This article from CNN’s education section shocked me on a few different levels.  To sum it up (although I still think you should read it), No Child Left Behind has a “loophole”: any racial group with fewer than 45 members in a school can be excluded at the school administrator’s will.  In many cases throughout the country, schools have been counting the scores of the white population and discarding the scores of the black minority population due to their lower performance.  This fact in itself is disheartening – despite the social advancements we’ve made as a country, a situation such as this one seems to give America, especially its minorities, a smack in the face.

Apart from the racial discrimination issue, this loophole highlights the wrongs of the educational system today.  “One of the consequences is that educators are creating a false picture of academic progress.”  So true!  Brophy would say that America has begun its focus on performance goals in lieu of mastery and learning goals.  How can the educational system be so hypocritical as to adopt the theory that success is measured by grades, let alone manufactured ones?  The academic progress of a school is based on so much more than standardized test scores; and yet it seems that administrations believe strongly enough in the antithesis to this statement to take advantage of the ability to exclude an entire race.

What are they trying to prove?

My viewpoint on education has always involved a focus on creativity.  Perhaps, as a student in Music Education, this should come at no surprise.  My philosophy of education is oriented toward allowing the individual to express himself in a means that works for him – if this means includes music, I become excited.  I know that I have the chance to mold this student’s potential into something unique that distinguishes him from the rest of the student population.  While I used to believe that creativity was only an aspect that could be applied to the fine arts, certain readings in educational theory, philosophy, and practice have altered my concept of what is possible in other forms of education.

Central to the concept of creativity is the role of the individual.  David Labaree discusses the implications of three different goals in education: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility.  I believe that the last of the three has the most potential when it comes to fostering the success of the individual.  Democratic equality promotes the creation of the ideal citizen, while social efficiency aims to ready each student for the workforce; each of these approaches ignores the input of the individual and instead portrays education as a collective, public good.  While these consequences are not necessarily negative, they fail to address the promotion of the individual’s interests and desires; in this way, they limit student choices and are relatively oppressive.

I maintain that the student must be able to express himself in the way that he chooses to in order to feel responsibility for his accomplishments and that this is made possible through adopting the social mobility goal.  This educational approach fosters the success of the individual and allows them to own their accomplishments.  As Labaree states, “From the perspective of the mobility goal, the outcome for the individual is precisely what matters most.  The result is an emphasis on individual status attainment rather than the production of human capital” (p. 51).  As a sort of private good, education is represented as a source of cultural capital.  Once something takes on such value, it becomes a sought-after commodity; the individual is thus motivated to gain as much of this commodity as possible to ensure his success.

Unfortunately, some will receive more than others and this implies that there will be varying levels of mobility as Labaree addresses in his discussion of downfalls of social mobility.  As the term “mobility” implies, individuals are able to rise in the pyramid of educational and eventual vocational achievement based on their performance in school.  Many students end up viewing school as a way to prove themselves capable of being the best instead of a community in which to actually learn.  They excel in becoming “well schooled and poorly educated” (p. 68).  Thus, the question becomes how do we give students an education that will give them freedom to choose their own course as well as acquire a comprehensive and broad base of knowledge?  To find the answer, we must turn to Brophy.

Brophy’s ideas for motivating students are extremely thorough and address each type of learner.  He distinguishes performance goals from mastery goals by discussing the lack of learning involved in the prior; that is, performance goals would be common among students in educational systems that promote social mobility.  As educators, and even as part of his community in general, we have the responsibility to direct the student’s effort toward mastery-oriented goals.  This support is necessary to ensure that the student’s drive to obtain education as cultural capital is not a shallow one – actual learning must occur!

To do this, we must scaffold the student’s interests and achievements.  A good place to start would be to let the student know that he has control over his success in acquiring knowledge.  Brophy discusses the entity theory, in which students view knowledge as a fixed entity that they cannot alter, and the incremental theory, in which students understand that they can increase their knowledge incrementally.  Of course, a learner’s community must foster the latter theory to help the student feel empowered over his own success.  Brophy continues to state, “You can encourage the incremental theory of ability and a mastery orientation toward learning activities by portraying these activities as opportunities to acquire (not just display) knowledge or skill and by giving feedback to students in ways that reinforce this idea” (Supporting, p. 60).  The student must know that gaining knowledge is an educational process, not merely an end.

