Subversive Week 4

The one thing my co-op does that is subversive is he does encourage a lot of student-student interaction as opposed to teacher-student interaction. I think to be even more subversive the lessons need to pose more of a problem for students. Right now, there isn’t much inquiry-based learning going on in the classroom. The teacher is still acting as the main source of information and the teacher is still in charge of transferring that information to the students. Another part of being subversive is not always accepting that there is one single answer to a question. One of the team teachers asked my co-op while they were planning the lesson for hyperboles if a hyperbole can be personification. I think it can be. For example a sentence like “the bear’s smiles was as wide as a river” could be both a hyperbole, personification, and there is even a simile in there! However, instead of having to explain to students that there could be two or more answers, they just chose to make sure their worksheet sentences only had one clear answer. I also think more authenticity needs to be brought into the classroom. The poetry unit could have included a lot more examples of how it is found in their everyday lives. For example, they could have done a project where they look for poetic devices in songs like the Katy Perry song we did in class during Teaching Writing.  

 

I was looking up more about subversive teaching and came across and interesting guy named Peter Pappas (I am now following him on Twitter). He poses some great questions to teachers and schools so they can evaluate how subversive they are being.

 

http://www.peterpappas.com/2012/07/13-subversive-questions-for-the-classroom.html