Week 3 Reflections

I am first going to begin by summarizing what I got out of the article Teaching is a Subversive Activity. The article is calling for more than just a reformation of existing practices. It is calling for a whole new way of doing school. In this new way of doing school the teacher becomes someone who fosters inquiry-based learning. Inquiry-based learning promotes the continued search for knowledge and rejects the idea of accepting answers that are conclusive. Inquiry-based learning would be lead by the student’s needs and curiosity. Therefore, the learning becomes more student centered and more focused on the process of learning. The teacher would help guide students in the sense that the teacher would ask questions and push students into deeper knowledge. This type of learning would also teach the students the art of crap detecting. They would no longer just accept without question the messages from authority and media. They would learn to be able to recognize biases in these messages.

I think this is a great idea, but I would need someone to model what this type of classroom would look like. It all sounds good in theory but how is it in practice? I also do agree that this type of classroom could not exist without radical change in the education system. Standardized tests couldn’t really exist with this new type of learning because everyone is going to experience different learning. Teachers also would have different looking lesson plans because they are no longer leading the students down certain paths. Instead the students are leading teachers down paths of inquiry and the teacher just acts as a questioner to get the students thinking even more deeply on the subject. Classroom sizes would also need to decrease dramatically for this type of personalized education to take place. I could have read into this article wrong and maybe I haven’t quite mastered the concept of inquiry-based learning.  This is just my perception of the information presented to me.

 

I think the only way to become a subversive crap detector is to become an inquiry-based learner. I need to educate myself on issues in order to be able to question authority and know the biases the media is portraying. I constantly would need to be pursuing knowledge in order to keep up with the ever changing wealth of information that is thrown at us as new information is learned every day.

 

I am going to leave you with quotes from Kozol's book that really stuck with me as lessons to remember when teaching in my classroom.

-"Celebrate words like "skinny" and "bamboozle" and "persnickety"!" (page 56)

-"None of us should make the error of assuming that a child who is hostile to us at the start, or who retreats into a sullenness and silence or sarcastic disregard for everything that's going on around him in the room, does not have the will to learn, and plenty of intersting stuff to teach us too, if we are willing to invest the time and the inventiveness to penetrate his seemingly implacable belief that grown-ups do not mean him well and that, if he trusts us, we will probably betray or disappoint him." (page 67)

-"If we want to teach our children to take pride in their own voices, I think that teachers need to fight hard to take pride in their own voices too." (page 98)

I also really loved the last chapter we read about making learning fun by making it relevant to what is actually happening in their lives (the tooth scenario). I want to strive to make my lessons engaging to them by having it relate to their lives.

I also like Francesca's story about the boy looking at a squirrel outside the window. I agree that "I won't be responsible for hurrying my children out of that age when many things are interesting and so much is new" (page 105). I wouldn't stop the student from watching the squirrel. I might just ask him to write about it later ;)