Theme 1 concluding post

Among the focus questions for Theme 1 were the following: 

1. Should education be individualized to the interests or innate capacities of individual students? 
2. Should all children receive an education suitable for college readiness?
3. How important is it to prepare children to be successful in labor markets? What role if any should the need for a globally competitive workforce play in curricular design?

As with our introductory material, you all had different and interesting things to say. In this review, I’m going to focus on the first couple of issues since folks, by and large, had the most to say about them.

On individualized instruction, some were positively bullish. Here Kelly argues that accommodating the interests and learning styles of diverse learners is every teacher’s responsibility:

It is evident that all children do not learn the same way, at the same time.   It is the responsibility of the teacher and schools to meet the needs of all students.  It is clear that individualization is a priority when principals initiate professional development opportunities by offering trainings on multiple intelligences, differentiated learning, RTI (response to instruction), or ways to accommodate our diverse learners.  It is an educator’s job to meet the needs of all his/her students in the classroom.  If teachers are refining and reflecting their craft to meet the needs of ALL of our students, then society must be ready to embrace ALL of our students and youth.

Others were flatly skeptical of the possibility of meeting this standard when it comes to student’s interests. Lindsey, for instance, argues that:

…to plan and teach each child’s specific interests is idealistic, not reality. In a perfect world, all teachers strive to nurture student’s interests but they understand the limitations of this practice. Therefore, we need to group students by similar abilities or interests to meet realistic time restraints. This allows the teacher to reach more students throughout the day compared to meeting with each student individually. Of course, many will probably disagree with my claim that individualization can’t be done. The Head Start Program says it’s possible, and lays out a ‘simple’ management system for “Individualizing [Curriculum] for Every Child.” This involves using methods of creating categories for student needs, filling out summary sheets, preparing lessons, and documenting daily work. This process is not simple. While I agree with the Head Start Program proposition, I maintain that this is not achievable due to the time restraints and limitations of the teachers in today’s environment.

This matter of individualized versus non-individualized instruction also seemed to be bound up with disagreement on the merits of Deweyian learner-centered curricula versus the efficiency guided ideas of Ross and Bobbitt. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most folks are sanguine to the ideals in Dewey, but at least some wonder aloud just how sanguine they are. In a probing piece about her own priorities entitled ‘Old School is the New School?’, Rachel declares that, “I am that teacher that will not talk until it is quiet and I am that teacher that makes kids sit quietly inside while the rest of the classes are out enjoying recess and I am that teacher that makes them toe the line.” At the same time, she states, “I am the teacher that, when it comes down to it lets them learn whatever way is best for them.  If you need to stand up to learn, I am not going to force you to sit…I may not be able to let you learn only what you are passionate about…but I will try my best to provide you with additional resources and experiences so that you can be passionate about what I am required to expose you to. “So,” she asks herself, “what am I? Old school? New school? Or, am I the best of both school worlds?”

On the other hand, some strenuously object to parts of Bobbitt’s ideal, particularly the remark that students should not be educated in knowledge or skills they will never use. Stacy, for instance, worries about what sort of experience of education students will have if they are always educated only with an eye toward what use they will be socially. She shares this interesting video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M4tdMsg3ts&feature=fvwrel), in which a class valedictorian, “…likened herself to a slave who did what was asked of her without questioning.”

If Bobbitt’s remark also entails testing students for their strengths (through measures such as IQ), then setting them off on some educational track (e.g. college ready or vocational), then Chad and Lisa H. are not on board. Chad maintains that this sort of system can only be premised on “false interpretations of innate capabilities” and serve therefore to perpetuate social divisions based on race or class. Lisa on the other hand worries about the potential of this sort of system to limit the prospects of all. She writes:

While it may have been common practice for one to choose a career and keep that career for a lifetime, it is commonplace [nowadays] for one to have multiple, quite different careers before one retires.  Reports such as this one from Business Wire (http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20040923005586/en/NYC-Professionals-Expect-Careers-Lifetime-NYU-Survey) estimate professionals will have three or more careers over their lifetime. I also find it difficult to believe that a child could determine, or that an adult could choose for a child, what career that child would enter.  What happens when the child changes his/her mind about the career he/she wants to pursue?  While choice may not have been an option in the past, choices are expected.  It wouldn’t work to limit a student even to one field of work in order to determine what skill set it was necessary to teach.

