability (between student & text) as strategy for responding to comprehension questions and essay writing, wherein to relate to have personally experienced.
Being able to relate, in and of itself, isn't the cause of my despair. It's the over-reliance on experience to the exclusion of other ways of creating conditions for understanding that worries me. This bent away from the traps of "cultural literacy" began w/good intentions;
but this response -- understandably, in resistance to the hyper-testing mania that overtook and still dominates much of the schooling landscape -- may err too far in the direction of allowing some young people to never have to stray too far from their own thoughts.
I want to know what young people think, what they notice and see, how they navigate and experience the world. AND, I want their insights on what others notice, see, conclude, design, and decide; for that, too, concerns young people --
not only in their immediate, local, kinship networks, but about how they perceive others' perceptions of the they things they have noticed, or not. They are civic beings, active in their citizenry, and to deny this and allow otherwise is educational malpractice.
I want young people to be seen and engaged as real interlocutors, not discursive window dressing to be written into curricula and grant proposals as the "participatory" element. I don't just want to hear what they think; I want to think with them, toward new questions.
So, I return to a familiar, frustrating thought: My, how standardization, answer-driven teaching, & the greedy pursuit of efficiency-driven uniformity has royally screwed over kids & schools.
And (some) big data efforts want to help do more of the same.
#smalldatabigmoments"
lalithavasudevan education standardizedtesting standardization experience relatability teaching learning schools schooliness kinship perception culturalliteracy howweteach howwelearn comprehension essays writing howwewrite teachingreading teachingwriting noticing civics citizenship democracy democratic malpractice participatory participation unschooling deschooling pedagogy uniformity efficiency bigdata testing
august 2018 by robertogreco
Carla Shalaby on Twitter: "One way educators can support the #NationalPrisonStrike is to recognize how we model and teach a carceral philosophy of throwaway people when we rely on punishment, exclusion, removal, control, and policing as our strategies of
"One way educators can support the #NationalPrisonStrike is to recognize how we model and teach a carceral philosophy of throwaway people when we rely on punishment, exclusion, removal, control, and policing as our strategies of "classroom management." 1/
Too often, teachers think classroom management is something to do in order to get to the real teaching. In fact, classroom management is teaching itself. It's a curriculum, a set of lessons that young people are learning from us.
Are we intentional in these lessons?
How might the everyday experience of schooling be different if we imagined classroom management as a prison abolition curriculum?
What might lessons in freedom look like, instead of lessons in authoritative models of control that teach strategies for powering over others?
Freedom does NOT mean doing whatever we want. Or just having lots of choice. It means getting to be our whole, human selves, in community with other whole, human selves, and using our power to demand that each of us is taken care of, treated with dignity, and fully embraced.
Given this definition of freedom, we are not free if we don't consider how to support these prisoners on strike. Because we would be failing to use our power to demand that each of us is taken care of, treated with dignity, and fully embraced. Teachers have lots of this power.
Freedom is a VERY high standard of "classroom management," not the loosey-goosey, chaotic free-for-all that educators often fear. We must notice and stop classroom practices that model a culture of policing and prison, AND we must also draft a freedom curriculum with children.
What might that look like? Ask your kids. They're the ones with their imaginations still intact. Ask them what human beings need to be their best, most whole human selves. And how we can each use our power to meet those needs, in community and with community. No throwaway people.
Take a lesson from @DingleTeach's approach, which was to work with her students to understand together that they need one central "rule" as their approach to classroom management: "We will take care of each other."
I invite classroom teachers to imagine their possibilities as prison abolitionists. This primer is a good start. https://www.thenation.com/article/what-is-prison-abolition … "As @C_Resistance explains in its definition of abolition, 'we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future.'"
What models could you build today within the four walls of your classroom (WITH YOUNG PEOPLE, not FOR them!) that can represent how we want to live in the future?
That's a freedom question that could guide your classroom management curriculum this new school year.
When you feel stuck or if you are scared to misstep, you could look at your classroom management practices that day and ask students, "what did I teach through how I treated you? What did we learn by my model?" Invite them to help you do better, to teach one other to do better.
Angela Davis says, "[prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism." She tells us, "prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings."
Suspension and expulsion do the same. They don't disappear social problems, they disappear human beings, as Davis teaches. So don't let anyone fool you into believing that throwing young people away is a question of safety. We don't disappear danger by disappearing human beings.
A safe world will require us to learn freedom, together with young people and with reverence for the lessons of our elders, and to use schools as a way to engage children in addressing social problems rather than hoping to simply disappear the human beings who make them visible."
nationalprisonstrike teaching howweteach classroommanagement freedom control prisons curriculum hiddencurriculum authority authoritarianism power hierarchy prisonabolition children youth teens society capitalism prisonindustrialcomplex suspension expulsion discipline sorting schooltoprisonpipeline
Jakey Toor en Instagram: "Sorting, Sifting, and Purging in SD; Fascinating to go through all my old books, research, notes, and papers 📚📖📝—- Lisa Delpit was, and…"
"Lisa Delpit was, and still is, one of my favorite education theorists & authors. In fact, a few years ago, while working with a coach, I realized that part of what I want for the field of education is to see more sociology & anthropology research utilized in credentialing programs, as well as in-house professional developments. I feel lucky to have been introduced to Delpit's work early on in my own program, which I have to say, especially now in retrospect, was top notch. "In her groundbreaking 1988 essay "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children," the elementary school teacher cum theorist Lisa Delpit dismantled some of the pieties of progressive education. Deliberately unstructured teaching strategies like "whole language," "open classrooms," and "process, not product" were putting poor, non-white children at an even greater disadvantage in school and beyond..." - The Nation: An interview with Lisa Delpit on educating "Other People's Children'"."
education jakeytoor 2018 1988 lisadelpit progressive learning schools schooling teaching howweteach sociology anthropology pedagogy power openclassrooms wholelanguage disadvantage process processoverproduct structure unstructured
Scratching the Surface — 85. Mindy Seu
"Mindy Seu is a designer, educator, and researcher. She is currently a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was previously a designer at 2x4 and MoMA. She's designed and produced archival sites for Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin's Eros and Avant Garde magazines. In this episode, Mindy and I talk about her early career and why she decided to go to graduate school, the role of research and archives in her work, and how graphic design is just one pillar of her practice."
mindyseu jarretfuller design education archives internet web online 2018 positioning internetarchive claireevans brunolatour graphicdesign purpose iritrogoff networks connections fearlessness decentralization neilpostman teaching howweteach institutions structure interviews research project-basedreasearch
july 2018 by robertogreco
Time for Self | Akilah S. Richards [Episode 61]
"In this episode, Atlanta-based SDE facilitator and education entrepreneur, ANTHONY GALLOWAY II, speaks on moving past the mental aspect of self-care over to the literal practice. You'll also learn about two Atlanta events in support of Self-Directed Education, both of which Anthony is playing a major role in bringing to the city. Also, the Jamaican patois term "Dat nuh mek it" basically means "that isn't nearly enough." In other words, something needs leveling up, because in its current state, it just won't do. You're welcome! #POCinSDE"
akilahrichards anthonygalloway unschooling deschooling self-care self-directed self-directedlearning creativity art howweteach howwelearn work labor focus artleisure leisurearts play teaching mentoring practice criticism advice decisionmaking schools schooling schooliness decisions skepticism pedagogy priorities process technology 2018
The power of 'evidence': Reliable science or a set of blunt tools? - Wrigley - 2018 - British Educational Research Journal - Wiley Online Library
"In response to the increasing emphasis on 'evidence‐based teaching', this article examines the privileging of randomised controlled trials and their statistical synthesis (meta‐analysis). It also pays particular attention to two third‐level statistical syntheses: John Hattie's Visible learning project and the EEF's Teaching and learning toolkit. The article examines some of the technical shortcomings, philosophical implications and ideological effects of this approach to 'evidence', at all these three levels. At various points in the article, aspects of critical realism are referenced in order to highlight ontological and epistemological shortcomings of 'evidence‐based teaching' and its implicit empiricism. Given the invocation of the medical field in this debate, it points to critiques within that field, including the need to pay attention to professional experience and clinical diagnosis in specific situations. Finally, it briefly locates the appeal to 'evidence' within a neoliberal policy framework."
johnhattie 2018 teaching howweteach education policy evidence visiblelearning evidence-basedteaching criticism learning
Science / Fiction — Carol Black
"'Evidence-based' education, scientific racism, & how learning styles became a myth."
"1. The Debunkers
2. The Map and the Territory
3. The Evidence
4. The Territory Beyond the Map
5. Here Be Dragons"
"A disturbing feature of this discourse in education is the frequency with which it takes the form of male researchers and pundits telling female educators that their views on learning are cognitively childish and irrational and should therefore be disregarded. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, a prominent debunker, has shared some rather patronizing speculations as to why the vast majority of (mostly female) teachers persist in thinking their students have different learning styles ("I think learning styles theory is widely accepted because the idea is so appealing. It would be so nice if it were true.") His paternal tone is especially disturbing since he makes his case by failing to mention the existence of legitimate competing views from respected scientists and education researchers."
"But despite the debunkers' undeniable passion on the topic, the fact is that there are extremely reputable scientists on both sides of this debate. In other words, as Grundmann and Stehr put it, "the basic rift in these debates is not between lay people and experts but between two alliances that advocate different courses of action based on divergent basic values and knowledge claims... we see representatives of science and the lay public on both sides."
So what are the two alliances in the case of learning styles? And what are their divergent basic values?
Luckily, you don't have to dig very deep to find out. If you review the writings of the most vocal learning styles 'debunkers,' you quickly find that they are almost always simply advocates for traditional, teacher-controlled direct instruction. They tend to favor a traditional "core knowledge" curriculum, traditional forms of discipline, and they adhere to a traditional IQ-based view of intelligence. In other words, they're just educational conservatives. (In the UK they openly call themselves "trads" as opposed to "progs.") They trumpet any research that supports their preferences and ignore or attempt to discredit any research that leans the other way. They don't like progressive or self-directed or culturally relevant approaches to education. They don't tend to concern themselves overmuch with less tangible aspects of children's well-being like, say, "happiness" or "creativity" or "mental health." They define "what works" in education in terms of test scores.
But the reality is that you can't say 'what works" in education until you answer the question: works for what? As Yong Zhao explains in "What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education," it's reasonable to assume, in education as in medicine, that any given intervention may have negative as well as positive effects; if we want to claim to be evidence-based, we need to look at both. What raises test scores may lower creativity or intrinsic motivation, and vice versa; this study, for example, found that direct instruction hastened young children's mastery of a specific task, but lowered exploratory behavior. So "what the research supports" depends on what you value, what you care most about, what kind of life you want for your children."
"The first thing to understand about learning styles is that there is no agreed-on definition of the term. Multiple frameworks have been proposed, from the popular Visual-Auditory-Kinesthetic framework, to the Concrete-Abstract framework, to the Holistic-Analytical, Impulsive-Reflective, Convergent-Divergent, Field-Dependent-Field-Independent, Cognitive-Affective-Physiological –– one literature review identified 71 different models. As Kirschner and van Merriënboer grouse, if we consider each learning style as dichotomous (e.g. visual vs. verbal) that means there are 2 to the power of 71 possible combinations of learning styles – more than the number of people alive on earth.
They say that like it's a bad thing. But as astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson remarked recently, "In science, when human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That's why physics is easy and sociology is hard."
Zhang and her frequent collaborators Robert Sternberg and Stephen Rayner, co-editors of The Handbook of Intellectual Styles, are not fans of the 'debunkers.' They use the term intellectual style as an "umbrella term for all style constructs," (including learning styles, cognitive styles, perceptual styles, and thinking styles) which relate to "people's preferred ways of processing information and dealing with tasks." (Notice the word "preferred" here, since that will come up later.) As these authors see it, intellectual style differences are complex, involving cognitive, affective, physiological, psychological, and sociological dimensions. Researchers Maria Kozhevnikov, Carol Evans, and Stephen Kosslyn use the term cognitive style (which includes learning style constructs), to describe "patterns of adaptation to the external world that develop through interaction with the surrounding environment on the basis of innate predispositions, the interactions among which are shaped by changing environmental demands."
The most promising style constructs, in Kozhevnikov's view, are not the narrow visual-auditory-kinesthetic (V-A-K) perceptual categories, but the richer constructs of "context-dependency vs. independency, rule-based vs. intuitive processing, internal vs. external locus of control, and integration vs. compartmentalization." These cognitive tendencies are neither set in stone nor completely malleable; they intersect with cognition at multiple levels, from perception to concept formation to higher-order cognitive processing to meta-cognitive processing.
So it's complicated. And yet despite what researchers Elena Grigorenko and Samuel Mandelman call "the very fine texture" of the "intertwined threads of intelligence and personality" that make learning styles so devilishly hard to define, in practice these differences are not at all difficult to see.
Which is probably why somewhere between 75 and 90% of teachers believe they exist.
In self-directed learning situations where children are able to follow their curiosity in their own ways, differences that might be muted or masked in a controlled instruction setting become very clearly visible. Sensory preferences intersect with social, emotional, and cognitive differences in complex and individual ways that profoundly shape how each child enters and explores and takes hold of the world. One child will spend quiet hours poring over illustrated books about science or history; another child is quickly bored by those, but gets deeply engaged in active social projects like building or filmmaking or citizen science. One child listens in on adult conversations and remembers everything she hears, absorbing knowledge like a sponge; another child creates and constructs knowledge in her own hands-on ways, writing her first book before she reads one. One child is observant and cautious, always making sure of things before venturing into unfamiliar terrain; another child is bold and intuitive, diving in head first and filling in the gaps later in a "fake it till you make it" spirit. The river moves steadily toward the sea, but it follows many divergent pathways, and the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line.