One more influential way to encourage learning is to make the information meaningful.  I experienced this firsthand as part of my tutoring process.  The teacher in the middle school at which I tutored, let’s call her Mrs. Jones, was extremely effective in this area.  By giving personal stories as part of several English lessons, the kids were more attentive and understood her on a much deeper level.  I was able to take a lesson from Mrs. Jones in this area and help one student with a “How-to” paper that required them to write about a quote written somewhere around the room.  One student chose to write about the quote that said “A smiling face makes this a happy place!”  On the surface, I thought that this sixth grade African-American student who made it clear he was uninterested in the assignment was not going to probe his mind to find any connection with the quote.  When I asked him what the quote meant to him, he stared at me blankly, wearing anything but a smile.

But then I asked him to think about why this quote was in the room – why would some lame smiley face and a quote on a poster change someone’s day?  With a slight smile, he told me that it probably made someone happy to see other people smiling.  I asked him if he’d ever experienced this sensation personally, and I was afraid to be answered by laughing and criticism; instead, he told me “yeah, like when I go to McDonald’s, everyone smiles and it makes me feel more comfortable and like I want to buy stuff.”  Perfect!  I thought to myself and out loud.  “Yeah, ok, so I guess it does make me feel better when other people are happy,” he continued, “and maybe if I show others that I’m happy, I can make a difference in their day too.”

At first, I thought that he might be using sarcasm to enhance his display of disinterest – but then I saw him nodding his head as he wrote down sentence after sentence on his formerly blank piece of paper.  He showed a sense of understanding and appreciation that was not there when we started talking.  This young man’s perspective was changed by something that was meaningful to him – a McDonald’s restaurant.  Our conversation seemed to motivate him to find some connection with the assignment that originally started out as dull and meaningless to him.  Of course, once the student is motivated to learn something, one is faced with a glaring question: just what is it that we want him to learn?  I have experienced one defining moment that has influenced the most basic aspect of my views on education: how to define literacy.

In music, literacy might be considered the ability to interpret notes on the page – that is, to use the correct fingerings, follow the correct dynamics and other markings, and perhaps even bring an unwritten interpretation to the piece that is unique to the individual’s concept of musicality.  By using a prior knowledge foundation to interpret material and ultimately make statements that extend beyond what is explicitly written, we discover a description is perhaps applicable to all areas of literacy.  Steven Tozer identifies four contemporary perspectives of literacy: conventional, functional, cultural, and critical.  Each vantage point seems to become more complex than its predecessor.  The first represents the most basic question of one’s ability to read and write, and generally describes what most people would consider the traditional definition of literacy to be.  However, it is simply not enough to stop here; we must press on to include more complex aspects of comprehension in literacy.

Functional literacy addresses a social practicality that focuses on understanding the significance of what is being communicated.  This type of literacy, as the term would suggest, refers to the skills required for a person to function as a comprehending member of society with the ability to balance check books, understand events in the newspaper, etc.  This view is limited in completeness however, as it fails to address a sense of worldly context that cultural literacy provides.  For instance, beginning to form opinions based on social and political factors in one’s environment would imply that one is culturally literate.  And finally, the ability to recognize injustices and emancipate oneself from them is recognized in the critical literacy perspective.

I think that this last view is perhaps the most complete description of my goal as an educator, although perhaps not the most convenient to use in discourse involving the term literacy.  For example, I feel I should be able to use the phrase “computer literate” to imply that one is capable of using a computer to express his own ideas – this necessitates the idea that literacy is a measure of one’s proficiency in performing certain actions.  It is not enough to be able to turn the computer on and off – this is what conventional literacy might imply.  However, I do not think that many things about computer literacy are oppressive and require emancipation, as the critical view describes.  In terms of literacy, I believe that an individual must be informed about contextual norms and truths in order to make sense of the information he acquires through a given form of “literature” to be considered fully literate.

