Critical Issues in Education 2013

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?

At the W school, I had sat through two class periods where the students, 7th and 8th grades, were watching a film on the Salem Witch trials. It was a documentary that attempted to uncover the mysteries behind the series of odd events that happened so long ago, through science and psychological tests. While watching the film, I noticed that the teacher paused the movie several times to reiterate what was said to make sure all the students were paying attention. What was interesting and commendable about her teaching strategy during this section was that she constantly reminded the students that these townspeople of historical Salem were not “crazy” or “stupid”.

For young middle school students, it is easy to judge people as simply “crazy”. Both the film and the teacher’s lesson for the day was to justify what went wrong in the town of Salem, reminding the students that there is an explanation for how this idea of a witch came to haunt the town. This open mindedness helped students understand the reasons behind the Salem witch-hunt and gradually students began a discussion on their own experiences of instances when they thought they were being haunted because of a series of odd events around them. It was a short discussion but I enjoyed hearing how students did not think the townspeople of Salem were merely “crazy”. This lesson to share experiences and digging deeper into the Salem mystery relates back to the importance of experience that Dewey writes about.

            A couple of days ago we had an intense conversation in one of my classrooms debating whether or not Ebonics should be included in school curriculum. A couple of students argued that it would be okay to allow Ebonics in high school, but it should not continue to happen in college. They argued that the “real world” consists of Standard English and that education should be based on this type of English. This conversation made me think about Dewey’s statement, “the main purpose or objective is to prepare the young for the future responsibilities and for success in life, by means of acquisition of the organized bodies of information and prepared forms of skill, which comprehend the material of the instruction”. This quote makes me think about the fact that everyone has different definition and vision of success. 

I found Lareau's categorization of child-rearing into two distinct methods, concerted cultivation and the accomplishment of natural growth, and her ascription of each method to a specific socioeconomic class to be very problematic.

Christine Newville

            I struggle with Freire because I agree with him the most, but also find the most problems with his ideas.  I would like to talk most about chapter two on the section titles “Respect for what Students Know”. I think this is an amazing concept to bring into the classroom; that the teacher should use the backgrounds of the students to enhance their own teachings. Even using the word ‘respect’ shows a great degree of humility required from the teacher, that the teacher should not come into a classroom with a superior and apathetic manor, but should evaluate each student as a person with a story.

            When I first read Freire, I could see this being a very effective way of teaching the humanities, using current world events to understand past social tensions, or taking personal backgrounds to understand a text, this to me is beauty in a classroom and would lead to good discussion and thought. However I struggled to understand how Freire would be applied to a science classroom, most of all a math. I felt that, because there was so little discussion in math classes to begin with, that math was, in fact, a set of rules and systems not to be reinvented or evaluated, that Freire would have a hard time involving personal backgrounds into the curriculum.

Leah Kahler

Professor Alice Lesnick

Critical Issues in Education

February 20, 2013

To my group members: I chose to analyze Freire because I had a hard time reading and am unsure if I’m misinterpreting his points, so if you got something different from the reading, please let me know. I chose three separate passages to which to respond.

“By ‘progressive’, I mean a point of view that favors the autonomy of the students” (21).

Looking back over the binaries that we established on the first day of class between traditional and progressive educations, the line seemed very blurry then. Freire puts it in obvious terms- a progressive education is one that grants the student to decide. But the question that follows his simplification is what choices exactly are the students making? Are they allowed to decide what to study? How to study it? And most importantly, is the array of choices discrete, or is the student allowed as many educative possibilities as his imagination can muster?

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.

Ava Cotlowitz

2/16/2013

Response Paper #2

            John Dewey’s publication Experience Education begins by framing how educational theory, in its most extreme terms, is an “opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without.”  As far as schools are concerned, this opposition “takes the form of contrast between traditional and progressive education” (Dewey, 5).  Within traditional education, a “pattern of organization” takes place that continuously transmits to new generations bodies of information and skills that have been worked out in the past.  On the other hand, progressive education is a more dynamic mode of learning, in which individualized experiences shape how one learns and grows through creative activity and democratic arrangements.  Dewey argues that the students who learn under these two types of education generally maintain different behaviors and attitudes.  Students who are educated traditionally may be more docile, receptive, and obedient, while students who are educated progressively may be more outspoken, creative, and autonomous.  Ultimately, these contrasting modes of learning rely heavily on difference of experience and how educative and miseducative experience can either foster or stunt growth of further experience.

Reflection #2

Freire and Ebonics

Quela Jules

2/20/13

            Two friends came to me outraged last week about a heated discussion regarding the use of Ebonics in the classroom and whether or not it should be fostered, or tolerated in schools. A white male student blatantly said that Standard American English is the only acceptable form of English in the United States. I am not here to say whether I agree or disagree with his stance on the topic, but rather to provide a series of images related to it. What was difficult about hearing the man speak was not the words he was saying, but the position from which he spoke, he was white, privileged, and conservative, and one could infer that his main contact with African American Vernacular comes from Hip Hop, or the words that have somehow made their way into the vocabularies of the young white and privileged. He is speaking as someone who has only had to master one language his whole life and fully understands the privilege in that.