Sunday, December 1, 2013

"Empowering Education: Education is Politics" by Ira Shor


This week’s blog post on “Empowering Education: Education is Politics” by Ira Shor is a Connections post. I found this article a tough read so I will be using different resources to help me make my connections.

I believe Shor’s main point in this article is that a teacher’s curriculum needs to be more than taking notes and memorization. These things can harm a child’s development and learning ability.
“People are naturally curious. They are born learners. Education can either develop or stifle their inclination to ask why and to learn. A curriculum that avoids questioning school and society is not, as is commonly supposed, politically neutral. It cuts off the students’ development as critical thinkers about their world. If the students’ task is to memorize rules and existing knowledge, without questioning the subject matter, or the learning process, their potential for critical thought and action will be restricted.” (pg 12)


“People begin life as motivated learners, not as passive beings. Children naturally join the world around them. They learn by interacting, by experimenting, and by using play to internalize the meaning of words and experiences.” (pg 17)


These quotes reminded me a great deal of Kliewer’s article “Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome.” Children learn in many different ways. As future teachers we will need to incorporate our curriculum to fit the needs of every child. Take the example of Shayne’s classroom and her student Isaac. I loved reading about this classroom and the ideas Shayne had! It was such an inspiration to me. Shayne incorporated a curriculum that fit Isaac’s needs. Instead of verbally communicating his interpretation of a book, he danced it out. This caused the other students to “learn by interacting, by experimenting, and by using play to internalize the meaning of words and experiences.”

Shor also discusses that we need to break the stereotypes of teachers. This coincides with Christensen’s article “Unlearning the Myths that Bind Us.” The media loves to play on different stereotypes-especially in a school setting. Christensen tells us that the media influences us in major ways. Even in college I find myself using stereotypes to describe professors. I’m sure all of us have used www.ratemyprofessor.com to look up our professors. I have looked up a professor, saw the bad reviews, and walked into the classroom worried. Of course, the majority of the time, the professor turned out to be the complete opposite of the reviews left by other students.  

I found this video and thought it helps add onto my Christensen connection. The video shows how the media uses stereotypes for teachers and the students’ reactions to the teachers and their homework. I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did. (I mainly loved it because I could remember growing up with these cartoons-gotta love the 90’s!)



Points to Share with the Class:

I could personally relate our FNED 346 class to this article. I love Dr. Bogad’s teaching technique. Instead of making us memorize vocabulary words She allows us to learn in our own way. While we read our weekly readings we write our articles in our own way-a way that reflects our individual learning techniques. I have learned so much in these past weeks in our class than any other class-mainly because I am not under pressure to memorize! 

4 comments:

  1. Hi Dorothy,
    I really liked the video that you used in your blog this week! I thought that it tied in nicely with your connections to Christensen. I also totally agree with you that I found myself relating this article to our FNED 346 class. All of the articles and classroom experiences kept jumping into my mind and reminded me of the teacher that I want to be.

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  2. Dorothy,

    I love your cartoon of the kid saying that he isn’t a floppy disc. So true! I love the retro throwback to floppies too. It shows how dated this backwards education system truly is!

    The first quote shows how we are just churning out clones through rote and memorization, over and over again. Shor here is telling us that we need innovators and critical thinkers!

    Your second quote is one of my favourites (I have many in this piece). Children are thinkers, they are curious. They want to know the answers to everything. Hence why they are constantly saying “but why”. They actually want to learn! I’m sure you see this in your classrooms when you are doing service learning! You also note how students all learn differently, as we saw in last week’s article. Very important to note.

    Speaking of differences in learning, you then touch upon difference in teachers. I’ve never gone to the website you shared, I didn’t know it existed. I don’t think I would go to it anyway because everyone’s learning style is different. Everyone learns differently so if there’s a student who doesn’t get anything out of a class and therefore dismisses the teacher style, that isn’t the teacher’s fault (most of the time). It’s simply that they learn differently.

    In the English class I have now, there’s an older woman with whom I have had other classes with through the years. One day, a few weeks after the start of the semester, we were talking about our class. She had told me she was so nervous about taking our professor because she had heard from fellow students about how difficult he was. How it was the only B they ever received on a paper. But she was having a different experience and so was I, sure we got crappy grades on our first drafts of our papers too but we were learning about what he was looking for so we could get it right the next time.

    He lectured towards us for the first couple of weeks and then had us discuss. Once he gauged our participation he noticed that we had a lot to say so he changed the format. Instead he now arranges our desks in a circle each class and sits among us as we discuss all class long how we feel about the texts. It’s the ultimate sign of respect and through this format, we have become a close knit family-esque class.

    This is all about what Shor was trying to teach us!

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  3. Dorothy,

    I love when you said " a teacher’s curriculum needs to be more than taking notes and memorization. These things can harm a child’s development and learning ability". This is so true. What are we really learning when we are copying down facts and do we ever look at them again? I know when I study for a test or quiz I always like to make a study guide and not even look at what I wrote in class.

    Thank you for your informative blog,
    Shanelle

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  4. I believe Shor’s main point in this article is that a teacher’s curriculum needs to be more than taking notes and memorization. These things can harm a child’s development and learning ability.

    I agree with this completely. when a teacher just makes students take notes it really is not doing anything for them and it does harm the learning ability because people do not want to learn by doing this.

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