ED125 - Schooling (Winter 2016):
... Progress of the Course Dialog, in 4 Labs ...
Lab 1:
"TEACH ME SOMETHING." In this lab, I take on the personas of three archetypal American students -- all equally "intelligent," but with very different experiences of institutionalized education, and predisposed attitudes toward their current learning environments. We begin this lab by talking about what values and principles are most important for educators to embody in educational exchanges. The class then decides which "Student" they will teach -- Bobby Buttkisser (who buys into the school system), Requirements Ray (who 'games' the system with minimal required effort), and Donnie Don't-Give-a-F*ck (who rejects the validity and value of the system) -- and one person volunteers to teach them something...doing their best to apply all the principles they have asserted. I do not make this easy for them. And all the students who witness this teacher-student interaction can speak to either side's subconscious as the classroom dialog unfolds (and often collapses, at least in the beginning). So we begin seeing how deeply engrained in us is the American culture of schooling habits, and how difficult it is to see and change those habits under pressure. |
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Critical Thinking Break:
"Expanding Commonsense Claims." Between the first lab and the last, we practice looking at our own statements about schooling and education, learning to see the Normative and Descriptive ('Values' and 'Facts') Claims that we carry about school, and to expand those outward into statements that more fully and/or accurately reflect the way people learn, and the influence that educational environments can have on peoples' learning experiences... |
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Lab 4:
"EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: Creating & Problem-shooting" Our final lab for the course asks the class to apply all the lessons of the course -- and all the thinking they've done about what they value in education -- in generating a plan for a future school, and critically imagining all the potential benefits and problems that might arise in creating that educational environment. For this lab, we break the class into 3 specialty areas: Curriculum (what is taught), Pedagogy (how things are taught), and Infrastructure (how the teaching-and-learning environment is structured and organized). These groups then confer separately, come up with a plan, and describe those ideas to the rest of the class. From that point, we discuss and debate the merits and challenges inherent in these approaches, negotiating and refining these three elements into a single, coordinated plan for a (hopefully) healthy, effective, purposeful educational environment. |