Doc Johnson
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Re: ThreadBanger: DIY Fashion and Sewing
Amortisatie Wrote:not to be a bump on the road, but what book?
Well, since you asked...
Some excerpts from the Intro:
Quote:Failure of [educational] policy and those who implement it to be flexible in adapting to differences in students’ idiosyncratic approaches to growing and being within the context of schooling often results in significant problems, both for schools and for students. Kids who don’t fit in, kids who don’t “achieve” at their levels of ability, kids who just don’t give a damn… they all become problems for school policy, and the administrators of the institution seek though various means to gain their compliance. The presence of such kids in the school harms the school’s ability to generate “achievement” as a product; and the process of schooling often creates for such kids an environment that actively militates against their self-conceptions, their preferred modes of social being, and their ongoing commitment to and love of learning as an activity.
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In this book, I hope to demonstrate that different conceptions of the student, as a subject, result in very different understandings of appropriate pedagogy. I believe that each of the cases presented will examples that will help my readers understand why current standards-based educational policy does not demonstrate much insight in its understanding of students, especially students who fail, who don’t fit, who resist, who will not and/or who cannot be made to fit by the policy that is supposed to serve them. In standards-based education (SBE) students’ subjective experiences, motivations, and so forth have been simplified, rendered irrelevant, and/or externalized to their experiences of education. At the same time students have available to them, by virtue of their very humanity, a variety of internal referents, seemingly irrelevant to policy makers: the elements of their biographies that make them real people who experience education in the particular. These are the sorts of referents pertaining to one’s experience of “self” contra one’s role as “student” as constructed in various processes of education.
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SBE [standards-based education] policy demonstrates a fundamental lack of concern for a host of unassessed differences among students: differences in learning styles, interests, motivations, family lives, socioeconomic circumstances, and many, many other things. Why and how particular students are motivated to learn in the first place is, to me, a much more important question than that regarding how students in general might be motivated to cooperate with school policies and practices through application of any given system of standards, assessment, and accountability. While current educational policy is predicated on a relatively straightforward and seemingly commonsense set of prescriptions related to those three concerns, I believe that the consequences of this system are both more complicated and more vexatious than many people (especially the makers and administrators of policy) assume. To put it plainly, students are human beings who encounter education in particular, not in general. Who a student is, and how he or she encounters these particularities of experience matter very much. The individual student’s personal experiences of education are the foundation of that student’s cognitions, motivations, and actions, and they also are the reasons for how any particular student will interact with the educational system in question. Current policies governing public education are insufficiently attentive to this fact. The net result of this inattention to the particularity of student lives is an educational experience that is, on the whole, less interesting, less rewarding, and less inspiring of further efforts to become educated. At the same time, students must live in a world that requires that they prepare for a variety of adult responsibilities without providing the sorts of autonomy that would allow them to actually be prepared as adults to meet those challenges productively.
And my conclusion:
Quote:This set of principles suggests in the broadest possible terms, what I consider to be the lessons from my inquiries into the pedagogical philosophies and practices found in Marine Corps recruit training and Ving Tsun kung fu, and the critiques of traditional schooling emerging from School Survival. They are not specific policy recommendations or standards. They are points from which to orient and interrogate specific policy practices and standards. They are metacritical principles with which to assess policy, drawn from various points in the preceding chapters, and very much in the spirit of my understanding of how principles guide practice in Ving Tsun. I have stated each as clearly as possible, while at the same time attempting to keep them general enough for usage in diverse contexts and situations.
1. Every place can be a classroom, and every occasion can be a time to learn.
2. Everyone can be a teacher and everyone can be a student.
3. Culminating events and intermediate achievements are important. They lend a sense of real progress and achievement to the minutia of the daily grind.
4. Worrying about mistakes is fruitless, as it focuses you on (a) the idea that there is only one answer to every problem, and (b) worrying about the past instead of the present. They also personalize failure and make you worry about failure and achievement instead of the work that is being done and how it’s being done.
5. Learning is not always either easy or fun (nor should it be). At the same time, there is room in education for play.
6. Young people are capable of assuming responsibility if they are expected to, and if they are given the autonomy to do so. Create space for autonomous action and personal responsibility. Let the consequences rather than “accountability” guide the student toward better behavior.
7. Standards should be as basic as possible, and should be elaborated with an eye toward emphasizing the most basic and critical aspects. Fundamental elements should be given time and attention, and students should have the opportunity to explore the relationships between advanced and “basic” concepts and principles.