In other words, human learning differences are complex, multi-dimensional, and difficult to definitively pin down, but this much is clear: the kids have different styles of learning. So how does something so intuitively obvious and readily observed cease to exist in the eyes of the debunkers?"
"The debunkers admit that people have fairly stable learning preferences. They also admit that people have variable abilities in visual v. auditory memory, etc. When you combine preference with ability –– e.g. "I have a good visual memory, and I prefer information presented visually" –– that's probably what many speakers of the English language understand by the term "learning style."
So that thing? That exists.
But here's where the crucial elision occurs, and the claim shifts to the matching hypothesis. In a literature review of learning styles research, Pashler et al. state it this way: the theory of learning styles is only confirmed if we can successfully sort individuals into groups "for which genuine group-by-treatment interactions can be demonstrated."
What are "group-by-treatment" interactions? Well, in this scenario the teacher diagnoses and sorts the learners into groups, applies a randomized instructional "treatment" to each group, and then administers a test to determine which "treatment" worked better –– like a drug trial.
It's important to note that the debunkers' claim is thus based almost entirely on studies of teacher-controlled direct instruction; they don't involve scenarios where learners have agency. But the problem with studying learning in teacher-controlled settings is that it may be unclear whether you're measuring something about the learning or something about the teaching. In other words, you have to be sure that "Treatment A" isn't just a better or more interesting lesson than "Treatment B."
How can you solve that problem? Simple. By excluding from the list of methodologically acceptable studies anything that involves the kind of creative activities that good teachers might come up with to address the needs of diverse learners.
From the standpoint of strict scientific method, this is, of course, correct; your experimental protocol should control every variable except the one you're testing. How can you achieve this? By further simplification, of course: by creating a lesson so lacking in complexity that it can't possibly be interesting to anyone. Like memorizing a random list of words.
Here's where you run … [more]
carolblack learningstyles evidence 2018 paulkirschner jeroenvanmerriënboer li-fangzhang mariakozhevnikov carolevans elenagrigorenko stephenkosslyn robertsternberg learning education data danielwillingham daviddidau joanneyatvin power yongzhao research unschooling deschooling directinstruction children happiness creativity well-being iq intelligence traditional testing intrinsicmotivation mastery behavior howwelearn self-directed self-directedlearning ignorance franksmith race racism oppression intersectionality coreknowledge schooling schooliness homeschool multiliteracies differences hierarchy participation participatory democracy leannebetasamosakesimpson andrealandry pedagogy teaching howweteach colonization leisterman ibramkendi standardizedtesting standardization onesizefitsall cornelpewewardy cedarriener yanaweinstein
june 2018 by robertogreco
School is Literally a Hellhole – Medium
"By continually privileging and training our eyes on a horizon "beyond the walls of the school" — whether that be achievement, authentic audiences, the real world, the future, even buzz or fame — have we inadvertently impoverished school of its value and meaning, turning it into a wind-swept platform where we do nothing but gaze into another world or brace ourselves for the inevitable? Here we have less and less patience for the platform itself, for learning to live with others who will be nothing more than competitors in that future marketplace."
"What would be possible if we instead were to wall ourselves up with one another, fostering community and care among this unlikely confluence of souls? Does privileging the proximate, present world render any critique of or contribution to the larger world impossible?
I don't think so. Learning to protect, foster, and value the humans in our care will often automatically put us in direct conflict with the many forces that disrupt or diminish those values. More than reflecting the real world or the future or some outside standard or imperative, kids need to see themselves reflected and recognized in these rooms. This is true even in the most privileged of environments. Providing recognition means valuing students' perspectives and experiences, but also helping them gain critical consciousness of themselves and their world, which they often intuit.
These tasks aren't disconnected from the outside world, but often need a smaller, more human-sized community in which to flourish. The impulse to test and measure continually intrudes upon this process. But so do other prying eyes, ones that cast our students as entrepreneurial, capitalistic, future-ready, self-motivated, passionate individuals — and that often shame those who can't or won't conform to this ideal.
We should ask ourselves to what extent those outside standards and ideals are antithetical to the values of education — civic discourse, collectivity, cooperation, care. I realize this post is short on specifics, but let's be more cautious about always forcing one another out into unforgiving gaze of others, commending the merits of a world beyond this one."
arthurchiaravalli schools schooling schooliness presence unschooling deschooling education learning highschool competition coexistence community benjamindoxtdator engagement blogging teaching howweteach howwelearn personalbranding innovation johndewey work labor nietzsche collectivism collectivity cooperation care caring merit entrepreneurship passion 2018 foucault michelfoucault
Are we overthinking general education? – Jonathan D. Becker, J.D., Ph.D.
"Many colleges and universities are trying to figure out new ways to tackle general education requirements. My own employer, VCU, has been undergoing an effort "to re-imagine our general education curriculum." The proposed framework that my VCU colleagues came up with isn't bad, but it still feels like picking courses out of individual boxes and checking boxes to complete a checklist. It feels like what happens when universities try to be innovative and break out of boxes, but turf wars ensue and departments dig in their heels. The result is an overwrought compromise that doesn't serve anyone particularly well.
Here is something I wrote on Twitter back in 2015.
[embedded tweet: https://twitter.com/jonbecker/status/670360697105174529
@gsiemens I seriously want to teach a course where all we do is read and discuss @brainpicker and @Longreads.
Imagine this learning experience: 1 faculty member with 20-25 students just reading and discussing the Longreads Weekly Top 5. They'd meet once a week, in a meeting room or a coffee shop or outside on a lawn or in the forest; it doesn't matter. And they'd just talk about what they learned. And maybe they'd blog about it so they could expand their discussion beyond the designated class time and space and could get others outside the class to weigh in. That's it; that's the whole instructional design. No predetermined curriculum; very little by way of planning. Learning outcomes? How about curiosity, wonder, critical thinking? Those are your "learning outcomes." I'd bet students would learn more by reading and deeply discussing those 5 articles each week than they would in most other tightly-designed, pre-packaged curriculum-driven course.
I would also love to involve students in a learning experience built around food shows like Alton Brown's Good Eats. Seriously. Watch just the first few minutes of this episode. In just the first 3+ minutes, we get history (information about the Ottoman Empire), science (cooking and surface area), and math (computing surface area). In a show about kabobs.
[embedded video: "Good Eats S09E2 Dis-Kabob-Ulated"
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5skv9x ]
What if general education was more like this? What if students read Longreads and watched episodes of Good Eats as part of an effort around interdisciplinary studies?
And then there's Anthony Bourdain. To me, Parts Unknown was, at its heart, educational media.
I'm not from West Virginia like Craig Calcaterra (see below) is. But, I spent a lot of time in that state doing field research at the end of the 20th century. When I watched the episode of Parts Unknown that Calcaterra shares, I felt like Bourdain had really captured what I had come to know about the state and then some. Watch the episode and tell me that you didn't learn a ton. The way Bourdain juxtaposes New York City and his fellow New Yorkers with the "existential enemy" in West Virginia is classic Bourdain."
[embedded tweet: https://twitter.com/craigcalcaterra/status/1005077364131422208
Anthony Bourdain went to West Virginia last year. In one hour he did way better capturing my home state than 1,000 poverty porn tourist journalists with pre-written stories parachuting in from coastal publications have ever done. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6inwh4
Parts Unknown is an interdisciplinary curriculum. It is about culture, food, history, politics, economics, etc. It's about people.
[embedded tweet: https://twitter.com/ablington/status/1005056496609169409
Anthony Bourdain had one of the only shows on tv that tried with all its might to teach Americans not to be scared of other people.
And isn't that what general education is?
Replace the word "travel" with the word "learning" in the following quote from Anthony Bourdain.
[embedded tweet: https://twitter.com/Tribeca/status/1005073364531269633
"Travel isn't always pretty. It isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that's okay. The journey changes you; it should change you... You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind." — Anthony Bourdain #RIP
Maybe we're overthinking general education in higher education. Probably, in fact.
jonbecker education generaleducation anthonybourdain 2018 interdisciplinary learning travel sharing ideas unschooling deschooling cv culture exploration conversation longreads lcproject openstudioproject howweteach howwelearn
Dr. Kate Antonova on Twitter: "If anyone ever asked me, as a college prof, what qualities I'd like to see in my incoming students (no one ever has, tho a number of non-profs have told me what I'm supposed to want), it's this: curiosity and a reading habit
"If anyone ever asked me, as a college prof, what qualities I'd like to see in my incoming students (no one ever has, tho a number of non-profs have told me what I'm supposed to want), it's this: curiosity and a reading habit.
[Links to: "How Our Obsession With College Prep Hurts Kids"
https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Our-Obsession-With-College/243459?key=3gZXXhLQjFMTjaMwNwzCEQpsINeRL6GkHu8ch6mHb8ZREuWEf6Qmo5gM5YChCxE0RmoxbHVSemFhLWJTcnJBUndoVFpqMFBBeXVYajZhaW9GMmdBbktRY1MwWQ ]
The other really important thing for success in college, IMO, is self-regulation, but that's a super-hard thing for everybody & esp kids who are still developing cognitively. I see no value, & a lot of harm, in forcing regulation before it's developmentally appropriate.
Plus, IME, if you have enough curiosity, you end up regulating yourself in ways that are nearly impossible for a task you're not into. So it all comes back to curiosity.
The other thing that'd be nice - but is not essential - to see in incoming freshmen is an accurate sense of what college is for. Most people are pretty madly and deeply misinformed on that, and that's harming kids.
Too many kids come to college bc they're told it's necessary, or bc it's the only way to a decent job. Both are lies. They should come, when they're ready, because it's the best way to achieve next-level critical thought specific to one or more disciplines.
So we're back to curiosity again. But the reading part is at least as important, & is interrelated. I'm not an expert on instilling curiosity or encouraging reading in k-12. But I'm damn sure standardized testing isn't the answer & neither is traditional, required homework.
I'm pretty certain, too, that seven hours of mostly sitting still and listening isn't terribly useful (and at the elementary level it's downright cruel).
I don't think anything I've said here is earth-shattering. Yet the conventional wisdom about what makes public k-12 education "good" is soooooo far off the mark.
If I cld fantasize ab what I'd like my future students to have done before college, it'd be this: read & write every day, a variety of texts; interact in a sustained way w lots of different ppl; & practice creative problem-solving in small groups, guided by knowledgeable adults.
That's something public schools *could* do, they just don't, because it's not what the public wants. Even the private schools that do some of that are usually pretty notoriously bad at exposing students to people different from themselves.
I've taught everyone from super-elite Ivy students from private high schools to the kids struggling to stay in CUNY after k-12 in troubled NYC publics. They were ALL missing out in different ways. The best students are always, always the readers.
The best of the best I've ever taught have been readers from backgrounds that happened, for whatever reasons, to expose them to a wide variety of circumstances.
School is almost never what brought those students either of those advantages.
But it could be."
kateantonova highered highereducation colleges universities education curiosity learning purpose 2018 cognition problemsolving creativity lcproject openstudioproject sfsh tcsnmy cv k12 statistics calculus reading howwelearn howweteach highschool publicschools schools schooling children adolescence diversity exposure
may 2018 by robertogreco
World'sSmartestGman on Twitter: "Imagine thinking taking the most inquisitive creature in the world, human children, and putting them into a prison with nothing but punishment to enforce learning and wondering why they don't"
"Imagine thinking taking the most inquisitive creature in the world, human children, and putting them into a prison with nothing but punishment to enforce learning and wondering why they don't
Have you ever met a child that hasn't been to public school yet, or been raised by telescreens? They want to know everything. You don't have to try to get them to learn
If you have a kid, everything you do is a chance to teach. When you're cooking dinner, there's physics, botany, history, chemistry, metallurgy, anything. Encourage them to ask questions.
"What if he/she needs to learn something that I don't?"
If it's important to know, why don't you know it? If you have trouble with it, get a book for them, and read through it so you understand it better too.
Involve your kids in everything. Teach them how to be safe around dangerous tools, then gradually let them learn to use them. Have books about everything. They'll read them.
If your kid brings you a rock, or a stick, or a bug, learn about that thing, whatever's appropriate for their age and knowledge. "This is a branch from a tree" or "This is from an Elm tree" or "This is Ulmus laevis"
We live in a miraculous time, where the monopoly on information is broken, where texts can be copied infinitely and effortless and knowledge is trivial to communicate. Schools are stone age, comparatively.
We're so prosperous that people all over take their free time to put information about their areas of expertise online for anyone to see, for free. We should rejoice at our fortune.
You can ask questions on any topic of millions of experts on anything, from your kitchen, and they'll answer, for free. To squander this resources and waste a childhood in govt school is a sin.
It would be like sending your kid to carry water home all day, when you have a faucet in your house. That's what govt schooling is like in the age of free information.
I'm not saying it isn't challenging, but you're also losing a tremendous amount of challenges associated with 12 years of govt schooling that you are taking for granted.
And more than anything, it's your child. They trust their parents. Govt school teachers them to trust whatever rando in whatever school you are forced into because of your street address.
When you're wrong, you can tell them, and explain why. When the rando teacher's wrong, they have to learn the wrong thing or be punished.