Lisa goes on to suggest that some combination of child-centered instruction in elementary school and increased focus on job or college readiness in later years might be best. Some version of this sentiment is widely shared. Toni W., for instance argues that in order to build “a curriculum that produces mature adults ready to function in society and one that helps them discover and grow their innate abilities”:

The best option…[is] finding a balance between Dewey’s approach and the Social Efficiency model.  Through an experience-based model of education children will naturally lean toward their own abilities and interests.  On the other hand, this approach should not be void of some teacher-mandated learning of subjects in which the students themselves may not inherently choose to participate so that all children are exposed to the essential knowledge needed in order to successfully function in society.  Dewey’s method of fashioning schools to be “embryonic societies” where students are faced with actual problems in order to gain an understanding of real life situations and solutions to such can offers advantages as students develop a better sense of what they’ll face in the future (Kleibard, 2004).  It must be noted, though, that the experiences must be carefully designed to prepare children to operate successfully and help further the society in which they’ll take part.  Elements of the Social Efficiency model take root at this juncture.

Erica also opposes universal college readiness on grounds that it alienates students having no intention to pursue a college degree. Jeffrey, on the other hand, supports it on grounds that “not providing students with college readiness is essentially limiting a possible avenue for the individual if or when they choose to pursue endeavors other than directly entering college.”

So where do I end up in all of this? More confused than ever I think! You all raise just so many relevant considerations on all sides of the issues. I suppose there is one issue on which my position seems to be crystallizing, namely this last one on college readiness. 

Despite the many good arguments against universal college readiness, a few weighty counter-considerations always seem to win my allegiance. While it is no longer true that a college degree is a ticket to good work and success, the evidence remains pretty clear: Social mobility and status and having a college degree are powerfully linked. As the infographic here makes clear, the better educated you are, the more you earn and it is very rare indeed to be among top earners without higher education (see particularly the part ‘How class breaks down’): http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_04.html Since in our culture money is power, this speaks volumes to me about just how important it is for every individual to at least have had a fair shot at a college education. Unless every individual has had a fair shot, it seems to me, there is no way we can say that opportunities are equal in our society. Add to this the intrinsic rewards of a college education (the intrinsic value of learning and knowing more about the world, learning to appreciate the arts, literature, etc), along with its power to expand horizons and open minds, I can’t help but conclude that college readiness should be the standard for all capable students. Everything else then is just strategy, e.g. whether we should prefer child-centered methods to traditional academic ones or some model of social efficiency. Which (or which combination) we should prefer depends on which best gives every student a fair shot at going to college.

Having said some things about content, I want to finish with a few procedural remarks about blog writing and what I’ve seen so far. I’ve seen and read many very good and interesting things. One thing that especially impresses me with what I’ve read so far is the high level of engagement with our materials and ideas. Truly excellent! But there are always things that could improve. Here are just a few:

1. Focusing on a specific issue.  
2. Being very precise in what you want to say about it.  
3. Supporting what you want to say with examples, evidence, or arguments.
4. Engaging some of the real hard questions or details.  
5. For links to related web resources, indicating in your text what that link is a link to and why it’s important.

Each of these things, by the way, is modeled and highlighted in my Theme 1 introduction and my commentary on it, so please do revisit this if you’d like some examples. I’ve slightly updated in light of our work so far. 

Here are some remarks, too, about commenting on one another’s posts. The main thing that we are trying to do is advance our collective thinking about the issues. Hence, the most common sort of comment you should make should, in some way or other, will identify supporting or challenging evidence, examples, or arguments that the author does not consider. Comments need not always express disagreement then, and most of the time involve identifying points of both agreement and disagreement. So commenting is different from the following things, which you should avoid:

1. Making remarks about the author. Comments are about the author’s ideas or about the issues. 
2. Correcting the author’s diction, style, whatever. 

So commenting is also different from what I am doing when I send you feedback using a marked up Word .doc (which some of you have not received because I have no comments for you at this level). The comments I send in that format are generally comments about how to improve as a writer and they are not intended to model the sort of remarks you should make in your comments.

Okay, I look forward to the next round!

Introduction concluding post

What are the aims of education? Who should have authority to set the curriculum and how should we resolve curricular disputes? Big questions all, questions we’ll ponder all semester, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

We expressed a diversity of interesting views about them this week. On the question of aims, different folks expressed strong allegiance to just about every one of the major curricular ideologies (Scholar Academic, Social Efficiency, Social Justice, and Learner Centered).

Our classmate Chad Roundtree, an urban educator, argues that, “…the best method to determine curriculum or evaluate curriculum materials in [urban or underserved] schools is premised on its value in reconstructing the reality of student’s lives. I believe schooling or curriculum design birthed from conservative ideals will fail to address the very inequalities that created the challenges my students will face in our society and they will be deprived of the opportunity to acquire a pragmatic foundation with practical skills to become empowered to change their realities (Schiro, 2008).  Learning the accumulated knowledge of our culture or learning how to become functioning members of our society will certainly be effective with some groups of students, but from my experience, my students have become most invested and committed to their education when it granted the opportunity to create a more just society…I believe the only purpose of an education is to enhance the well-being of our children so that they may increase the vitality of our democratic society.”