It is one thing to explain the many facets of my personal philosophy of education but an entirely different feat to assimilate such ideas into the real world.  It is therefore necessary to consider the role of the school systems in determining what students learn and how they learn it.  In their article, “Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits,” Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk compare and contrast aspects of critical thinking and critical pedagogy.  While there are many differences between each of these views, they share an essential element: “For both critical thinking and critical pedagogy, ‘criticality’ requires that one be moved to do something, whether that something be seeking reasons or seeking social justice” (p. 51).  Regardless of whether one wishes to adhere to the critical thinking or critical pedagogy viewpoint, the important aspect of each of these ways of thinking is that they require action.

One of my first priorities as an educator will be to create a classroom environment that is oriented around discussion, not test-taking.  I believe that discussions can be just as effective, if not more, as tests are in evaluating student performance.  While discussion-based activities will most likely be few and far between in the music classroom, they would be crucial if I ended up teaching my minor, Secondary English.  I think that more subjects should model themselves after many English classrooms by cutting down on tests and increasing the focus on participation in group discussion.  So much more can be learned when everyone shares his ideas with his peers than when he is required to write them down in an allotted amount of time on a multiple choice exam.  As a critical thinker, I am preparing myself to become a critical pedagogue – that is, the energy I expend toward cognition currently is in preparation for the modifications I hope to implement within the school system.

This movement would seem to draw the focus away from the emphasis on the individual, as I have up until now been trying to sell.  But upon further examination, I am confident that the approach would imply a more individualized attention when executed properly.  Instead of supplying students with questions pointed toward certain answers, I hope to foster their creativity in allowing them to form their own questions about issues and establish their own answers individually.  It would be important to subsequently have them share their ideas with a group of other students in order to allow cognitive development to thrive.  Tozer’s conception of literacy applies here in full force: these students would be responsible for understanding the material’s context in order to truly process it.

Burbules and Berk note that a critical pedagogue would supply their students with questions to which they already have specific answers mapped out, while the critical thinker might instead hope to accomplish new feats by illuminating novel questions in the quest to discover the truth.  This is where I would side with the critical thinker – I want my students to make their own insights; each student has his own experiences to bring to the table, so each will have the facility to add a new perspective to the collective.  I aim to take Brophy’s words to heart and scaffold each student’s ideas to foster their ability to make meaningful connections, thereby learning the material instead of regurgitating it or circling a letter on a “multiple guess” test.

As a future educator, I am prepared to take responsibility for becoming a change agent.  Whether through holding discussions with my class on the social and political implications of a publication of recent events or encouraging them to bring their own interpretation to a piece of music, I want my students to be able to think for themselves.  My overall goal is to therefore bring out the unique aspects of each student’s thought processes while motivating him to think critically.  I hope I have shown how the different facets of Labaree’s social mobility, Brophy’s learning goals, Tozer’s literacy, and Burbules and Berk’s criticality have combined with my own experiences to create a rather eclectic but comprehensive representation of the educator I have started becoming.  To answer that one middle school student’s question, I am ready to be a teacher.  Do I think I am done learning?  Not by a long shot.

Bibliography

Brophy, J. (2004). Supporting students’ confidence as learners. In Motivating students to learn (2nd ed., pp. 55-86). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Burbules, N. C., & Berk, R. (1999). Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences and limits. In T. S. Popkewitz, T. S., & L. Fendler (Eds.) Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics (pp. 45-65). New York: Routledge.

Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34, 39-81.

Tozer, S. E., & Willis, A. I. (1995). Liberty and literacy today: Contemporary perspectives. In S. E. Tozer, P. C. Violas & G. B. Senese (Eds.), School and society: Historical and contemporary perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 247-264). New York: McGraw-Hill.

I was elated to find out that the rest of Ian’s article regarded writing style for a few reasons. First off, writing style was the aspect that initially drew me in to Royce’s own reading response. By beginning his writing in a commanding tone, I did exactly what he told me to do, and was glad that I did so. Secondly, I was hoping that he was not emotionally reacting to the content of the article: a professor maintaining that overpopulation was causing a problem that could perhaps only be solved by “death for most of the human population”. I had hoped that this was not the case because the article, once I read it, seemed so blatantly out of context.