You also have friends and family, who are smart and good at stuff. When you're socializing, they're still learning. If your brother's a mechanic, they'll ask him mechanical questions.
We're so conditioned to think of learning as structured, formal, teaching, education, at school, because people are getting paid off it. But it happens all the time, naturally.
Some things are better taught sitting down, like reading and maths, but once those are mostly out of the way, a lot of things can be taught in situ.
Even sports and games are teaching. Trigonometry, statistics, history, biology, sociology, culture. We don't think of things as teaching because we're used to kids hating learning, because learning is punishment in govt schools.
When you go to the park, history, botany, biology, geology. When you go to the library, art, architecture, English, history, chemistry. When you go to the grocery store, botany, history, chemistry, sociology, economics.
Most of the people I interact with on here, I can tell have the joy of learning and knowledge in their hearts. That's all you need. If you never had it, because of govt school, find it, it's wonderful.
Because if you have the joy and love of learning and knowledge in your own heart, it will flow out to everyone around you, especially if you have children."
unschooling education deschooling homeschool learning children parenting schooling schools howwelearn howweteach teaching schooliness internet web online curiosity childhood publicschools 2018
Article: Notes On An Anarchist Pedagogy – AnarchistStudies.Blog
"But, at this particularly dark moment in our nation's history, I feel the need to act inside the classroom in a manner that more readily and visibly embodies the important and insightful critiques and guideposts of critical pedagogy,[2] perhaps in a manner, inspired by Graeber and Haworth, that rejects and abandons (education) policy, and more demonstratively and communally embraces the liberatory and transformative power of education itself, free from the bondage of neoliberalism.
Early on in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber offers us: "against policy (a tiny manifesto)". Graeber tells us:
The notion of "policy" presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. "Policy" is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.
(2004: 9)
And, as the people I have identified in these notes thus far all document, policy (education reform) is little more than a "governing apparatus which imposes its will" on teachers, students, administrators, and entire communities with high stakes testing, the deskilling of teachers, the cuts to and diversion of funding for public education, and the imposition of the corporate model to direct and control all "outcomes". And, following Graeber's pushback to "policy", I want to enact, to whatever degree possible, "an anarchist pedagogy" to acknowledge, confront and overcome the very dominating and authoritarian dynamics at work in the classroom today from kindergarten right on through to graduate school.
I want to evoke and provoke the issue of anarchy as a counterforce and impulse to the "governing apparatus which imposes its will on others". I want to engage education as the practice of freedom methodologically, and not just ideologically (of course, I would agree that a genuine embracing of education as the practice of freedom ideologically would axiomatically mean to embrace it methodologically as well – as I believe Paulo Freire and bell hooks demonstrate, and many others also successfully participate in such engaged pedagogy).
But for my musings here, I want to consider enacting freedom directly and in totality throughout the classroom. This is the case, in part, because I want to challenge myself, and to some degree many of my colleagues, to once again consider and reconsider how we "are" in the classroom, living and embodying education as the practice of freedom, and, in part, to accept the need to acknowledge, confront and address the reality that we "operate", however critically, within the very "governing apparatus which imposes its will". As a result, I am, for the sake of these notes, forcing myself to fully embrace freedom, and, to whatever degree possible, attempting to reimagine and recomport myself toward promoting education as the practice of freedom.
As good a "critical" pedagogue as I believe I am and have been, for me these notes are a call to identify my beliefs, habits and pedagogy, not unlike Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy were for him. These notes are a consideration of how I embrace and enact those beliefs, habits and pedagogy, and represent a challenge to improve upon my pedagogy. I have decided that rethinking my own pedagogy in light of an anarchist pedagogy might prove the most challenging, informative and constructive mediation on pedagogy I could contemplate and enact at this moment."
"As many of us directly involved in the "field of education" (working as teachers and administrators from kindergarten through twelfth-grade, or those working in schools of education and on various education initiatives and in policy think-tanks) have witnessed (and sometimes promote and/or confront), there is much emphasis on a "best practice" approach and on "evidence-based" support for said practices. As a result, so much of education research and teaching is "data-driven", even when the data is suspect (or just wrong). And, still more harmful, there exists a prejudice against "theory" and against a theoretical approach to teaching within a social/political/cultural context that emphasizes other aspects and dimensions of teaching and learning (such as the history and legacy of racism, sexism, class elitism, homophobia and biases against those with abilities and disabilities that render them "problematic" or outside the mainstream of education concern). All of this leads to an obsession with "information", to the detriment of teaching and learning (see Scapp 2016b: Chapters 5 and 6). We also wind up with no vision or mission – education becomes little more than a "jobs preparatory program" and a competition in the market place. This is what leads us to the litany of reform programs (from the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" to Obama's "Race to the Top", never mind the practically innumerable local initiatives attempting to "fix" education). The results are proving disastrous for all.
At the same time, even though someone may employ a theoretical stance and perspective, this doesn't guarantee a successful classroom dynamic. We need to remember that how we are (a concern of these notes from the very start) is just as important as what we are presenting, and even why. We need to establish trustworthiness and a sense that students have the freedom to explore, challenge, work together, and even be wrong. Of course, I recognize that the classroom dynamics will look different in elementary school than in a graduate seminar, but for the sake of this meditation on pedagogy, I would like to posit that while acknowledging the differences that exist at different levels of instruction, the essential character of "education as the practice of freedom" ought to be manifest at every level, and at every turn. The hard and important work of good teaching is helping to create and establish that freedom."
"There is a long tradition of attempting to create such an "other space". Feminist pedagogy has argued for and provided such other spaces, at times at grave personal and professional cost (denial of tenure, promotion, as well as ridicule). So too have disciplines and perspectives as diverse as Ethnic Studies and Queer Studies, and Environmental Studies and Performance Studies offered challenges to the constrictive traditional learning environment (space) and also offered new possibilities of reconfiguring those spaces (in and outside the classroom). In his essay "Spaces of Learning: The Anarchist Free Skool", Jeffery Shantz rightly notes that:
Social theorist Michel Foucault used the occasion of his 1967 lecture, "Of Other Spaces", to introduce a term that would remain generally overlooked with his expansive body of work, the notion of "heterotopia", by which he meant a countersite or alternative space, something of an actually existing utopia. In contrast to the nowhere lands of utopias, heterotopias are located in the here-and-now of present-day reality, though they challenge and subvert that reality. The heterotopias are spaces of difference. Among the examples Foucault noted were sacred and forbidden spaces which are sites of personal transition.
(in Haworth 2012: 124)
It is precisely this effort to help create another kind of space, a "heterotopia", that leads me to disrupt the distribution of the syllabus as the first gesture of the semester, and to solicit and elicit contributions and participation from the class toward this end.
Part of the reason that complying with the "syllabus-edict" is problematic is that it fully initiates and substantiates "the banking system" of teaching that Paulo Freire so astutely identified and named, and so thoughtfully and thoroughly criticized (as oppressive). Participating in the automatic act of handing out the syllabus (hardcopy or electronic) constitutes the very first "deposit" within the banking system, and renders students passive from the very start: "This is what you will need to know!". So, the very modest and simple gesture of not distributing the syllabus initiates instead the very first activity for the entire class, specifically, a discussion of what the class will be.
Of course, such a stance, such a gesture, doesn't mean that I would not have thought through the course beforehand. Certainly, I envision a course that would be meaningful and connected to their program of study. But, what I do not do is "decide" everything in advance, and leave no room for input, suggestions and contributions to the syllabus that we create, to enhance the course we create. This offers students a (new?) way of interacting in the class, with each other and the teacher, a way of engaging in social and educative interactions that are mutual and dialogic from the very start. As Shantz claims:
Anarchist pedagogy aims toward developing and encouraging new forms of socialization, social interaction, and the sharing of ideas in ways that might initiate and sustain nonauthoritarian practices and ways of relating.
I am claiming that the simple and modest gesture of extending a welcome to participate goes a long way "toward developing and encouraging new forms" of teaching and learning, new forms of mutual and dialogic interaction that are both respectful of the subject matter and of the students, and, if successful, does create the very "heterotopia" Foucault and Shantz describe.
I also ask students about the ways we might be able to evaluate their work and the course itself, evaluate the success of the teaching and learning, and my ability to help facilitate successful teaching and learning. The results vary, but students always come up with interesting and innovative ways to evaluate and … [more]
pedagogy anarchism anarchy deschooling decolonization unschooling learning teaching bellhooks ronscapp paulofreire freedom liberation neoliberalism capitalism lucynicholas postmodernism michaelapple angeladavis henrygiroux roberthaworth descartes stanleyaronowitz stephenball pierrebourdieu randallamster abrahamdeleon luisfernandez anthonynocella education dericshannon richarkahn deleuze&guattari gillesdeleuze michelfoucault foucault davidgraeber jürgenhabermas justinmuller alanantliff kennethsaltman davidgabbard petermclaren alexmolnar irashor joelspring gayatrichakravortyspivak colonialism highereducation highered cademia politics 2018 resistance corporatization betsydevos policy authority authoritarianism howweteach government governance colonization homeschool power control coercion félixguattari conformity uniformity standardization standards syllabus heterotopia lcproject openstudioproject tcsnmy sfsh cv utopia collaboration evaluation feminism inclusion inclusivity participation participatory mutu
The Push for Outdoor and Nature-Based Preschools - The Atlantic
play outdoors preschool education schools schooling academics learning howwelearn nature richardlouv children kids 2018 conorwilliams forestkindergartens kindergarten forests nclb rttt freedom unschooling deschooling unstructured creativity reggioemilia waldorf montessori pedagogy howweteach teaching health alternative childcare sustainability
Fred Moten's Radical Critique of the Present | The New Yorker
"He is drawn to in-between states: rather than accepting straightforward answers, he seeks out new dissonances."
""I like to read, and I like to be involved in reading," he said. "And for me, writing is part of what it is to be involved in reading.""
"For Moten, blackness is something "fugitive," as he puts it—an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. In "Stolen Life," he writes, "Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It's a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument." In this spirit, Moten works to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation. One also finds a certain uncompromising attitude—a conviction that the truest engagement with a subject will overcome any difficulties of terminology. "I think that writing in general, you know, is a constant disruption of the means of semantic production, all the time," he told me. "And I don't see any reason to try to avoid that. I'd rather see a reason to try to accentuate that. But I try to accentuate that not in the interest of obfuscation but in the interest of precision.""
""The Undercommons" lays out a radical critique of the present. Hope, they write, "has been deployed against us in ever more perverted and reduced form by the Clinton-Obama axis for much of the last twenty years." One essay considers our lives as a flawed system of credit and debit, another explores a kind of technocratic coercion that Moten and Harney simply call "policy." "The Undercommons" has become well known, especially, for its criticism of academia. "It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment," Moten and Harney write. They lament the focus on grading and other deadening forms of regulation, asking, in effect: Why is it so hard to have new discussions in a place that is ostensibly designed to foster them?
They suggest alternatives: to gather with friends and talk about whatever you want to talk about, to have a barbecue or a dance—all forms of unrestricted sociality that they slyly call "study.""
"Moten's poetry, which was a finalist for a National Book Award, in 2014, has a good deal in common with his critical work. In it, he gathers the sources running through his head and transforms them into something musical, driven by the material of language itself. "
"And he's still trying to figure out how to teach a good class, he said. He wasn't sure that it was possible under the current conditions. "You just have to get together with people and try to do something different," he said. "You know, I really believe that. But I also recognize how truly difficult that is to do.""
2018 fredmoten davidwallace poetry fugitivity betweenness liminality dissonance reading howweread fugitives blackness undercommons education highereducation highered stefanoharney sociality study learning howwelearn unschooling deschooling teaching howweteach pedagogy criticalpedagogy grades grading conversation discussion
An Upsurge of Questioning and Critique: toward a Community of Critical Pedagogy
"There has been, of late, a lot of talk about centers of teaching and learning, digital innovation centers, and efforts to grapple with the emergent nature of the educational profession and practice. Academics of a certain shade are padding down desire lines toward a future where learning and progressive digital education might leave its paddock and find its space upon the wider pasture of higher education. Many of these efforts, though, look and feel like paddocks themselves, circumscribed around professionalism, administrative power or vision, closed by the choice of their constituency even in their testament of openness.
If leaders choose groups of leaders, if those groups publish upon their pedigree in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Times Higher Ed, &c, then they will be hard put to magnify their purpose through an allegiance with education's lesser privileged: students, adjuncts, "drop outs," instructional designers—those without access, without committees, without the funding to network, without the key cards necessary to open certain doors. Change kept at high levels—change which doesn't include, but makes obsequious gestures towards, those who lack the privilege to debate change—cannot be productive except to elevate higher the privileged and further disenchant those who most need change to occur.
Change, in other words, cannot be accomplished with a coffee klatsch, no matter how well-funded by a Mellon grant.
Maxine Greene writes that conscientization—that critical consciousness that alerts us to our agency, and that spurs us to intervene in the world—to make change— "is only available to those capable of reflecting on their own situationality" (102). If we find ourselves finally capable of that reflection only when or if we clear a certain pay band, or are granted a certain title, or are invited into the right rooms (rooms too often unlocked by respectability politics), then what of those who remain outside those rooms, who cannot—or refuse to—participate in respectability, those without the titles, those underpaid?
Doesn't leadership in education also include the adjunct who offers their time to an online community college student? Doesn't leadership include a student who conscientiously objects to Turnitin? If leadership in education has to include a 3D printer, an Oculus Rift, a budget to hold "summits" and attend conferences, then I fear there are too many leaders being left out.
Quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Greene writes:
Praxis cannot be the viewed as the project of any single individual. Rather, it is "the cluster of relations of an ideology, a technique, and a movement of productive forces, each involving the others and receiving support from them, each, in its time, playing a directive role that is never exclusive, and all, together, producing a qualified phase of social development." (99)
In other words, change requires movement across many lives, the weaving together of multiple and unexpected intelligences, and a radical inclusivity that is bound to make uncomfortable those who issue the call, that disrupts the disruptors, that leaves humbled leadership. It's not that a community formed around inclusion must aim to unsettle and unseat, but rather that the myriad diversity that answers the call will necessarily yield the unexpected. A multitude will never be of a single mind; but it is a multitude, by Merleau-Ponty's accounting, which is the only means toward change.
Similarly, Jesse Stommel has written about critical digital pedagogy, that praxis:
must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;
will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices.
Cultivating these many voices to realize a praxis is an ongoing project. I wrote recently to a friend affected by the recent UCU strike in England:
There are times when a critical pedagogy refuses to be merely theoretical. It is a tradition that comes out of a concern for labor, for the agency of those doing labor, and the perspicacity inherent behind that agency. The imagination is not an impractical facility at all, not a dreamer's tool only, but a precision instrument that delivers a certainty that things can be otherwise; and in the face of circumstances that are unfair, the imagination gives us insight into what is just.
Similarly, though, the imagination asks us to consider justice an evolutionary project, if not an asymptote we will never quite reach, a process more than a destination. "The role of the imagination," Greene tells us, "is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinary unseen, unheard, and unexpected." Each new dialogue around justice leads to new insights, new confrontations, new inventions, and each new dialogue necessarily also uncovers old hurts, systemic injustices, and offenses nested within un-inspected assumptions and behaviors.
It is with this in mind that I find myself so often blinking into a teacher's or administrator's assertions about grading, or plagiarism, or taking attendance, or just "making sure they do it." There are undetected injustices riding under our teaching policies, the teaching we received, and the teaching we deliver.
There are likewise injustices riding under so many attempts to gather in our circles of prestige. To enact a just agency, we must step outside those circles into unexpected places. "An upsurge of questioning and critique must first occur," Greene insists, "experiences of shock are necessary if the limits or the horizons are to be breached" (101)."
"It's my belief that the Lab must be a place where a cacophony of voices can be heard, where an upsurge of questioning and critique is the mode of the day. And to make this happen, no door is left unopened. If praxis "signifies a thinking about and an action on reality" (98), then Digital Pedagogy Lab seeks to be praxis, and to make change through the movement of productive forces, new insights, new confrontations, new inventions. All gathered together in matching tee-shirts."
seanmichaelmorris criticalpedagogy lcproject openstudioproject pedagogy inclusivity 2018 digitalpedagogylab mauricemerleau-ponty maxinegreene jessestommel praxis inclusion justice vision administration hierarchy injustice professionalism power openness open teaching learning howweteach howwelearn privilege change respectabilitypolitics respectability conferences labs ideology diversity highered highereducation academia education
Blog—Jarrett Fuller — The Soul-Crushing Student Essay
"I taught a writing class for the first time this semester and it was easily the hardest course I've ever taught. My experience tracks pretty closely to Korb's story. It was hard to get students to contribute, to discuss readings, to bring their own thoughts into the texts we'd read together. Even though I ranted against the five-paragraph essay on the first class, and presented on why we'd be dismantling that form to use for our own purposes, I referred to it only as a problem of structure, not of content. I hadn't connected that only does that format inhibit new styles and structures of writing but also how much of yourself is brought into it. I wish I had read this at the beginning of the semester instead of the end. I have all sorts of ideas for the next time."
jarrettfuller 2018 fiveparagraphessays structure form writing teaching howweteach content style teachingwriting education
Taeyoon Choi on drawing, teaching, disability, and the difference between work and project – The Creative Independent
"I think the common mistake of a beginner teacher is giving too much: too much preparation and too much energy, too much love. They end up feeling burned out easily.
I try to limit how much I prepare and leave room for students to fill that. I've had good success with that recently. Also, I think teachers are often exhausted even before the class begins simply because of mental anxiety. Before class, I try to sleep well, eat a good meal, and be energetic.
Acknowledging that I'm not an expert always really helped me as well. I don't have answers for many student questions, especially technical questions. Conceptual questions can be confusing too. Sometimes it's good to say something like, "I don't know, I'm sorry. Let's look at it together." This relieves a lot of burden from your shoulders.
I learn best when I see a teacher working on a problem. If you have a code problem, you're stuck, and you have an error, what do you do? You open up Stack Overflow. How do you search it? How do you fix things? Learning how to work through a problem is way more important than doing it the "right way." I try to teach the emotional roller coaster of coding, which is similar to the experience of working on art and having breakthrough moments.
There are many different kinds of teaching. It depends on context. For SFPC, we select students so that we can collaborate with them. The focus is finding and building a community we are excited about. When I teach elsewhere, sometimes it's more technical and transactional. I think that's fine; schools have different goals.
Lately I'm trying to focus on supporting future teachers. I think I'm quite good at helping people teach. I taught a class at NYU called "Teaching as Art" and want to do more of that.
I teach because I want to be a student. I still go to classes a lot. Right now I'm learning American Sign Language, which is completely changing everything. I also do yoga. My yoga teacher is an amazing teacher: very generous and supportive. My teacher also takes other teachers' classes. I think reciprocity is about always learning and respecting another. That's the only way you could actually offer something."
taeyoonchoi teaching howweteach learning interestedness interestingness 2017 pedagogy cv unschooling deschooling howwelearn education disability sfpc schoolforpoeticcomputation
Are.na / block added by kmd k
"I'm distrustful of content-based pedagogy because I'm distrustful of any desire to reproduce identity, to make more of the same. I think pedagogy that seeks to reproduce little versions of the teacher is as suspect as parenting that seeks to reproduce little versions of the parent.
I think that good teaching, like good parenting, demands helping a younger person articulate their best self and understand themselves in relation to the world; it can't do that by determining for a student who they are or what they need to be.
My approach to pedagogy is equally rooted in philosophy and in pragmatism. In my experience, you just can't make people think or be what they don't want to think or be, or what they're not ready to think or be. You can point people in a certain direction; but if they don't want to run with you, they'll just be gazing vaguely in that direction while you sprint off towards the sunset.
It is inevitably the case that in a class with 6 or 12 or 40 students, only a few will share your investments and interests. It can be more or less depending on context and institution, but as a teacher you always have to be prepared for the possibility that you walk into a room and not a single student in there gives a shit about what you have to say. What do you do with those students? How do you serve those students? I absolutely reject the idea of just writing students off. I think if you're going to stand in front of someone for 45 minutes and tell them what to do, you have to either bring in something they can find a way into or have the excuse of a prescribed curriculum. Nothing else will do.
This is why I consider my job to help students learn how to think whatever they're thinking, rather than telling them what to think. I would love if my students learned about socialism or psychoanalysis or Spinoza from me; I would love it if they came out of the closet after I teach Sedgwick or whatever. But that's not always going to happen, and it's never going to happen with every student. Unless I am in a position to vet or choose each student individually - and unless each student is also in a position to leave my class - I don't consider it ethical to demand students think or know in a particular way, in part because I know people can't always overcome the modes of thinking they've internalized without a lot of work. I've never taught a graduate seminar, but if I could teach, say, a grad seminar on Spinoza and interview each potential student for 20 minutes first to see if they could hack it, that would be one thing. But if I'm walking into a room full of undergrads or high schoolers, some or all of whom don't want to be there, I have to be able to offer them tools and concepts that don't demand allegiance to a specific content or ideology.
-Fuck Theory Tinyletter"
content pedagogy education unschooling learning identity teaching howweteach colonization pragmatism philosophy deschooling experience curriculum spinoza ethics thinking criticalthinking ideology
Isis Lecture (Lecture given at the Oxford Literary festival in 2003 ) - Philip Pullman
[from this page: http://www.philip-pullman.com/writings
"This was the first extended piece I wrote about education. I wanted to say what I thought had gone wrong with it, and suggest some better ways of doing things. The lecture was given during the Oxford Literary Festival in 2003."]
"I'm going to talk about culture this afternoon, in the widest sense; about education and the arts, especially literature. It's my contention that something has gone bad, something has gone wrong in the state of education, and that we can see this very clearly in the way schools deal with books, and reading, and writing – with everything that has to do with literature, and the making of it. When more and more good teachers are leaving the profession in disillusion and disappointment; when the most able undergraduates are taking one look at a career in teaching, and deciding that it offers no scope for their talents, and turning away to do something else; when school headships are proving harder and harder to fill – then we're doing something wrong.
I think it boils down to this: that education now is suffused with the wrong emotion. Somehow, over the past quarter of a century, ever since James Callaghan's famous Great Debate speech, we have seen confidence leaking away, and something else slowly seeping in to take its place. What that something else is, I shall come to near the end. No doubt some of the confidence was misplaced; no doubt we needed a Great Debate. But I think the benefits that came from it have long since been exhausted. It's time for another way of doing things.
So first of all, I'm going to look at what's happening now, and I'm going right in to the glowing, radioactive core at the heart of the engine that drives the whole thing: the National Curriculum and the SATs. I won't spend too long on these things, but we do need to look at the actual stuff to get a flavour of the thought behind it, and this is what the Qualifications Curriculum Authority says about the Reading part of the English tests at Key Stage 2 – that means, in human language, at age 11.
They think that reading consists of using a range of strategies to decode, selecting, retrieving, deducing, inferring, interpreting, identifying and commenting on the structure and organisation of texts, identifying and commenting on the writer's purposes and viewpoints, relating texts to the social, cultural and historical contexts.
That's it. That's all. Nothing else. That's what they want children of 11 to do when they read. They don't seem to know that reading can also be enjoyed, because enjoyment just doesn't feature in the list of things you have to do.
Mind you, it's just as well that they don't have to enjoy it, because they're not likely to have a copy of the books anyway. In another unit of work – 46 pages, to get through in a fortnight – they are to study Narrative Structure. The work's built around two short stories and part of a novel. It's not expected – this is interesting – that the children will have their own copies of the complete texts, though some pages may be extracted and photocopied.
But the whole book doesn't matter very much either, because books exist in order to be taken apart and laid out in pieces like Lego. One of the things the children have to do in this unit of work is to make a class list of "the features of a good story opening." This is where it stops being merely tedious, and starts being mendacious as well. The teacher is asked to model the writing of an alternative first paragraph for one of the stories. The instructions say "Read through the finished writing together. Check this against the criteria for a good opening – does it fulfil all of these?"
I can't say it clearly enough: this is not how it works. Writing doesn't happen like this. What does happen like this is those Hollywood story-structure courses, where there are seven rules for this, and five principles of that, and eight bullet-points to check when constructing the second-act climax. You cannot write a good story by building up a list of effective openings. It is telling children a lie to say that this is the way you write stories. Apart from anything else, it's profoundly vulgar.
Then there is the Reading Journal, which children have to keep. Among other things, they have to:
List the words and phrases used to create an atmosphere
Write a fifty word summary of a whole plot
Pick a descriptive word from the text and, using a thesaurus, write down five synonyms and antonyms for that word
And so on. What concerns me here is the relationship this sets up between child and book, between children and stories. Stories are written to beguile, to entertain, to amuse, to move, to enchant, to horrify, to delight, to anger, to make us wonder. They are not written so that we can make a fifty word summary of the whole plot, or find five synonyms for the descriptive words. That sort of thing would make you hate reading, and turn away from such a futile activity with disgust. In the words of Ruskin, it's "slaves' work, unredeemed."
Those who design this sort of thing seem to have completely forgotten the true purpose of literature, the everyday, humble, generous intention that lies behind every book, every story, every poem: to delight or to console, to help us enjoy life or endure it. That's the true reason we should be giving books to children. The false reason is to make them analyse, review, comment and so on.
But they have to do it – day in, day out, hour after hour, this wretched system nags and pesters and buzzes at them, like a great bluebottle laden with pestilence. And then all the children have to do a test; and that's when things get worse."
"So said Ruskin in 1853. Again, we didn't listen. Ruskin went on to point out that when you do trust people to act for themselves, they are free to make mistakes, to blunder and fail; but there is the possibility of majesty too. Do we want human beings teaching our children, with all their faults and follies and limitations, but with all their depth and grandeur as well? Or do we want managers, who are glib and fluent in the language of audits and targets and performance indicators and mission statements, but who are baffled by true originality, who flinch and draw back from it as if it were deadly poison?
The extraordinary thing is that they are the same people. They could all be free, if they chose. Some of the young people who come into teaching may be timid and narrow-minded, but don't think for a moment that I think that they're not capable of courage and curiosity. They've never had a chance to show it; their teachers are afraid themselves. Marilyn Mottram of the University of Central England in Birmingham, who has been studying the way the National Curriculum and the Literacy Strategy work in schools, wrote to me last month: "When I work with teachers on developing ways of using texts I'm frequently asked '… but are we allowed to do that?' This sort of continuing anxiety about literacy teaching," she goes on, "suggests that a culture of conformity has been quite securely established among our primary teachers and, like many others, I find this deeply disturbing."
These young people are tigers born in cages, and kept caged until they think that being caged is a natural condition; and they look down at themselves, and they see their magnificent stripes, and the only way they can understand them is to think that they themselves must be made of bars: they are their own cage; they dare not move outside the little space they occupy. But they are tigers still, if only they knew."