8. The space of the school is not a prison. Not all aspects of school life should resemble prison life: architecture, uses of time, and surveillance that make it seem so should avoided.
9. Praise and recognition are at least as important as punishment in motivation. People get used to punishment, and learn to endure it. They embrace praise/recognition even if it is unwarranted. Forgive failure and then move on to the next attempt to be successful. In the same spirit, do not make explicit comparisons between “good” and “bad” students. This promotes division, bad feelings, and brutality.
10. Respect students’ bodies and belongings. The boundary between people’s self-concepts, their possessions, their styles, and their personal space, is porous and can become a point of contention.
11. Citizenship does not mean, going along with everyone else. It is diverse, and includes the full range of citizens. Do not force enthusiasm. Things like pep rallies and school spirit for some are affirmations; for others they are torture and brainwashing. Give students personally relevant reasons to be enthusiastic about school instead of forcing them to ape enthusiasm (or to form a counter-reaction to others’ enthusiasm).
12. Do not allow abuse. Respect the dignity of each student, even when it is hard to do so. Popular or “good” students should demonstrate tolerance for those who are not (with power comes responsibility). Administrators and teachers set the tone for how people are treated. If they show respect as a matter of course, then their example will show others what is expected.
13. Authentic learning incorporates both training and play as elements of curriculum. Create learning environments that allow engagement with curriculum in a variety of ways. Allow for diverse learning styles at the same time as challenging students to expand their repertoires of learning styles.
14. The community needs to be a part of schooling, not as “stakeholders,” but as participants in ongoing learning. Schools should, as a result, be made to be more like libraries and community centers. At the same time, students should remain important decision-makers in the context, because it belongs to them.
I hope that my readers take to heart (or at least attempt to be charitable toward) these principles. I offer them as one way to put students at the center of the educational enterprise. The alternative is not acceptable, and too many times current schooling practices to seem to go in the opposite direction, valuing control over humanity. When we create organizational structures to process human beings, in pursuit more ideal human “products,” there is a great danger that the individuals who manage the organization, driven by that larger organizational purpose, will treat any human "dysfunction" in that organizational system (e.g., academically deficient or poorly behaved children) as less than fully human. This will-to-perfection ignores that human beings cannot, logically, be dysfunctions in an organizational system, unless one's thinking about organizational functioning assumes that people are already less than fully human, merely parts that either work well or do not. To assume this is to make a categorical error. Human beings are not the same thing as organizational "parts." When we assume this, then children, prisoners, the insane, the mentally challenged, the crippled of mind, limb and spirit, can easily become human sacrifices on the altar of organizational mission. Even worse, we are able to rationalize failure to produce in terms of individual dysfunction rather than in terms of organizational failure to cope with reality.
We must be careful to remember that education is always, always, always about human nature and human relationships. When we allow organizational mission to occlude that, and to create the conditions that breed dehumanizing behavior, and sociopathic personalities for that matter, then we do not serve humanity. We don't help anyone by forcing every individual into the same conceptual cubby holes. But it happens every day. We break a lot of these individuals as they are coerced and encouraged and bribed, with increasing forcefulness, to comply with organizational rules, roles, and outcomes. More importantly, people who fail to fit well, who get broken in the process, are made personally to blame for their victimage. Those who are made to fit, easily or not, and survive the process, often have, themselves, internalized the very measures by which they are molded into stereotype. Even if we think, for example, that a teacher is unfair, and school sucks, it is difficult not to pay attention to what one's poor grades are supposed to mean. Very few people who make passing grades have sympathy for those who don't. They feel lucky, skilled, and maybe a little bit righteous about it. They succeeded where others failed. Failure, of course, is a matter of not having the right attitude or not applying oneself or—Fates forefend!—resisting the attempts of others to mold one's cognitions and behaviors to be “correct.” This trend toward sameness and blame for failure to conform may not be the greatest danger facing our public schools, but it stifles creativity, arbitrarily rewards conforming behaviors, and lays the groundwork for scapegoating those who pose a problem for the smooth functioning of the system.
At some point, there will be people who do not fit the system. They will manifest this in a variety of ways, and there are just as many reasons for why they don’t fit with the school’s dominant culture. I do not believe that making them fit is the only answer, or the best one. However, neither is leaving them without recourse. They may feel like losers or freaks, or they may feel that parents and teachers don’t understand them. On the first count, they are different, but that doesn’t make them losers; on the second count, they may be exactly right. For that reason, they need space to develop, and people who will listen and help them, rather than correct or fix them.
I got nothin'.
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