Luckily, Royce and I share the same view and have the same reaction toward the article: what stands out is not the strikingly inhumane content, but the way in which the content was presented. Ironically, the article begins with noting that this professor’s comment was out of context before it continues to take more and more of his statements out of context. How does this make sense? The author must have decided briefly that something should be done about ensuring that people who support this professor don’t rise in outrage, so he inserted a courtesy statement. And yet, the rest of the article continues to suggest that this author really doesn’t care about context.

There is something to be said about persuasive writing – I think that this article creates an opinion in the type of reader who fails to look beyond the subjective matter of the article. For people like Royce and I, the content of the article is only half the story; the political writing style is the remaining issue. As critical thinkers, we find value in analyzing how the author uses subconscious writing techniques to convey his point. It would be a more interesting article if the author displayed complete quotes and included references to other issues that didn’t make this professor sound completely crazy.

The main categories I used to make the massive amount of information from this article make sense to me were the following: Idealistic vs. Practical, Collective vs. Individual, and Public vs. Private. The article implies that the three aspects of political goals in education (democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility) all lie in different areas of these categories, and I divide them as follows:

Democratic equality: idealistic, mainly collective, public
Social efficiency: practical, collective, public good for private sector
Social mobility: practical, individual, private

Overall, I see social mobility as the crossroads of democratic equality and social efficiency in many ways. As the article mentions, social efficiency supports the idea of creating a pyramid of educational and vocational prestige. This is a very practical view of the world in that each job requires different levels of education, and to keep society running in a way that is “fair,” we must have some reasoning behind giving some people high level jobs and others lower level jobs. As has been noted before, we can’t have people with PhD’s working at McDonald’s – someone needs to take these less desirable jobs to maintain the structure of society.

However, while the social efficiency viewpoint might consdier these truths to be unchangeable, the social mobility viewpoint believes that this pyramid form is not prescribed. People can move between levels of the pyramid (hence “mobility”) and create their own destiny. This idea shows the influence of the democratic equality viewpoint as it is more idealistic. Social mobility and democratic equality (DE) have the following in common: focus on educational opportunity and focus on individual achievement. (While DE is mainly focused on collective good, this collective good is obtained through the success of each individual.) On the other hand, this progressivist view is countered by the conservative view, or the crossroads of SE and SM, that focuses on the practicality aspects that progressivists seem to neglect: funding of these optimistic ideals and social implications of such feats.

The end result (an overall pyramid that allows cases of mobility) seems to describe what society really is shaped as. Of course, the SM view is not just a combination of DE and SE views. Instead of having the goal to shape people into ideal republicans or workers, SM is oriented toward creating “winners”. This view is not ideal – instead of instilling hard-working values into people, it promotes the development of well schooled and poorly educated students (p. 68). As long as students get their credentials and decent grades, they don’t care what they actually learn.

At the risk of summing this article up with a question, I believe that it is the only way to end: how do we give students an education that will prepare them well for their job but also give them a broad knowledge base? Until we can find the answer to this question, we must continue to analyze the effectiveness of each view to create the model student.

But when do we as teachers say we’ve done all we can do?  When do we hold students and their parents responsible for the grades our students receive?  I think that there are still a lot of factors that we have not addressed that account for student motivation; I both fear and look forward to becoming a teacher so that I can find out what some of these outlying factors are and how to deal with them.  It becomes a new challenge to find the root of student motivation and lack thereof once one is out in the real world and not just theorizing in a teacher education course.

As the students were working on their “How-to” paper in class, I walked around to help any students with questions.  As I was helping one student, another would raise their hand and ask me a question, then another.  Finally, I got four or five students together who weren’t making much progress on their paper and we had a talk about how to write their paper.  Each of them told me their subject that they were to describe, and I tried scaffolding all of their ideas, asking them how they could make the subject grab the reader’s attention.  “Why do I care about learning how to tie my shoes?” I asked one student, with an interesting response of “Well, if you don’t know, you could trip on your shoelaces and fall on your face!”  I told her that it seemed like it was important to know for my own health and safety, and she grinned, writing down ideas incorporating the help that I gave her.