"So here are five steps we should take, starting right now.
Do away with these incessant tests; they only tell you things you don't need to know, and make the children do things they don't need to do.
Abolish the league tables, which are an abomination.
Cut class sizes in every school in the country. No child should ever be in a class bigger than twenty.
Make teaching a profession that the most gifted, the most imaginative, the most well-informed people will clamour to join; and make the job so rewarding that none of them will
want to stop teaching until they drop.
Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be something intrinsically worth doing.
If we do those five things, we will not bring about a golden age, or an earthly paradise; there are more things wrong with the world than we can cure by changing a system of schooling. But if we get education right, it would show that we were being serious about living and thinking and understanding ourselves; it would show that we were paying our children the compliment of assuming that they were serious too; and it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time …""
philippullman education canon teaching writing howwelearn howweread howweteach howwewrite reading literature management unschooling deschooling schooliness schooling policy curriculum culture society meaning johnruskin learning schools pedagogy literacy purpose life living pleasure via:derek storytelling stories fear intrinsicmotivation children self-esteem self-confidence language communication time slow results accountability measurement testing standardizedtesting standardization 2003
What You Missed That Day You Were Absent From Fourth Grade, by Brad Aaron Modlin
"Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather's
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something."
poems poetry schools schooling unschooling education learning teaching howweteach howwelearn bradmodlin via:agentdana
Carol Black on Twitter: "THREAD Brief tutorial in why innovations in institutional education always "fail.""
"THREAD
Brief tutorial in why innovations in institutional education always "fail."
2. First ask yourself: Why does the existing education system consistently fail a large percentage of kids?
(Aside from the obvious issues of poverty, inequity, racism, trauma.)
3. The existing system fails because one size does not fit all. One size will never fit all. There is nothing that you can do on this earth that will work for everybody.
4. The existing public system fails the kids who don't fit the demands of the existing system. Kids who are too high-energy, too independent, too creative, too introverted, too extraverted, too rebellious.
5. So you work, and work, and make changes to the system. You open it up, you make it accommodate students who are more high-energy, more independent, more creative.
6. And it still fails for a large percentage of kids. Maybe a slightly smaller percentage. Maybe a slightly larger percentage. But it still fails for a lot of kids.
7. Because one size does not fit all. One size will never fit all. There is nothing that you can do on this earth that will work for everybody.
8. So you say, "We need to get back to basics! What kids need is high expectations! None of this "progressive" nonsense! What kids need is direct instruction and accountability!"
9. So you work, and work, and make changes to the system. You create lengthy lists of standards, you identify the knowledge and skills that kids need to master, you test them to make sure they're mastering those skills.
10. And it still fails for a large percentage of kids. Maybe a slightly smaller percentage. Maybe a slightly larger percentage. But it still fails for a lot of kids.
11. Because one size does not fit all. One size will never fit all. There is nothing that you can do on this earth that will work for everybody.
12. So you say, both of these models are too extreme! What we need is a balanced education that has some freedom of choice but also a rich curriculum with high standards!
13. So you work, and you work, and make changes to the system. You come up with project-based models, you have "genius hour" on Fridays, but you also have a full standards-based system with testing and accountability.
16. So here's an idea: maybe we need to stop trying to find the One Best Way of Educating All Children.
Maybe we need to recognize that children are different, they will always be different, and it's a good thing that they're different.
17. Maybe we need to recognize that the child who will grow up to be a jet pilot, and the child who will be a poet, and the child who will be a chef in a fast-paced restaurant, and the child who will be a forest ranger, and the child who will be a research scientist +
18. + and the child who will be a finish carpenter, and the child who will be a software engineer, and the child who will be a kindergarten teacher, and the child who will be a firefighter, are really different children, and they may need different approaches to education.
19. They need different amounts of social stimulation and quiet time. Different amounts of freedom to explore and structured instruction. Different amounts of feedback and independence. Different amounts of hands-on and text-based learning. Different tools. Different paths.
20. Maybe one child will blossom in a quiet, calm, formal education environment. One child will blossom in a noisy, open, makerspace environment. One child will blossom in an outdoor, nature-based environment. One child will blossom in a democratic free school.
21. One child will blossom by homeschooling or unschooling and apprenticeships in the wider community. One child will blossom with a combination of these.
22. And before you say it's not possible to provide all those options, I'd like to point out that it might be more cost-effective to provide a stable array of options in every community than it is to overhaul and "reform" the whole system from decade to decade.
23. (Might not be as profitable for Pearson, though!) 🤔
24. But that's just the cost in money. The cost in children's lives when a child is stuck for twelve years in an educational environment they simply can't thrive in –– when a child fails, day after day after day, year after year after year — it's unfathomable.
Because people are different, people will always be different, and it's a good thing that they're different.
26. When can we start looking at education this way?"
[Also here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/975766319600615424.html ]
carolblack education sfsh tcsnmy lcproject openstudioproject onesizefitsall unschooling deschooling diversity options learning children howwelearn howweteach schools schooling edreform
Sean Michael Morris on Twitter: "It's not pragmatic now to think that on-campus and online college experiences can remain separate, in terms of quality but especially in terms of ideology. #digped"
"It's not pragmatic now to think that on-campus and online college experiences can remain separate, in terms of quality but especially in terms of ideology. #digped
We have long framed online learning as inclined toward rudiments, toward direct instruction, toward autonomy, whereas campus learning is framed as intimate, nuanced, communal.
But if online learning is more rudimentary, less nuanced, personal, complex than campus learning, it betrays an implicit assumption that so are online students less.
In program after program, online classes are restricted to courses that rely more entirely on content than on invention and inquiry. The most interesting classes are kept on campus.
When we omit seminar classes or dialectical teaching and learning from online course offerings, we create an inequity. When we think of online learning as instrumental and not intrinsically valuable, we create an inequity.
Online students are students like on-campus students. Just as curious, just as hopeful, just as genius, just as troubled, just as excited and unsure. Do our online courses actually accommodate them?
Do online courses accommodate students at all? Or do they cater primarily to an ideology of efficiency, retention, "student success", and numbers which institutions can report?
Increasingly, the importance of _who students are_ is coming into greater relief. Identity is at the center of education. It is the student's mind, not the institution's competitive aspirations, that needs attention.
Likewise, teaching must remain a work of self-actualization (a la @bellhooks). When we take our teaching online, do we feel as interested, as invested, as challenged, as engaged, as when we teach on campus?
Have we created an online learning which has self-actualization at its core? What is the goal of online learning? Inclusion? Access? Efficiency? Increased enrollment?
We must look straight at the online learning we've created and that we sustain and ask: is it education we are providing? Education with all its texture and nuance and abruptness and creativity.
If the current form of online learning, once we inspect it, doesn't measure up as parallel in value to on-campus learning, we just take it upon ourselves to revise it, to refuse what is inequitable and imagine something different.
This, and more, is the work I hope to do at @umwdtlt with @Jessifer, that @amcollier and I were after at @Middlebury. It's what @DigPedLab is for. But this work needs all the voices and collaborators possible. Are you in?"
seanmichaelmorris digitalpedagogy criticalpedagogy education highered highereducation online college universities howweteach bellhooks accessibility inclusion inclusivity efficiency creativity equity
How to Ungrade | Jesse Stommel
""I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning."
~ Cathy N. Davidson
The work of teaching shouldn't be reduced to the mechanical act of grading or marking. Our talk of grading shouldn't be reduced to our complaining about the continuing necessity of it.
If you're a teacher and you hate grading, stop doing it.
Across education, we've normalized absurd levels of grading, test-taking, and standardized assessment. And yet letter grades are a relatively recent phenomenon. They weren't widely used until the 1940s. In "Teaching More by Grading Less," Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner cite the first "official record" of a grading system from Yale in 1785. The A-F system appears to have emerged in 1898 (with the "E" not disappearing until the 1930s) and the 100-point or percentage scale became common in the early 1900s. According to Schinske and Tanner, even by 1971, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the U.S. were using letter grades. The desire for uniformity across institutions was the primary motivator for the spread of these systems.
As I was preparing to write this piece, I looked through the sections on grading from a dozen or so U.S. teaching and learning centers. What I noticed across the lot of them is how their language around grading emphasizes "efficiency" (the word repeated incessantly) while reducing individual students to cogs in a machine that ultimately seems to have little to do with them. The work of grading is framed less in terms of giving feedback or encouraging learning and more as a way of ranking students against one another. Nods to "fairness" are too often made for the sake of defensibility rather than equity. What disturbs me is how effortlessly and casually this language rolls off Education's collective tongue. And I'm even more disturbed by how many otherwise productive pedagogical conversations get sidetracked by the too easily internalized ubiquity of grades.
The page from the Berkeley Graduate Division offering "Tips on Grading Efficiently" is pretty standard fare. The very first bit of advice on grading for new graduate student instructors raises more anxiety around grades than it alleviates. And at the same time, as is all too common, grading is something new teachers are encouraged to spend as little time on as possible: "Too often, time spent grading takes away from time spent doing your own coursework or research."
Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept they have to be graded, students are made to feel like they should care a great deal about grades, and teachers are told they shouldn't spend much time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades. Obedience to a system of crude ranking is crafted to feel altruistic, because it's supposedly fair, saves time, and helps prepare students for the horrors of the "real world." Conscientious objection is made to seem impossible.
I've been leading workshops on grading for years, and when I talk about why I don't grade, I often hear back some version of, "but I have to grade" ... because I'm an adjunct ... because my institution requires it ... because grading is necessary in my discipline ... because wouldn't you want your heart surgeon to have been graded? The need to navigate institutional (and disciplinary) pressures is real, but I would argue teachers grade in many more situations than grading is useful and/or actually required by institutions. And, as I've said before, I care less that my doctors are graded and more that they've read all the books of Virginia Woolf or Octavia Butler, because critical thinking is what will help them save my life when they encounter a situation they've never encountered before.
Peter Elbow writes in "Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement," "Let's do as little ranking and grading as we can. They are never fair and they undermine learning and teaching." I believe pedagogy is personal and idiosyncratic. My approach won't necessarily work in each classroom, at every institution, for all teachers, with every group of students. My hope with this and my previous posts about grading is to challenge stock assumptions, describe what has worked for me, and explore alternatives that might just work for others."
jessestommel grades grading education schools teaching ranking 2018 standardization efficiency institutions sorting ungrading assessment learning howwelearn howweteach excuses process rubrics highered highereducation
On learned and leisurely hospitality by Ivan Illich (Gurteen Knowledge)
"Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship."
[from: "The Cultivation of Conspiracy" (1998)
http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1998_Illich-Conspiracy.PDF ]
hospitality friendship via:dougaldhine ivanillich conviviality howweteach howwelearn deschooling unschooling service learning being presence 1998
Teju Cole (@_tejucole) • Fotos y vídeos de Instagram
"ξενία (Xenia)
"guest-friendship"
The offer of shelter. The ritual washing of the guest. The offer of a meal. The care of the guest without demanding the name of the guest."
hospitality tejucole guests 2018 howweteach howwelearn deschooling unschooling service learning being presence
Teju Cole en Instagram: "⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ theoxenia ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Hospitality (xenia) towards the humble stranger (xenos) who turns out to be a god (theos). The concept is…"
"theoxenia
Hospitality (xenia) towards the humble stranger (xenos) who turns out to be a god (theos). The concept is later ritualized."
hospitality tejucole howweteach howwelearn deschooling unschooling service learning being presence
Teju Cole en Instagram: "⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Hospitality is political, and personal. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Repair a friendship. Start with one. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Begin today. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀"
"Hospitality is political, and personal. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Repair a friendship. Start with one. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Begin today."
tejucole hospitality friendship howweteach howwelearn deschooling unschooling service learning being presence audiencesofone
How to Build Castles in the Air – Teachers Going Gradeless
"One of the more profound ironies of "going gradeless" is realizing just how fundamental grades are to the architecture of schools.
Grades undergird nearly everything we do in education. By threatening late penalties and administering one-shot assessments, we focus our famously distracted students on the task at hand. By regularly updating our online gradebooks, we provide an ongoing snapshot of student performance so precise it can be calculated to the hundredths place.
Grades inform our curriculum and instruction too. Because so much rides on them, it's essential we build upon the rock of "objective" data, not the shifting sands of human judgment. Thus, we limit ourselves to those kinds of learning that can be easily measured and quantified. A multiple choice quiz testing students' knowledge of literary devices can be reliably scored by your 10-year-old daughter (not saying I've ever done that). A stack of bubble sheets can be scanned on your way out of the building for the summer. Check your results online in the driveway, then go inside and make yourself a margarita.
If you want to evaluate something more complex, like writing, you had better develop an iron-clad rubric and engage in some serious range-finding sessions with your colleagues. Don't put anything subjective like creativity or risk taking on that rubric — you're already on shaky ground as it is. Make sure to provide an especially strict template so that the essay is fully prepared to "meet its maker." Word choice, punctuation, sentence variety, quote incorporation — these are the nuts and bolts of writing. If the Hemingway Editor can't see it, isn't it just your opinion?
