The two articles's for this week's class (Leard & Lashua, 2006 and Cavallo et. al) describe at length teachers and researchers success stories with young people who through pedagogical practices ascribed by Freire were able to accomplish what many thought was not possible. "The City That We Want" presented a wonderful paradigm for teaching by combining the epistemological theories of Piaget, Freire and Papert and providing a "generative theme whereby any participant will have their own ideas and beliefs and can use these to guide their conception and implementation." Thus, the student can use the skills and ideas that they have experienced to guide them in learning and most importantly changing the world around them for the better.
As it pertains Instructional Technologies class and how technologies are used I felt the Cavallo article illustrated some poignant moments of the use of cameras by students to illustrate and narrate their environments. One example, the young girls who used cameras to show the deplorable conditions and sexual the harassment. These girls understood how to portray their environment and displayed what needed to be changed to fight against the conditions they faced.
I couldn't help to think that the subtexts to these examples are to disprove many of the prejudices that people have about children in inner city or "developing nations": an idea that only certain children want to learn and others do not or are not interested in it. Many believe that some young people have given up or are lazy. Some believe in bogus theories of intelligence that it is a product of genes. Through critical pedagogy and understanding the problems of life under capitalism and what it creates (inequality, racism, sexism, etc), educators of all types need to understand that children not only want to learn but need it as they do breathing. Would we ever ask a child, do you want to breathe?
The real question within these pedagogical breakthroughs, where teachers were able (with support of course) to reach students with all the environmental baggage they carry, is whether societies in general are making the reforms or revolutions to move into a system of education that can work. Education here meaning much more than what is "required" by some standards but a deeper understanding of how to change your surroundings. I think Leard & Lashua in quoting Dimtriadis made the conclusion that, "it is important to validate a wide range of competencies in the classroom, such as emceeing or rapping, and utilize knowledge gained from efforts to survive on the streets."
By understanding the literacy of young people, or our students, we can develop along with relevant technologies a curriculum that is relevant to our students needs. A problem-solving education should not be something foreign to our understanding of how children learn or how knowledge is gained. Instead it should be our daily practice of solving the problems of society in general because in the end if you cannot eat, how relevant is knowing Plato, Socrates or the rest of dead philosophers?
2 comments:
You point out the critical underpinning of education, which is that we, as a society, must decide what is valuable to know and to pass on to succeeding generations. I do believe that the traditional mode of education is important for the knowledge it teaches, but also that innovative programs, such as those that we read, are equally important for the intellectual challenges and creative thinking that they promote. Wisdom comes from both thinking and doing, and then reflection on the results. Students needs different educational experiences in order to learn different things. So, budgetary constraints aside, are you in favor of lengthening the student's time in school to allow for a broader educational experience?
It's not so much that I am in favor of lengthening children's time at school but that education is confined to the educational space of a school. We tend to fetishize the actual building of a school as the only location for education.
We need to come to a deeper appreciation that in everyday situations all of us can become teacher and vice a versa the student in different spaces in changing the world around us.
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