Education Fieldwork

• Elementary school in a suburb of Philadelphia
• Tucked into a neighborhood, surrounded by trees, grass, etc.
• School goes from K-5th, all in one building
• No businesses, schools, religious buildings, etc. near the school, but primarily houses
• My placement is with Nina Smith, an English Language Learners (ELL) teacher
  • This is the second semester in a row that I am working with Nina
  • She is the ELL teacher for both Elementary Schools in the district
    • Last semester I only went to one of the Elementary Schools (Elementary 1)
    • This semester I will be doing 2 ½ hours/week at each school
      • The schools are in the same district and similar communities- how will they be different?

This was my second visit to my independent school placement in center city with Teacher P's second grade classroom. We had morning meeting again where we played an interactive game discussing what we were going to do during the weekend. During the student's half hour at PE, Teacher P and I discussed the upcoming math lesson, and how one student struggles to work independently with his math work. She told me that this student, T, will be starting during this coming week to take medication for ADD symptoms. I am not sure if he has been diagnosed for ADD--I assume so since he is starting medication. She expressed some concern about never having taught a student on this medication before. She also mentioned that the adjustment process may be a difficult one, and that she was anticipating that. I am curious to see how T is doing this week since he started taking the medication--updates to come.

Placement

Field Notes #2

February 5, 2013

Last week at the end of my praxis visit, the main classroom teacher and I decided to implement a system of notes to guide my visits to her classroom. This is mainly because she has a meeting for 20 minutes when the students first arrive so there is another teacher in the classroom directing morning meeting. So, when I walked into the classroom today, there was a box labeled “Teacher Ellen” that had several sticky notes inside of it.

The first sticky gave me instructions for the beginning of the day: “please take down the New Years posters on the bulletin board at the back of the classroom and put up the new posters in the box.” The classroom has several bulletin boards, each of which consistently display student work. However, not all student work can be displayed on the board because this teacher teaches the entire 6th grade language arts/social studies classes. Sometimes, the work that is displayed on the boards is chosen randomly (as evidenced by the system I used last week to hang up posters in the hallways, basically put them up until there is no more space). However, sometimes, the student work chosen for display is based on the grade that the students received. Today, that is the case with the student work that I was asked to put up.  All of the work in the pile to hang up had a received a grade of A+, A, or A-.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - Field Placement Visit #1

As I approached the brown brick building of Excellence Charter School (ECS) at Learning Campus, groups of African-American students lingered around the front door and off to the side of the building talking to each other before school began. I entered the two glass doors and notified a white-male teacher at the front door to inform him that I was here for field placement with Jane Bard. (Jane Bard is a first year teacher). He directed me to the front desk to sign in. After I signed in, I went to Room 107 and saw my host teacher sitting in front of her laptop preparing for the day. Ms. Bard welcomed me and provided me a clipboard with three sheets of the assigned seating for the three math courses I would be observing.

When the first school bell rang, 10th graders began trickling into the classroom for their first class of the day -- geometry. Ms. Bard greeted her students saying "Good morning Tom" and "Good morning Anna" by calling out her students’ first names. She then asked her students how their internships were going. When they saw the new assigned seats, some of Ms. Bard's students called out, "We got new seats?!" Mrs. Bard tried to calm her class down by having her students focus on the Do-Now, which is a silent and independent task.  Since this was a new semester and a new year, Mrs. Bard had some questions she wanted to know from students. They were:

1. Which expectations will be most challenging for you?

Unstructured Dialogue: A Way to Access Funds of Knowledge

12:30 p.m. – I arrived earlier than I expected so I told Ms. D that next time I could start around 12:45 instead of 1 p.m. Today is my actual first day of “teaching/tutoring.” I put those in quotes because this experience will not exactly follow the kind of teaching that happens in a school classroom. However, Site A has classrooms that are used for all sorts of activities. A weekly schedule is posted on each classroom door to show which department can have the room for the allotted time.

The classroom is a decent size even though Ms. D said that there isn’t enough space in the organization. About 16 chairs surround the rectangle table, which occupies most of the classroom. A white board is located across the door. There is a world map and several handmade posters on the walls: classroom rules (e.g. Turn off cell phones), “What is your job?” (pictures with words), and classroom questions (e.g. How do you say ___ in English?). There are fluorescent lights on the ceiling. I mention this because lighting is one of my concerns in a classroom.

“Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more – always more – even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them,  to be is to have and to be the class of the “haves”.

When reading through Freire, I couldn’t help but agree with so many of the ideas he was presenting. I found myself underlining like mad and sharing some awesome quotes with my roommate as soon as I would come across them. He’s got a lot of amazing ideas with many possibilities within them but these possibilities are something I want to attempt to unpack some more, whether it be as a class or on an individual basis. When it comes to these types of readings (so much going on at the same time with so much possibility), I feel like I lose myself in the ideas rather than finding anything concrete.  With Freire,  unpacking brings up more interpretations and possibilities. For this reason, I find Freire so helpful and insightful in so many areas which also leads to my sense of confusion.  

Reading Pedagogy of The Oppressed is making me question my own status: am I oppressed or oppressor? Could I be neither? Being an American, I think, sets me up as a colonizer/oppressor/privileged person… so I thought, perhaps I might be an ally, joining in solidarity with the oppressed. But that role is questionable too. It could easily (unintentionally) posit the oppressed as "victims" and myself as a kind of "savior." I see this all the time with nonprofit organizations, youth groups, missions projects, etc. What entitles westerners to conceive of themselves as capable of changing the world, one person at a time? I think Friere would tell them that individuals can only change themselves: "Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects with must be saved from a burning building" (47). Further, "it is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors" (38). So maybe there's more to be explored in the the "with, not for" (30) concept: the savior/victim mentality is just as oppressive as the oppressed- or oppressor- status. 

This makes me question the notion of "empowerment": What is the act of empowerment? Who can empower? By empowering someone else, are you actually treating them as less than human? 

I've read Freire before in other education classes, though usually in smaller sections at a time.  I generally like theory based readings, but found myself having to relate to the real world to stay focused and really understand what Freire was saying.  I thought about how relevant his discussion of the fear of freedom (page 46), which creates the binary of oppressor and oppressed, is visible in many American movements, which makes his work all the more powerful to me because he wasn't intending to write about America specifically.  This leads me to believe his theories are applicable even outside the US, which is impressive.  On page 44 he writes, "In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of humanity in both.  This reminds me of the feminist movement.  I think some people fear that women are trying to conquer men, but the reality is that the feminist movement "restores humanity to both" men and women by allowing women to no longer be oppressed (for example, equal pay) and also so that men are no longer forced to be oppressors (for example, men would be allowed to express feelings and emotions more freely).  He also discussed, on page 45, that "in the initial stage of struggle" the oppressed tend to become oppressors, rather than striving for liberation altogether.