Hopefully, you see the irony here. Grades don't communicate achievement; most contain a vast idiosyncratic array of weights, curves, point values, and penalties. Nor do they motivate students much beyond what it takes to maintain a respectable GPA. And by forcing us to focus on so-called objective measures, grades have us trade that which is most meaningful for that which is merely demonstrable: recall, algorithm use, anything that can be reified into a rubric. Grading reforms have sometimes succeeded in making these numbers, levels, and letters more meaningful, but more often than not it is the learning that suffers, as we continually herd our rich, interconnected disciplines into the gradebook's endless succession of separate cells.
So, as I've said before, grades are not great. Nor are the ancillary tools, tests, structures, and strategies that support them. But as anyone who has gone gradeless can tell you, grades don't just magically go away, leaving us free to fan the flames of intrinsic motivation and student passion. Grades remain the very foundation on which we build. Most gradeless teachers must enter a grade at the end of each marking period and, even if we didn't, our whole educational enterprise is overshadowed by the specter of college admissions and scholarships. And since grades and tests rank so high in those determinations, we kid ourselves in thinking we've escaped their influence.
Even in a hypothetical environment without these extrinsic stresses, students are still subject to a myriad of influences, not the least of which being the tech industry with its constant bombardment of notifications and nudges. This industry, which spends billions engineering apps for maximum engagement, has already rendered the comparatively modest inducements of traditional schooling laughable. Still, the rhetoric of autonomy, passion, and engagement always seems to take this in stride, as if the Buddha — not billionaires — is behind this ever-expanding universe.
Let's go one more step further, though, and imagine a world without the tech industry. Surely that would be a world in which the "inner mounting flame" of student passion could flourish.
But complete freedom, autonomy, and agency is not a neutral or even acceptable foundation for education. The notion of a blank slate on which to continuously project one's passion, innovation, or genius is seriously flawed. Sherri Spelic, examining the related rhetoric of design thinking, points out how "neoliberal enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and start-up culture" does little to address "social dilemmas fueled by historic inequality and stratification." In other words, blank spaces — including the supposed blank space of going gradeless — are usually little more than blind spots. And often these blind spots are where our more marginalized students fall through the cracks.
Even if we were able provide widespread, equitable access to springboards of self-expression, autonomy, and innovation, what then? To what extent are we all unwittingly falling into a larger neoliberal trap that, in the words of Byung-Chul Han, turns each of us into an "auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise"?
Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint — indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectification and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.
One doesn't have to look too far to find the rhetoric of "harnessing student passion" and "self-regulated learners" to understand the paradoxical truth of this statement. This vision of education, in addition to constituting a new strategy of control, also undermines any sense of classrooms as communities of care and locations of resistance.
@hhschiaravalli:
A5. Watch out for our tendency to lionize those who peddle extreme personalization, individual passion, entrepreneurial mindsets. So many of these undermine any sense of collective identity, responsibility, solidarity #tg2chat
Clearly, not all intrinsic or extrinsic motivation is created equal. Perhaps instead of framing the issue in these terms, we should see it as a question of commitment or capitulation.
Commitment entails a robust willingness to construct change around what Gert Biesta describes as fundamental questions of "content, purpose, and relationship." It requires that we find ways to better communicate and support student learning, produce more equitable results, and, yes, sometimes shield students from outside influences. Contrary to the soaring rhetoric of intrinsic motivation, none of this will happen by itself.
Capitulation means shirking this responsibility, submerging it in the reductive comfort of numbers or in neoliberal notions of autonomy.
Framing going gradeless through the lens of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, then, is not only misleading and limited, it's harmful. No teacher — gradeless or otherwise — can avoid the task of finding humane ways to leverage each of these in the service of greater goals. Even if we could, there are other interests, much more powerful, much more entrenched, and much better funded than us always ready to rush into that vacuum.
To resist these forces, we will need to use everything in our power to find and imagine new structures and strategies, building our castles in air on firm foundations."
grades grading equity morivation intrinsicmotivation extrinsicmotivation measurement schools schooling learning howwelearn socialjustice neoliberalism arthurchiaravalli subjectivity objectivity systemsthinking education unschooling deschooling assessment accountability subjectification subjugation achievement optimization efficiency tests testing standardization control teaching howweteach 2018 resistance gertbiesta capitulation responsibility structure strategy pedagogy gpa ranking sherrispelic byung-chulhan compulsion constraint self-regulation passion identity solidarity personalization collectivism inequality
Raising Kings: A year of love and struggle at ron brown college prep : NPR
education restorativejustice washingtondc 2017 codeswitching codeswitch tolisten coryturner kavithacardoza suspension discipline schools highschool learning howweteach howwelearn schooltoprisonpipeline ronbrowncollegeprep patience
Julia E. Torres on Twitter: "Ask a 4th grader whether they truly "like" school, then listen to their responses. It's heartbreaking. Rather than dealing with it, we too often dismiss their comments. We say, "No kids like school--they just don't like being
"Ask a 4th grader whether they truly "like" school, then listen to their responses. It's heartbreaking. Rather than dealing with it, we too often dismiss their comments. We say, "No kids like school--they just don't like being told what to do". Avoidance + dismissal=no change"
children learning sfsh schools schooliness grades grading avoidance authoritarianism howweteach howwelearn unschooling deschooling 2018 juliatorres
Sisyphus on Twitter: ""Great literature wasn't written so that kids can learn about metaphors. Great lit is meant to rock your world, make you cry, and laugh. It's art, it's not fodder to be used to help you do better on a test." English teacher
"Great literature wasn't written so that kids can learn about metaphors. Great lit is meant to rock your world, make you cry, and laugh. It's art, it's not fodder to be used to help you do better on a test." —English teacher whose quitting teaching "because of all the BS."
education teaching howweteach literature reading howweread 2018 schools schooling schooliness metaphors sfsh
Michael Ian Black on Twitter: "Getting a lot of grief from teachers for my earlier take on k-12 education. I meant no offense to teachers, who I think, by and large, do their best. My criticisms have to do with the whole dang public education apparatus, w
"Getting a lot of grief from teachers for my earlier take on k-12 education. I meant no offense to teachers, who I think, by and large, do their best. My criticisms have to do with the whole dang public education apparatus, which feels hopelessly outmoded and moribund.
I advocate an new model of education which focuses on two things: creativity and critical thinking. That's it. All else would be in service of those two skills. Why? Because the history of public education has been about readying workers to work in predictable industries.
Those predictable industries no long exist or are undergoing radical transformation. What cuts across all industries in this new economy are creativity and critical thinking. If you have those two skills, you can do anything.
Those skills also happen to be the most fun things to work on. "Draw something." "What do you think about you drew?" We're not grading you, we're asking your opinion. What works about this? What doesn't work? Exactly how tasks are approached in the workplace.
Also, why are we gearing everything to the tests? The tests are snapshots, rarely illuminating, and often overweighted. As testing has increased, childhood depression and anxiety has risen with it. For what? An extra hundredth on your GPA?
To what end? Why are moving these kids through the production line? My kids are in high school and I promise they aren't excited about anything they're doing. They can tolerate it. They like lunch. But they're mostly just moving through the day.
Wouldn't it better if they were excited to attend school because school was where they did all the cool shit they want to do? Play video games and read cool books and study music and, yeah, maybe write a paper about that cool video game, and maybe learn a little coding.
You want to play guitar? Great. Here's a guitar. Here's how music relates to math. Here's how math relates to science. How's the song coming? Take an hour for lunch. You want to leave early today? Leave early. Treat kids the way you want to be treated, excite them...
Connect them with experts in the fields they're studying. Develop mentorships, make sure they take a hike every day. Make school the place you wish you could have hung out when you were their age. Teachers can be guides, a support system, one-on-one counselors. it can work."
[previous thread: https://twitter.com/michaelianblack/status/955470909669892098
"Been thinking a lot about k-12 education since last night. (I mean, before that too, but I hadn't written about it on Twitter.) My conclusion: it's total shit.
I'm going to make some points that are probably obvious to most people but they're worth saying. First, the average education destroys children's natural inquisitiveness. "This rock is cool!" "Great. Memorize everything about its composition. then I'm going to test you on it."
Second, the grading system is meaningless. A good grade denotes mastery of a subject about as much as having shiny teeth means you eat a healthy diet.
Third, kids are bored because school is boring because the way things are taught is boring. It's not the teacher's fault. It's a system that values compliance over creativity. It teaches kids how to regurgitate instead of how to think.
Why isn't school fun? Why doesn't it look more like kindergarten all the way through high school? Why isn't it student-driven instead of administration-driven? After they know how to read and perform basic math why can't they pursue subjects about which they show interest?
If a kid likes to read, why can't she spend her time with other kids who love literature? If she likes science, why not spent her time doing science? Why funnel everybody through the same stupid curriculum that has no real-world application?
The goal of k-12 education should to nurture kids towards an excitement of lifetime learning instead of towards getting into a college they can't afford. Anybody who wants to learn something can learn it. But they need to want to learn. School kills desire to learn.
Would any adult choose to go back to k-12 schooling? No fucking way. For most people, it's an endless drudge. Why not preserve childhood as a time of exploration and joy? Who is well-served by this system?
We know k-12 education doesn't work well. Kids hate it. Parents hate it. Teachers hate it. Employers hate it. Everybody hates it. So why do we keep it? Why are we inflicting so much misery on ourselves?"]
[And a thread prior to that: https://twitter.com/michaelianblack/status/955263135254016006
"One of my life's great stress-reducing realizations is that I don't care about my kids' grades.
Not only do I not care about their grades, I honestly think I'd be fine with it if they decide to drop out before graduating. The way we educate kids is 100% garbage. (Maybe 75% garbage.)
Here's the only thing school needs to teach kids: reading, how to construct a coherent thought, and basic math. After that, kids should be free to pursue whatever interests them, supplemented with broad exposure to the humanities.
There should be more: art, music, game playing, movie watching, physical activity. Schooling through high school should bear more than a passing resemblance to kindergarten. The way we do things is stultifying and soul-crushing.
Everything I value as an adult was treated as extracurricular and slightly distasteful by the school administration. The arts had no "practical value," but somehow trigonometry did. It made no sense.
When I decided to become an actor, I was told (and believed) I would never make a dime. I took that trade-off to do what I wanted in exchange for little to no pay. But a funny thing happened. The gig economy of the actor became the gig economy of the entire country.
So I found myself much more comfortable in uncertainty as traditional occupational structures began falling by the wayside. I felt like I had the flexibility and creativity to tackle unfamiliar jobs with minimal training because I believed in my own adaptability.
The kids I see these days can do anything on a computer. They are good collaborators and their egos seem more in check than mine. They'll do fine in the coming years, but I'd like to see their kids the beneficiaries of this new kind of schooling, a student-directed schooling.
That draws from the expertise of the faculty to augment studies, but also to be able to access the world's great minds on your narrow question. Slow, non-grade work that moves towards a defining and meaningful goal/solution. Applied education. Seems like a better way to handled"]
michaelianblack schools education grades grading homework schooling learning children parenting teaching unschooling deschooling 2018 self-directed self-directedlearning howwelearn freedom autonomy creativity misery sfsh criticalthinking middleschool highschool teachers howweteach schooliness oppression publicschools childhood
Taeyoon Choi on Twitter: "I'm wary of an explicative model of entrepreneurship in education (class project as a pitch & classroom as a mock business meeting). Instead… https://t.co/fI5I6OAZVh"
"I'm wary of an explicative model of entrepreneurship in education (class project as a pitch & classroom as a mock business meeting). Instead, I want my students to engage in a generative practice of systemic exchange. They create value, idea, trust, and care – not products."
[replied: "👇👉 the "unproduct" https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/t:unproduct "https://twitter.com/rogre/status/950556361540100096 ]
taeyoonchoi 2018 education entrepreneurship business capitalism care trust value repair unproduct meaning purpose exchange design pitching teaching values howweteach learning
xian franzinger barrett on Twitter: "@TheJLV The first time I was observed as a student teacher. I was quite nervous. My students asked why, "We observe you every day and we are more im… https://t.co/8QEUi6A0nx"
"The first time I was observed as a student teacher. I was quite nervous. My students asked why, "We observe you every day and we are more important observers". I remember than every time I'm observed, even in harassment. Our students know the teaching they need. Much love."
[added:
"☛ "We observe you every day and we are more important observers."
Cf. _I Learn from Children_ http://groveatlantic.com/book/i-learn-from-children/ … and "Who are you now?" http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/748734074"
https://twitter.com/rogre/status/933096514351534082 ]
xianfranzingerbarrett teaching howweteach carolinepratt observation children students relationships everyday learning unschooling deschooling education pedagogy conversation 2017
Engage – Michael Langan – Medium
"I know a science teacher who loves working with kids so much that he becomes depressed every June knowing that his current group of 8th graders are going to be leaving the middle school. This Science teacher has more high school kids come back to visit him than the rest of the staff combined.
Whats so special about this science teacher? He treats the kids like people. He talks with them like they are equals. He sits with them at lunch. He removes the authority boundaries in his classroom. He gives them freedom, as much as the system allows, during class.
This Science teacher stays after school with anywhere from 10 to 30 students four days a week so that the students can work on science projects for various regional and state science competitions. "If you really want to do science you have to stay after school," the teacher often says to me with a grin.
When you walk by this science teachers class it is messy. Kids are in the hall throwing balsa wood airplanes, testing mousetrap cars, or working on the computer to learn the mandated "content." Inside the room kids are everywhere. They are in the corners measuring levers, gluing, cutting, revising and testing. It is loud. It is chaotic and many traditional teachers in the building hate it and suggest that the "inmates are running the asylum" (real quote).
I visit often. I talk with him often. I try to relieve his angst often.
