reMAMARK

The classroom is a mess. Students are pacing about, sitting on desks, and speaking in a noisy buzz that fills even the air with a nebulous clutter. There are a few chairs curiously sitting atop the 3 lab tables at the back of the room. I sit towards the back of the room at one of these lab tables watching chaos.

In center city Philadelphia, a progressive public high school boasts of its high success in math and science. Welcome to Ms. T's last period physics class.

In particular, I'm watching Jerome. He's sitting on a desk currently, silently but very noticeably dancing with his head phones in, but every now and then he gets up, walks around, fidgets with lab equipment in the back, flicks his pencil of the side of a desk. He's very versatile when it comes to his physical autonomy, and simply watching him feels distracting.

Allison Zacarias

Education 200

Alice Lesnick

March 25, 2013

I am at an after school program in a city on the outskirts of Philadelphia which is not a conventional praxis because I do not observe a classroom/teacher. Instead I work as a tutor with first and second graders. Our schedule and routine is very consistent every week. First there is circle time, then the students do their homework, they work on a vocabulary/reading on-line program (Lexia), read for about 20 minutes, and then they can do whatever activity they would like.

Recently I have been working with a new student. Her name is Silvia and she is a 6-year-old Mexican-American first grader. Immediately I felt gravitated towards her because I saw a little bit of myself in her. I saw a very young Latina student that has mastered (as much as a 6-year-old can) the Spanish language and is now mastering the English language. When I introduced myself to her the coordinator (Mirtle) of the after school program (GEER) told Silvia, “Silvia, did you know that Allison speaks Spanish.” Silvia turned to me with a big smile and said, “Say something in Spanish.” When I did she looked over to Mirtle with a surprised/excited look. I have been trying to build a relationship with Silvia in which she feels comfortable telling me and showing me what she knows, does not know, and what she may need help with.

Marta Guerrero

Critical Issues in Education

Professor Lesnick

March 25, 13

Post 3: Reflection and Character Building

My praxis placement is in a character building/friendship class at private school. I have to admit that at first I was extremely skeptical of the fact that this school has such an abundance of resources that they are able to provide students with a class dedicated to teaching them how to navigate their feelings and the feelings of others. However, the more I observe and learn more about the curriculum, I begin to wonder how much of an impact this class would have in urban schools.

In my time in class and at my field placement I have discovered what has been most interesting to me is the interaction between student and teacher and the unspoken structure and relationship in the classroom. What I didn’t notice until the editing of this paper was the subliminal use of language, body language, and expectation that creates an interpretation and characterization of a classroom.

            In my first day at the field placement my notes had a lot of interpretation that followed what we discussed as “note-making”. In class when we discovered the difference of note-taking and note-making I looked back at my notes and realized I passed a lot of judgments that I assumed were objective observations. I observe two different class periods in my time at my placement.  Each class has different characteristics but the way I described them was very subjective to “normal” class assumptions. The following is a summarization of what my notes described:

This semester, my two field placements are non-traditional in the sense that they are not observational, but spaces in which I take on a role as a tutor or mentor to young students, which can be a daunting responsibility. One of my placements is at Oliver Elementary School, working with several members of Bryn Mawr’s Art Club to teach art lessons to 1st and 5th grade students in a school where funding for arts programs was cut years ago. The student coordinators plan and teach the lessons, and I, as one of several teaching assistants, supervise and help students with their projects once they’ve gotten their materials and directions.

            The focus of the curriculum that the Bryn Mawr coordinators have planned this semester is art as a profession, in a variety of fields. We have done projects that have put the kids in the shoes of advertisers, fashion designers, and, this week, cartographers. Miss Rose, as the kids call the student coordinator in Mrs. Dryer’s classroom, started the lesson with projections of several pictures of maps, of varied scale and magnitude. One was immediately familiar to me, and likely the rest of the classroom. The Mercator world map is something that we take for granted, having seen it, like Mrs. Dryer’s 5th graders, early and often. We don’t stop to call it into question, because why would we? The world is the world is the world. How could literally millions of people be wrong about something so fundamental?

John Dewey: Experience and Education

            Upon reading this book I couldn’t help but compare my own education to the subdivisions that Dewey was speaking about. Was I a product of more traditional education or of progressive education? If I had to choose one I would say traditional. My school days before college were filled with routine, strict guidelines, top-down rulings, and other harsh descriptive words thought up during class. These negative words though seem to do injustice to my education though because while it might have not have been progressive it hardly seem old.

Marta Guerrero

Professor Lesnick

Critical Issues In Education

February 18, 13

Learning as a Form of Teaching

“To teach cannot be reduced to a superficial or externalized contact with the object or it’s content but extends to the population of the conditions in which critical learning is possible.” (33)

As I read “Pedagogy of Freedom” I am struggling because I do not necessarily agree but I also do not disagree with the stance that Paulo Freire has taken on what it means to be an effective teacher. The reason I disagree is because I do not see exactly how this can be entirely realistic. I understand how this form of teaching can function in some schools, but not necessarily in others. That goes back to the idea that there is not one template of educational form that we can use for all schools. But perhaps this is where the creative portion fits.

Allison Zacarias

Education 200

Professor Lesnick

February 20, 2013

Paper 2

The relationship between teaching and learning

 There needs to be a relationship between students and teachers in order for there to exist a correct form of teaching and learning. A person can be labeled as a teacher simply because they have received the training for it but it does not mean that they know or are able to teach and have their students learn. Teaching is a learning experience where different skills are gained through the formation of relationships with students and the ability to learn from them. Freire says the following, “Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning” (31). The way that relationships between students and teachers should form is through the acknowledgement that each person is an individual and should not be seen as a whole or as a generalized group. When teachers learn about and from their students they are able to realize that in order for the students to learn they need to teach their teachers about the way in which they learn.

Annette Lareau’s research for her book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life,” while obviously noteworthy and perhaps groundbreaking two decades ago, does pose some problems as we look at it today. Her choices to include certain participants and exclude others seem to be based solely on whether they could help her check off several boxes that she prescribed for her study. She needed to have a selection of cases where each child was a unique mix of two possibilities for gender, race, and class. This method made it easy for Lareau to classify middle class families into a tactic of concerted cultivation, and working and lower class families into the strategy of accomplishment of natural growth. This is frustrating, because it seems to be much too narrow of a focus, much too literally black and white to really presume to be truly applicable to the larger population. By ignoring factors outside of the strict dichotomy of lower/working and middle class and white and Black, Lareau limits the amount of significance that can be extrapolated from her work.

Lareau states her theoretical perspectives regarding the inequality of education and educational institutions which encompasses different philosophies of child rearing, psychology, and socioeconomic standings and their correlation to each other. According to Lareau, middle class families tend to employ the concerted cultivation approach, while lower income families tend to employ the accomplishment of natural growth approach. She seeks to prove how concerted cultivation leads to a sense of entitlement in children while the accomplishment of natural growth leads to a sense of constraint. Although Lareau attempts to validate both approaches, she notes the significant advantage of the concerted cultivation approach and how it prepares the student for the inevitable life ahead of dealing with the masses of faceless institutions (and how this advantage automatically places others at a disadvantage). While I feel Lareau's theories hold some truth, I find her approach extremely reactionary and her study blind to the other causes of disadvantages in the classroom. In many cases, her observations are skewed to fit her theory and her attempt to distinguish her theory as binary in nature often leaves out the dynamic aspect of family lives, child-rearing methods, and situations. Because of this, the significance of her theory is stunted.