The surprise of my day occurred when one of the students I had been regularly helping raised her hand and asked, “Miss Morris, are you ready to be a teacher?”  I sat there smiling and perhaps furrowing my brow, considering the best way to answer this question: if I said yes, I would imply that I have nothing left to learn; if I said no, they would consider me a student, just like them.  I started to speak, but realized I had no idea how to answer the question.  The truth is, I do not think I could handle teaching a class for an entire year at present.  Spending time with these kids opened my eyes and made me see what it was like to teach at an inner-city school at a lower socio-economic level than the one in which I grew up.

At the beginning of TE 302, I read each text and applied it to the experiences I have had as a member of the upper-middle class.  However, upon beginning my tutoring at this Lansing middle school, I was initially shocked at how “out of control” the class environment seemed.  I know that I needed this wake up call for many reasons – after being in this environment, I expect to be much less intimidated by problems that might arise with trouble students in the future.  While I do not expect to be able to tackle every problem that comes my way, I do think that I will be more prepared to enforce classroom management when it needs to be enforced.  After seeing what happens in a consistent environment as well as a non-consistent environment, I appreciate the value of giving kids rules and sticking to those rules.  I still want to gain more experience with teaching though, and I expect to be able to do that as I take more courses at MSU and have more opportunities to teach and observe.

Am I ready to be a teacher?  Yes.  Do I think I’m done learning?  Not by a long shot.

The section on critical pedagogy was, on the surface, disheartening – are we supposed to be able to apply critical thinking techniques to our educational system? The article brings up the differences between critical thinking and critical pedagogy, mainly citing the different views on the role of politics and structure of the processes themselves; that is, critical thinking is more step-by-step based, while critical pedagogy seeks to teach to an overall goal. I feel like the step-by-step approach is something that would have been recommended in our last article by Ornstein as a sort of defensive teaching strategy. Critical pedagogy seems a much better means of teaching to me, as I tend to want overall educational goals to aspire to as both the teacher and the student.

Overall, I think that the article created a relatively subjective view of the concept of criticality. I appreciated the section on criticisms of critical thinking, but I don’t think that Burbules answered the questions that really needed to be answered. Why are women and ethnic minorities against critical thinking and pedagogy? Could it be that both subjects of criticality really are geared toward white males? Burbules seems to mystify the entire event by asking more questions and dancing around the actual issue at hand: what can be done to bridge the gap between feminist and minority views and criticality? Unfortunately and ironically, I don’t have the answer, so I will dance a little more before ending. Perhaps there is a way for critical thinking and critical pedagogy to take on a broader set of cultural values that would cater to these groups’ way of thinking.

Until that day, it seems that educators must continue to draw from different views to add to the existing eclectic pool of ideas from which good teachers draw different aspects of their teaching philosophy and practice. The ideas of critical pedagogy and critical thinking serve as yet more possibilities for the educator whose quest for the perfect philosophy never ends.

I was able to sort of co-teach with Mrs. A and address the students’ questions as if I were the teacher. Since I was in a different class then usual, I could not help my usual student, but rather helped everyone, walking around the room and keeping students on task. There was one boy to whom I did devote a lot of my time after having come back to him in my rounds and seeing a blank paper repeatedly… let’s call him Devon. Devon adapted the learned helplessness role, telling me that he didn’t understand the assignment (after I had personally explained it to him and given him examples multiple times) or he couldn’t do it. I sat down with him and we looked at his quote, which was somewhere along the lines of “Your smile makes this a nicer place.” This quote was not particularly deep or insightful, and I was hoping that he could manage thinking up something to say about his topic.

But then I thought about it myself – was it really easier to write about a topic that did not require a lot of thinking? I asked Devon to think about where he had experienced the topic personally – whether he was the one smiling or someone else was. Immediately, he thought about McDonald’s; he told me that he felt more comfortable in a McDonald’s because the workers smiled a lot. I was surprised by his example, but even more surprised to discover that it was a great idea about which he could write a paragraph. It made the poster’s value come to life, even in such “primitive” contexts as a McDonald’s restaurant. His answer gave me insight into his own value system, and I helped him expand on his topic.