What does he have angst about? Two things usually.
The lesser of the two is the few judgmental adults. The adults that make comments. The adults that judge him passively and not so passively. The adults that remind him that their job is a bit harder because they have "rules" that need to be enforced in their rooms and its difficult "when they come from your room."
Forget the fact that we have more regional science winners than ever before. Forget the fact that our kids are truly believing again (like they believed when they were much younger) that they like science.
None of that matters. What matters to these few angst causing adults is that the kids are harder to control due to the Science teacher giving the kids some control.
The main area where this teacher has angst is in figuring out how to engage the students. How to create an environment where all of them are in a totally absorbed state of mind without even realizing it. How does he get the kids looking and acting like a group of kids enthralled in a video game….while at the same time meeting the expectations of the institution?
How does he convince the kids to learn for the sake of learning while at the same time saying "clear your desks for the test?" How can he best keep the flow of the learning going while also making sure they know the vocab words that are on the common assessments and state tests?
I walk in this classroom nearly everyday, but when I walked in towards the end of one of his classes this past Wednesday the teacher was sitting down with the students and asking them, imploring them to help him figure out how he can engage ALL of them.
"When you think about learning, when you think back to the times that you were really motivated, what types of things were you doing?" He asked them.
A student answered, "friendly competitions." Many other students perked up at this answer and chimed in "Yeah, like jeopardy type games, where we collaborate for the answer and stuff."
"Or like when we made those Rube Goldberg machines and we were trying to beat the other groups."
The bell rang and I stayed to debrief with the teacher about the conversation he just elicited.
He told me, "before you came in I was telling the students I really needed them to stop worrying about grades, and they told me "we have been taught since kindergarten that the most important thing is to get an A."
"Yep," I said. "getting the right answer and the importance of an A is pounded into them at school and at home."
I continued, "what I realized, as the students were talking with you, was that they didn't even comprehend what you were asking them. They can't separate learning from a test. So when you ask them how can they be engaged they simply think about ways they are motivated to learn for the test.
Kids want the answer to "why are we doing this." For some the motivator is simply for the grade. For others the motivator is, "to win the game," or, "so I don't get in trouble," There are some that jump right in just for the sake of learning something new….but I don't think there are a lot of those kids."
Of course, saying this to the Science teacher caused him more angst. "I don't know what I'm doing." He responds. "I don't know how much longer I can do this. School keeps getting in my way."
"That means you're doing it right," I replied. "Its the people that have it all figured out that I worry about. The kids love you, and they respect you because they know you respect them. Plus, they love science again."
"Yeah, but next year when they visit they are going to tell me how they are getting their teeth kicked in because Science is so hard. Am I doing them a disservice by not preparing them for that?"
"We don't need to prepare kids to deal with things that suck. They had many classes that required them to sit, study, and regurgitate before they ever had your class. You are showing them what Science in school can be…and we never know which of your students may grow to be teachers themselves. Perhaps they will model your class."
"Thanks bud." He said, "But, I don't know what I'm doing.""
[via: "Great piece on the stress endured by teachers who try to buck the system to create better experiences for kids."
https://twitter.com/cblack__/status/947905528520249344 ]
education teaching howweteach angst 2017 learning children empowerment grades grading motivation intrinsicmotivation extrinsicmotivation thewhy deschooling unschooling michaellangan testing assessment respect science lcproject openstudioproject stress
(Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails)
"Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people *want*, educators are trying to deal with what they think people *need* (and this is often not at all what they *want*). Part of Montessori's genius was to realize early that children *want* to get fluent in their surrounding environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what they *need* in the environs and culture."
[via: https://www.are.na/block/1546832 ]
alankay brettvictor socrates education sfsh mariamontessori montessori children environment lcproject openstudioproject unschooling deschooling culture society consumerism marketing howweteach howwelearn history parc philosophy learning
Robbie McClintock in the Reflective Commons
"In this temper, one last hypothesis: in making the case for study, one does not denigrate the teacher's profession. To be sure, one has to speak out against exaggerating the power of instruction. But this criticism does not reject teaching; in place of a rejection, it is a quest for the mean, a celebration of the Greek sense for nothing too much, an attempt to balance an inflated version of the teacher's mission with a touch of reality. Yes—let us continue our effort to teach all as best we can, but let us do so with more humility, sobriety, and realism.
Instruction does not make the man. A teacher gains coercive power to control and mold his students only so long as they abdicate their autonomy and dignity. Such an abdication is not a good foundation for an educational system, especially since it is less common and continuous than many would seem to believe. The teacher's authority, be it as a model of excellence or of folly, is a quality his students project erotically upon him. It is an attraction or repulsion that results because students are forever suspending their interest in learning their lessons; instead they abstract, they reflect; they step back mentally and with curiously cocked heads they observe their didactic deliverer, musing with soaring hope, wonder, joy, resignation, boredom, cynicism, amusement, sad tears, despair, or cold resentment—Ecce homo!
A teacher may or may not cause learning, but he will always be an object of study. Hence the pedant so surely plays the fool. But hence too, the man teaching can often occasion achievements that far surpass his personal powers. Great teachers can be found conforming to every type—they are tall and short, shaggy and trim, timid and tough, loquacious and terse, casual and stern, clear and obscure. Great teachers are persons who repay study, and they repay study because they know with Montaigne, "My trade and my art is to live.""
teaching learning instruction montaigne 1971 robbiemcclintock lucan training study howwelearn howweteach pedagogy erasmus seneca plato
Harvard EdCast: Lifelong Kindergarten | Harvard Graduate School of Education
"The concept of kindergarten — as a place for young children to learn by interacting with materials and people around them — has existed for over 200 years, but never has the approach been so suited to the way the world works as it is today, says Mitchel Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab.
"That approach to kindergarten is really aligned with the needs of today's society," says Resnick, citing the need to adapt to the speed at which things change in the world. "As kids in the traditional kindergarten were playfully designing and creating things, they were developing as creative thinkers…. That's exactly what we need."
Being given the room to explore, experiment, and express oneself is vital to becoming a creative thinker — and to the learning process as a whole — says Resnick, author of Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. If people aren't encouraged in their creativity at an early age, and if this isn't nutured throughout their schooling, then they aren't as prepared to deal with the unexpected when it arises.
"We're trying to spread that approach to learners of all ages," says Resnick, who also leads the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT. "We want to take what's worked best in kindergarten and here at the Media Lab and provide opportunities for all kids of all ages to be able to explore and experiment and express themselves in that same spirit."
In this edition of the Harvard EdCast, Resnick talks about the importance of nurturing creativity in learning and explains why kindergarten is the greatest invention of the last millennium."
"Mitchel Resnick - MIT Media Lab: Lifelong Kindergarten" (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRxD-pe3PN0
"Helping Kids Develop as Creative Thinkers" (2017)
https://vimeo.com/244986026 ]
mitchresnick lifelongkindergarten mitmedialab 2017 interviews kindergarten play projects projectbasedlearning passion collaboration experimentation creativity medialab scratch making pbl teaching sfsh learning howweteach howwelearn risks risktaking education schools lcproject openstudioproject curiosity schooling unschooling deschooling mindstorms writing coding programming leaning creating lego reasoning
Why the phrase 'with fidelity' is an affront to good teaching | Chalkbeat
""With fidelity" are some of the most damaging words in education.
Districts spend a ton of money paying people to pick out massively expensive, packaged curriculums, as if every one of a thousand classrooms needs the exact same things. Then officials say, over and over again, that they must be implemented "with fidelity." What they mean is that teachers better not do anything that would serve their students' specific needs.
When that curriculum does nothing to increase student achievement, it is not blamed. The district person who found it and purchased it is never blamed. Nope. They say, "Well, the teachers must not have been implementing it with fidelity."
It keeps happening because admitting that schools are messy and students are human and teaching is both creative and artistic would also mean you have to trust teachers and let them have some power. Also, there are some really crappy teachers out there, and programs for everyone are often meant to push that worst-case-scenario line a little higher."
"Because, from inside a classroom full of dynamic, chaotic brilliance;
from a classroom where that kid just shared that thing that broke all of our hearts;
from a classroom where that other kid figured out that idea they've been working on for weeks;
from that classroom where that other kid, who doesn't know enough of the language, hides how hard he works to keep up and still misses things;
and from that classroom where one kid isn't sure if they trust you yet, and that other kid trusts you too much, too easily, because their bar had been set too low after years of teachers that didn't care enough;
from inside that classroom, it's impossible to trust that anyone else has a better idea than I do about what my students need to do for our next 50 minutes."
2017 tomrademacher education teaching howweteach fidelity curriculum messiness
Ana Mardoll on Twitter: "The thing about every "I did [ableist thing] and everyone was happy with me" article is that it relies heavily on human confirmation bias.… https://t.co/2wRZLAj4yF"
"The thing about every "I did [ableist thing] and everyone was happy with me" article is that it relies heavily on human confirmation bias. https://twitter.com/nrsmithccny/status/934032393572356096 …
Most humans are poised to believe that our decisions will have good outcomes. That's why we MAKE the decisions, after all. We pick what seems like the best decision and we hope it turns out well.
Recognizing that the decision was a BAD one in retrospect is REALLY HARD, and becomes even harder when we have to grapple with the fact that we hurt people in the process.
So when teachers ban laptops or fidget spinners or whatever, or when employers force everyone to wear fitbits and take the stairs, they're STARTING with the belief that this will have a good outcome.
Then we look at the words Nicholas has used there: "Low cost" to ban electronics. Well, for him it surely was!
For the students who had to scramble to buy paper and pens and bags to carry them in when they'd been EXPECTING to use the laptop they already owned... a bit more cost.
"Minimal Resistance". That isn't really surprising when we understand that disabled students aren't the majority--which is why they're so easy to stomp all over.
Also not surprising when we understand the high COST of "resisting". Easier to drop the class.
"Learning improved dramatically" but based on what? Knowing that this is a situation heavily prone to bias, how do we measure that?
This isn't pedantry. We're talking about a school. Research methods are important.
We also need to understand how fucked up it is when the goal is to maximize the experience for the geniuses in the class and if the bottom 10% drop out because it's too hard, that's considered a GOOD thing.
If banning electronics causes a "sharpening" of the grade curve--fewer "middle" students, but the higher ones get higher and the lower ones go lower--that means embracing the destruction of the weak in order to elevate your preferred students.
The American school system is competitive in really messed up ways, and electronics bans play into that. If you can't "cut it" with paper notes, you're left behind. Teaching as social Darwinism.
I am going to add, and folks aren't going to like this, that professors are some of the most ableist people on the planet. In my experience.
They've risen to the top of a heavily ableist system that is DEEPLY invested in pretending that it's merit-based.
In the midst of that merit-based pretense, they're also urged to believe that they're biologically better, smarter, cleverer, deeper thinkers.
So you have people who believe they are biologically better than disabled people but also think they know how to accommodate us. Red flags right there.
They're also steeped in a competitive atmosphere where learning takes a backseat to rankings and numbers games and competition.
So very quickly any accommodation seems like "cheating".
You need an extra hour to take the test? How is that FAIR to the OTHER students?
We wouldn't ask these questions if we weren't obsessively ranking and grading and comparing students to each other in an attempt to sift out the "best".
Why do we do that? Well, part of it is a dance for capitalism; the employers want a shiny GPA number so they know who will be the better employee.
But a lot of professors don't really think about that. They just live for the competition itself, and they view us as disruptive.
They also view us, fundamentally, as lesser. No matter how much we learn, we'll never be peak students because we're disabled.
That means we're disposable if we threaten the actual "peak" students and their progress.
That's why laptop ban conversations ALWAYS devolve into "but if you allow laptops for disabled kids, the able-bodied students will use them and be distracted!"
The worry is that the abled-kids who COULD be "peak" students won't be.
If the options are:
(1) Disabled kid, 3.5 GPA. Abled kid, 3.5 GPA.
(2) Disabled kid, 2.0 GPA, Abled kid, 4.0 GPA.
They'll pick #2 every time. They don't want everyone to do moderately well; they want a Star.
Professors want STARS, because a STAR means they're doing well. They're the best coach in the competitive sports they call "school".
Throwing a disabled student under the bus to make sure the able-bodied Star isn't distracted? No brainer. 9 out of 10 professors will do it.
I had very few professors--over 7 years and 2 schools--who recognized the ranking system was garbage.
One of them told us on the first day of class that we would all get As, no matter what we did. Told us that we didn't even need to show up, but that he HOPED we would because he believed we could learn from him.
I learned more from that class than maybe any other I took that year. The erasure of all my fear, anxiety, competition, and need to "win" left me able to focus SO much better.
It's INTERESTING that we don't talk about banning GRADES and instead we ban laptops.
We could improve learning dramatically if we banned grades. But we don't. Why not?
- Capitalism. We want employers to pick our students.
- Ableism. We LIKE ranking humans from better to worse.
- Cynicism. We don't believe students WANT to learn, we think we need to force them.
So in an effort to forced Abled Allen to be the best in a competition for capitalism, we ban laptops.
If Disabled Debbie does poorly after the laptop ban, it's no great tragedy; she was never going to be a 4.0 student anyway. Not like Abled Allen, the winner.
Anyway. Laptop bans are ableist. So is a moratorium on any notes whatsoever. Let students learn the way they feel comfortable learning.
And asking students to "trust" teachers will put disabled students first is naive in the extreme.
I don't "trust" a team coach to prioritize the needs of a third-string quarterback. Maybe some will, but most won't.
