Education and Democracy:
The story of schooling in the U.S. begins with core American values and beliefs, moves into imperfect plans and implementations, and arrives at human responses and habit patterns---the emotional, rational, motivated and pragmatic reality of American education as we know it.
Teaching this story begins with understanding what learning, schooling, and education are and how they interweave in the life of an individual. From there, it is a matter of seeing how we as a society have decided and continue to make decisions about who, what, and how American citizens should and will be educated---and how these well-intentioned implementations often fall short of their driving ideals. And finally, it involves the solution-oriented imagination and creativity of students seeing where they have the power and capacity to enact positive change within this larger educational system---as students, as teachers, as parents, and as citizens in the ever-evolving dialog of democracy in America.
When I am teaching, I will post my syllabus and interesting discussion boards here.
The story of schooling in the U.S. begins with core American values and beliefs, moves into imperfect plans and implementations, and arrives at human responses and habit patterns---the emotional, rational, motivated and pragmatic reality of American education as we know it.
Teaching this story begins with understanding what learning, schooling, and education are and how they interweave in the life of an individual. From there, it is a matter of seeing how we as a society have decided and continue to make decisions about who, what, and how American citizens should and will be educated---and how these well-intentioned implementations often fall short of their driving ideals. And finally, it involves the solution-oriented imagination and creativity of students seeing where they have the power and capacity to enact positive change within this larger educational system---as students, as teachers, as parents, and as citizens in the ever-evolving dialog of democracy in America.
When I am teaching, I will post my syllabus and interesting discussion boards here.
Discussion Boards & Labs:
My favorite way to teach (in any subject) is with a handful of pens, a big white board, and a lot of interaction. In ED125 classes, students' own learning experiences in schools become a large part of the curriculum: the course creates a framework for students to reflect on their past educational exchanges and to make conscious sense of their current beliefs and attitudes about school (what is, can be, and should be). To do that, each week in ED125 builds progressively from defining fundamental terms/topics in American education (School, the Person, Learning, Democracy, Diversity, the Real World), to discussing individuals' experiences and attitudes relative to those terms (through readings, interviews with parents/peers/teachers, and online forums among the students themselves), and finally using this organized knowledge-base to discussing what students think is most important for schools to accomplish--how learning institutions might go about doing that, and what role each students might play in that future. Boards are a wonderful way to capture the flow of these unfolding discussions. First, that public writing gives me some basic control over the shape of the conversation (labelling the main topic, building it out point-by-point into a more complex idea-framework); second, it provides a means of validating students' ideas and integrating them into those pre-planned frameworks (asking if I've heard and paraphrased them correctly, in-filling each point with their quotes, notes, and challenges). So the boards become an image -- not of my monologic lessons, but -- of our coordinated dialogs about crucial topics for accurately understanding and effectively shaping education in the U.S.: |
Labs are then an excellent way of grounding these idea-frameworks in reality: making sure that none of us fall into the easy pattern of saying "This is true, this should be done" without first testing out how those clear, neat principled ideas ACTUALLY play out in the complex and messy reality of a learning environment. I do 4 main Labs to test the ideas discussed in ED125.
The first is "Teach me something," wherein I embody on of three archetypal American School Students (the zealous achiever, the shrewd rule-manipulator, the resistant realist) and students work to build productive educational exchanges with those individuals. The second is, "Democratic Conversation," wherein I remind the students of the basic principled steps of 'doing democracy' (i.e., exchange perspectives, coordinate needs / wants / ideas, decide on some collectively informed and agreed-upon action), and then let them run the course discussion about that day's educational topic. The third is "Culture," wherein I provide them with a scenario -- a unique individual, doing something self-stressing, socially disruptive, or otherwise problematic -- and let them decide how to apply their educational principles to resolve that problematic situation. The fourth is "A Day in the Life," wherein the whole class breaks into constructive groups (Curriculum - 'learning what?', Pedagogy - 'teaching how?', and Infrastructure 'educating where / in what system?') and creates a reasoned plan for a school, which they then imaginatively walk us through, allowing others to point out the practical challenges that may arise in educational that reality. Together, these labs provide students with memorable experiences of applying their educational knowledge, beliefs, and values explicitly and complexly -- as statements of intention, as plans for action, as practical trials and learning reflections. |
* If anything gives me hope for the future of our planet, it is these moments: watching young leaders and teachers-to-be figuring out ways of turning my manufactured messes into healthy educational exchanges.