Lisa Engelsman, on the other hand maintains that, “Children of all backgrounds should be given the opportunity to learn about the world around them and how to become an active participant in their society.  Taken together these two ideologies, scholar academic and social efficiency, ideally should be applied to create a school environment where knowledge and skills are taught to all children in such a way that upon graduation they have acquired what is needed to be critical thinkers and participants in society.  They should have the skills needed to either go to work or pursue higher education.”

Other folks declined to be pinned down, some on principled grounds. Emily DuLaney, for instance, argues that, “While these [ideologies] are powerful and carry lots of push they are not always in the student’s best interests. For example, how can we provide a well-rounded education when we focus solely on one policy or curriculum ideal or philosophy to the exclusion of all others? By adhering to one ideology we limit ourselves greatly as educators.”

Who is right here? Or is there even a disagreement? Maybe not. Arguably of the utmost importance to each of Chad, Lisa, and Emily is doing whatever will ensure the future well-being of their students. If there’s any disagreement, it seems to be in the method, and here it may be that the disagreement turns entirely on what’s most strategic given the different circumstances they and their students face. Chad suggests as much when he says that, “Learning the accumulated knowledge of our culture or learning how to become functioning members of our society will certainly be effective with some groups of students, but from my experience, my students have become most invested and committed to their education when it granted the opportunity to create a more just society…” But then again, if the students in Emily’s and Lisa’s classrooms are not educated to the problems that face Chad’s students, can Chad’s students ever hope to occupy that more just, democratic society?

If our collective comments on the curriculum ideologies were marked by personal clarity and conviction, many comments on how to resolve curricular controversies— such as those involved in the case of Mozert versus Hawkins—were equally marked by tentativeness and uncertainty. Toni Thompson touches perhaps on one source of this tension when she writes: 

“Education should not serve the purpose of teaching students what to think, but rather its goal should be to teach students how to think and to have the confidence to do so! It is absurd to not allow parents to object to such teaching that violated the values they teach at home.”

Many of us shared Toni's sentiment that educators should teach how and not what to think. But the next statement? That's where things get difficult. Few are willing to forgo the idea that exposing children to new and potentially foreign and different ideas is a crucial component of teaching them how to think. But as the case of the Mozert parents shows, unwillingness to do so is not entirely neutral and conveys its own 'what' message. Maura Foley registers this tension when she writes:

“Though I will not always agree with the decisions these groups make, it would be wrong of me to push my cultural background and beliefs on other communities as my job is not to teach students what I believe but to give them the tools and knowledge to make their own decisions. As I shape my general music curriculum, I try to mold the program to the cultural reality of my community while at the same time working to stretch the limits in order to expose my students to new ideas and ways of thinking. However one could argue that by doing that I’m imposing a belief that the study of ideas different from one’s own is vital...”

And so I would argue. When it comes to setting important curricular priorities, such as whether or not to confront our students with foreign cultural or religious perspectives, we can be faced with genuine disagreement and a genuine dilemma. In such cases, there may be no solution that can work to satisfy the perspective of all parties. In such cases, the problem becomes not how to satisfy everyone, but how best to justify the choices we make. Whose perspectives most merit our respect? Whose demands can we safely set to one side and why? Note by the way that we do not slip through the horns of such dilemmas by doing nothing or remaining silent on them. Our inaction and silence themselves can educate. What justifies our doing so?  

At this level of questioning, the relevance of philosophy and curricular theorizing is hopefully clear. Insofar as some will want to criticize the curricular choices we make, we need to call on theory and philosophy to justify ourselves. To do that, we have to think hard about where we stand on complicated issues at the intersection of ethics, politics, and education. Doug Schraufnagle wrestles with some of these questions when he argues that, “So long as we continue to convince people that individual rights are supreme and the government’s job is to enforce them, how will we learn to live together in a society? The case of Mozert v. Hawkins County Public Schools provides us with a powerful example of such a contradiction (albeit a productive one). When we consider the individual rights of the parents who feel constrained by multicultural views of plurality, which voices do we listen to? Recognize that we are confined here by the ideological discourse of liberalism. If individual rights are the most important measure, then we are striving to be universally individual in a society which is inherently social. Is that a paradox, or just a contradiction?”

Good question, Doug. We’ll get deeper into it and questions like it ahead.