(Final note that there ARE good teachers out there and even good DISABLED teachers. I'm talking about systemic problems, not saying that all professors are evil. The problem is the system, not necessarily the people.)
(Although some of the people ARE trash. But only some.)
The original tweet is gone and please don't harass the teacher in question. Here's a screenshot for context, otherwise my thread makes little sense.
I want to add something that I touched on in another thread: Teachers are PROFOUNDLY out of touch when it comes to note-taking.
I guaran-fucking-tee these college teachers who "insist" their students note-take by hand aren't hand-writing to this extent.
For example, the quoted tweet has a professor saying "you just type whatever I say without thinking". That is so ridiculous.Ana My mobile still could load it.
Hardly anyone I know types fast enough to transcribe human speech.
When I take typed notes, I'm choosing what to include and what to leave out. Those choices are interacting with the material.
I'm not recording like a robot.
These professors have been out of the "student seat" for so long that they don't know what studenting is like.
They think we're transcriptionists when we're not. They think pen-and-paper students are paying perfect attention when they're not.
They think writing notes for 4-5 classes a day for 4-7 years is easy on the hands, when it's not.
They just don't KNOW, but (scarily!) they think they do."
notetaking ableism laptops highered highereducation learning education meritocracy capitalism cynicism grades grading sorting ranking teaching howweteach howwelearn disabilities disability transcription typing lectures resistance socialdarwinism elitism competition anamardoll
Dear Parent: About THAT kid… « Miss Night's Marbles
"I want to talk about THAT child, too, but there are so many things I can't tell you.
I can't tell you that she was adopted from an orphanage at 18 months.
I can't tell you that he is on an elimination diet for possible food allergies, and that he is therefore hungry ALL. THE. TIME.
I can't tell you that her parents are in the middle of a horrendous divorce, and she has been staying with her grandma.
I can't tell you that I'm starting to worry that grandma drinks…
I can't tell you that his asthma medication makes him agitated.
I can't tell you that her mom is a single parent, and so she (the child) is at school from the moment before-care opens, until the moment after-care closes, and then the drive between home and school takes 40 minutes, and so she (the child) is getting less sleep than most adults.
I can' tell you that he has been a witness to domestic violence.
That's okay, you say. You understand I can't share personal or family information. You just want to know what I am DOING about That Child's behaviour.
I would love to tell you. But I can't.
I can't tell you that she receives speech-language services, that an assessment showed a severe language delay, and that the therapist feels the aggression is linked to frustration about being unable to communicate.
I can't tell you that I meet with his parents EVERY week, and that both of them usually cry at those meetings.
I can't tell you that the child and I have a secret hand signal to tell me when she needs to sit by herself for a while.
I can't tell you that he spends rest time curled in my lap because "it makes me feel better to hear your heart, Teacher."
I can't tell you that I have been meticulously tracking her aggressive incidents for 3 months, and that she has dropped from 5 incidents a day, to 5 incidents a week.
I can't tell you that the school secretary has agreed that I can send him to the office to "help" when I can tell he needs a change of scenery.
I can't tell you that I have stood up in a staff meeting and, with tears in my eyes, BEGGED my colleagues to keep an extra close eye on her, to be kind to her even when they are frustrated that she just punched someone AGAIN, and this time, RIGHT IN FRONT OF A TEACHER.
The thing is, there are SO MANY THINGS I can't tell you about That Child. I can't even tell you the good stuff."
inclusion children teaching education schools inclusivity humans howweteach via:lukeneff
How Systemic Control Stunts Creative Growth – Rafranz Davis – Medium
"Last week our cohort of students began designing their making/coding engineering projects and as exciting as it was, we still had a moment of pause in which we thought that perhaps we needed to insert a little more control and guidance.
…for the sake of time and because it would've been much easier.
I'm glad that we didn't.
In the aftermath of "plan day" and amidst the exhaustion of coaching and continuously trying to promote more "yes and" in lieu of "but", I've thought about the diversity of ideas that kids had and the joy in their eyes as they were creating.
One of our groups is making a Scorpion-Dragon and another is making a combination of a Rube Goldberg machine with diet coke exploder. While I have no idea what the latter is, I am so excited to see it and am honestly still mortified at the thought that I even considered an outcome where kids would not have had such choices.
You see, I am one who is fortunate enough to have a front row seat to the power of creativity through my role as a nurturer for my nephew. I watch him experiment with a plethora of artistic choices and am constantly in awe of how much he learns just because he feels like it and most often because his project of choice demands it.
I'm also painfully aware how much a majority of his creative freedoms occur at home because school is most often not a place that is open to such thinking/doing…unless it is "holiday week", early release day or the weeks after state testing is done.
This is the reality for so many but in all fairness, this is how we've been conditioned to "do" school in the face of accountability.
…and as much as teachers get a hard time for their lack of creative ventures, especially considering technology, it's unfair to blame those who have no choice but to do as the system was created to do.
Too often, the de-creativeness of kids begins as soon as they enter the doors of early childhood. Creative play is replaced with scheduled assessments. Individuality is replaced with school uniforms of one color. Gender roles define everything from activities kids get to do, to who they sit with at lunch and who stands before or after them in line.
…the line where kids learn early to stand in silence with "bubbles in mouths" and hands behind backs
We still misinterpret quiet classrooms as the best classrooms.
If kids do get to create, they are all creating the same thing because the thought of "different" immediately triggers adult fears concerning time and we all know that in every classroom, time is a pretty hot commodity.
There just seems to be not enough of it.
I remember the first day in my high school algebra class when I decided to stop teaching according to the "lesson cycle" formula that our program seemed to have adopted. Kids lots their minds!
They wanted the template. They wanted the steps. They wanted me to do the thinking for them. They did not have the skills to creatively problem solve because in all the years that they had been in school, we did a great job of slowly but surely stripping this important ability away.
…an ability inherent in kids since birth as they utilize their senses to figure out the world around them.
…most often through curiosity driven play.
Right now, I'm sitting beside my nephew as he draws the header image for this piece. I spent yesterday watching him design and make an animatronic Christmas scene and over the last few weeks he's been creating digital images and uploading his creations to redbubble so that for a small price, others could experience his vivid imagination.
This…in addition to his extensive work in puppetry, minecraft, oil painting, clay molding, music and just about anything that he feels like learning.
I'm not worried about my nephew though. He has us to support and guide him.
Not every kid has that and perhaps school should be the place that cultivates creativity in lieu of controlling it."
rafranzdavis 2017 creativity math mathematics problemsolving algebra teaching learning howwelearn control freedom children unschooling deschooling sfsh curiosity schools schooling schooliness making art education howweteach openstudioproject lcproject
Jonathan Mooney: "The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed" - YouTube
"The University of Oregon Accessible Education Center and AccessABILITY Student Union present renowned speaker, neuro-diversity activist and author Jonathan Mooney.
Mooney vividly, humorously and passionately brings to life the world of neuro-diversity: the research behind it, the people who live in it and the lessons it has for all of us who care about the future of education. Jonathan explains the latest theories and provides concrete examples of how to prepare students and implement frameworks that best support their academic and professional pursuits. He blends research and human interest stories with concrete tips that parents, students, teachers and administrators can follow to transform learning environments and create a world that truly celebrates cognitive diversity."
neurodiversity 2012 jonathanmooney adhd cognition cognitivediversity sfsh accessibility learning education differences howwelearn disability difference specialeducation highered highereducation dyslexia droputs literacy intelligence motivation behavior compliance stillness norms shame brain success reading multiliteracies genius smartness eq emotions relationships tracking maryannewolf intrinsicmotivation extrinsicmotivation punishment rewards psychology work labor kids children schools agency brokenness fixingpeople unschooling deschooling strengths strengths-basedoutlook assets deficits identity learningdisabilities schooling generalists specialists howardgardner howweteach teams technology support networks inclusivity diversity accommodations normal average standardization standards dsm disabilities bodies body
1:1 ⊕ 1password ⊕ 1to1 ⊕ 3dprinting ⊕ 4chan ⊕ 21stcenturyskills ⊕ 1940s ⊕ 1950s ⊕ 1960s ⊕ 1970s ⊕ 1980s ⊕ 19070s ⊕ aaronhicklin ⊕ abandonment ⊕ abbas ⊕ abilities ⊕ ability ⊕ abilitygrouping ⊕ ableism ⊕ ablerism ⊕ abnormal ⊕ aboriginal ⊕ aborigines ⊕ abrahamdeleon ⊕ abrahamflexner ⊕ abstractexpressionism ⊕ abstraction ⊕ absurdism ⊕ abundance ⊕ abuse ⊕ academia ⊕ academicpsychology ⊕ academics ⊕ academization ⊕ acadmemics ⊕ acceptance ⊕ access ⊕ accessibilities ⊕ accessibility ⊕ accommodations ⊕ accountability ⊕ accreditation ⊕ acculturation ⊕ accuracy ⊕ achievement ⊕ achievementgap ⊕ acknowledgement ⊕ action ⊕ activism ⊕ adamheidebring-bruno ⊕ adaptability ⊕ adaption ⊕ adaptivelearning ⊕ add ⊕ addedvalue ⊕ addiction ⊕ adelegoldberg ⊕ adesign ⊕ adhd ⊕ adhoc ⊕ adjuncts ⊕ adjustment ⊕ administration ⊕ administrativebloat ⊕ adminstrativebloat ⊕ admiration ⊕ admissions ⊕ adobe ⊕ adolescence ⊕ adoration ⊕ adulthood ⊕ adultism ⊕ adults ⊕ advertising ⊕ advice ⊕ advising ⊕ advocacy ⊕ aestheticpractice ⊕ aesthetics ⊕ affect ⊕ affection ⊕ affordability ⊕ aft ⊕ agatasoroko ⊕ age ⊕ ageism ⊕ agency ⊕ agesegregation ⊕ aggression ⊕ agilelearning ⊕ agilelearningcenters ⊕ agility ⊕ agillearningcenters ⊕ aging ⊕ agriculture ⊕ ai ⊕ akihikotakahashi ⊕ akilahrichards ⊕ alameda ⊕ alanantliff ⊕ alanjacobs ⊕ alankay ⊕ alanperlis ⊕ alanshapiro ⊕ alanskoskopf ⊕ alanturing ⊕ alanwatts ⊕ albermarleschooldistrict ⊕ albertcullem ⊕ alberteinstein ⊕ aldoushuxley ⊕ aleccouros ⊕ alecresnick ⊕ alexandercoward ⊕ alexandralange ⊕ alexmolnar ⊕ alfiekohn ⊕ alfredhitchcock ⊕ alfrednorthwhitehead ⊕ alfredojaar ⊕ algebra ⊕ algeria ⊕ algorithms ⊕ alienation ⊕ alinear ⊕ alisongopnik ⊕ alisonknowles ⊕ alissawalker ⊕ allancollins ⊕ allankaprow ⊕ allentan ⊕ allies ⊕ allsorts ⊕ almastonewilliams ⊕ alomashaha ⊕ alphonsolingis ⊕ alsteiner ⊕ alternative ⊕ alternativeartcollege ⊕ alterpodium ⊕ altgdp ⊕ altschool ⊕ alvintoffler ⊕ alwayslearning ⊕ amandacachia ⊕ amandaross-ho ⊕ amateurism ⊕ amateurs ⊕ amazon ⊕ ambiguity ⊕ ambition ⊕ ambivalence ⊕ americandream ⊕ amiga ⊕ amitpitaru ⊕ amnh ⊕ amplify ⊕ amycollier ⊕ amywilliams ⊕ analogies ⊕ analogy ⊕ analysis ⊕ analyticalthinking ⊕ analytics ⊕ anamardoll ⊕ anarchism ⊕ anarchy ⊕ anationatrisk ⊕ anationtrisk ⊕ ancient ⊕ ancientchina ⊕ ancientegypt ⊕ ancientgreece ⊕ ancientindia ⊕ ancientrome ⊕ andragogy ⊕ andrealandry ⊕ andrewblauvelt ⊕ andrewbutler ⊕ andrewferguson ⊕ andrewmeltzoff ⊕ andrewsliwinski ⊕ andrewzolli ⊕ angeladavis ⊕ angeladuckworth ⊕ anger ⊕ angst ⊕ anikaschwarzlose ⊕ animalhumanrelationships ⊕ animalrights ⊕ animals ⊕ animalstudies ⊕ animation ⊕ anime ⊕ anitabright ⊕ anji ⊕ anjiplay ⊕ annablinstein ⊕ annalowenhaupttsing ⊕ annanorth ⊕ annavladimirova ⊕ annebalsamo ⊕ anneboyer ⊕ annegalloway ⊕ annekoskela ⊕ annholum ⊕ annialbers ⊕ annicejacoby ⊕ anniemurphypaul ⊕ annotation ⊕ anterogarcia ⊕ anthonybourdain ⊕ anthonycody ⊕ anthonydunne ⊕ anthonyfyson ⊕ anthonygalloway ⊕ anthonynocella ⊕ anthropocene ⊕ anthropologists ⊕ anthropology ⊕ anti-autonomy ⊕ anti-hierarchy ⊕ anti-isolation ⊕ anti-schools ⊕ anti-specialization ⊕ anti-teaching ⊕ antigrowth ⊕ antithesis ⊕ anttipaakkari ⊕ anxiety ⊕ anyahindmarch ⊕ anyakamenetz ⊕ apclasses ⊕ apgartest ⊕ application ⊕ apprenticeships ⊕&n