After this class, I stayed around for the class in which I usually tutor. Eventually, a new teacher came in – she was another English teacher in the building. I explained to her what we had done in the last class, and she seemed unworried about the lesson plan. She addressed the class pleasantly as they took their seats, and I started thinking that this would be a nice, orderly class period compared to the last one of relative chaos and general unfocusedness. As she was starting to explain the activity that was written on the board, a student came in late. His first step into the classroom was met by the teacher sternly saying, “out.” The student, understandably, looked at the teacher with confusion. “Out, stand outside the door and don’t come in, I’ll deal with you later,” she told him. The groans he made were typical of an adolescent complaining about what’s “fair.”

The entire class fell silent, some with open mouths; one of them might have been me. She continued to explain the lesson a bit, when another student walked in whom I had excused a few minutes earlier to go to the bathroom before class started. When the teacher yelled “out!” at her, I felt terrible – the poor girl was trying to explain that I had excused her, and now she was getting punished. She looked helplessly at me and I looked helplessly back – I didn’t know what to do! Should I interrupt the teacher to explain the situation and basically tell her that she would be wrong to send the girl out? This would be challenging her authority in front of the students, and I opted to stay quiet for now.

After she was done explaining the activity, she walked outside to talk to the two late students. I walked with her to the door, explaining the situation – crisis averted. As she was addressing the other child, however, I realized that it was probably going to take a while. The rest of the kids looked puzzled regarding the activity, so I deeply inhaled and took a stand at the front of the class. I started explaining the activity and giving examples of quotes and what to write about each. The kids reacted moderately well – some understood perfectly now, while others still had a few specific questions. I went to a few people personally to help them.

Then the teacher came back in and gave the activity actual structure. She wrote 1,2,3 on the board and asked for examples of what the three paragraphs could be about. This technique worked really well – the students responded quickly with answers like personal experience, why you chose the quote, etc. (mostly the examples that I had given them a few minutes prior). I quickly learned the value of being strict: for the rest of the class, instead of getting up and walking around and generally not doing the assignment, the students were mostly on-task and created writings that were much more extensive than the prior class. The teacher also used a trick to keep them busy once they were done: she gave them a brain teaser where you try to connect nine dots with four straight lines. The kids loved it! They couldn’t figure it out, so it kept them engaged once they were done with their paper.

While at first I thought this last teacher was a bit over the top with the stern attitude, it worked out for the benefit of everyone – the teacher had complete control of the classroom, the kids were more productive, and in the end, they had fun. I’d like to be able to combine these desirable outcomes in my own teaching to avoid being a teacher lost in the sea of students, as Teacher A seemed.

When I played the video, I was kind of confused. It showed a man’s legs from the knees down to the feet with two different socks pulled up rather high and shoes on. He seemed to be lying down on some red background. The podcast didn’t get any less weird after this point. The narrator started speaking in German as words appeared at the bottom of the screen. I listened to and read what was being said and thought that this lesson was kind of bizzare – it was all conversational speech, but it was a conversation between him and himself. I learned a few random words and phrases (like picnic bench, water, sock, very cold, etc.) but they seemed overall to lack the usual conversational words.

While this video was not the best to start learning on German, I like the approach it took. By letting the student hear and read the words being spoken, they immediately know the correct inflection and pronunciation to use for the words, and the general sound of the German language is produced nicely (although rather quirkily). The narrator walked around and it never panned up from his feet; he simply discussed the sensations he experienced in real time, walking around the grass, toward the water, getting his feet wet, changing his sock…. It was definitely a weird way to teach the German language, but it gave me a feeling of immersion that a textbook does not give. It kept everything in context and as he spoke he repeated things several times. I sort of took the cue from this technique, trying to repeat the words that he spouted several times with the same accent that he displayed.

If you’re interested in checking it out, I would recommend doing so! The video was definitely odd as you followed his feet around, but the teaching technique seemed to work well. Nothing was explained in English, so you were forced to make sense of things as they occured. I am interested to see what they come up with next!