Once again for TE407, I will be entering a citation for each work discussed before discussing it.
Nelson, J. L. (2001). Defining Social Studies. In Stanley, W. B. (Ed.), Critical Issues in Social Studies Research for the 21st Century (pp. 15-38). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
I found this chapter, or perhaps I should say this article to be very redundant both with itself and with other themes we've been covering so far in our seminar. I feel that the chapter could be summed up in a number of short statements, as follows:
Definitions are important in policymaking and academics.
The definition of "social studies" is contested.
Therefore, policymaking and academic work about social studies are contested.
Social studies in general and history in particular are subject to political control.
Democracy requires educating people to be able to reach conclusions different from those of their government.
Therefore, maintaining the contestation of the definition of social studies is democratic.
Maybe the above are shocking to some people, but seriously this is almost all stuff we've been talking about already. Does it seem to anyone else that this article was also a hearty exercise in self-promotion in the sense that it aggrandizes what the author apparently loves to do the most, namely define "social studies?"
Well it's happened again, you've squandered another perfectly good second summer semester not taking TE302 (because it's not offered then). We're heartily into the fall semester of 2008, and already I'm seeing a lot about TE407 that is very different from the prior courses.
For one thing, let's talk about the difference between seminar and lab.
In the TE407 seminar, the class investigates various issues by discussing them. We might be presented with a video clip or reading, and then we'll take time to pick that apart by talking about it. Fascinating, right? Sure, if everything goes well. I would say that the quality of your TE407 experience will vary greatly depending on who you have as an instructor and who you have as classmates. (Some would say that this is true in any class, but I'll make at least the suggestion that in some contexts the material covered and the design of the course by the department can play such a role.) Given a sample size of one in our instructor, I'll make the bad inference that TE407 seminar instructors tend to be more experienced than TE407 lab instructors. You may get the feeling that I am saying that TE407 seminar is a lot of talk and not a lot of hands-on. You are partly right: from my experience so far, there's a fair amount of wide-angle thinking and not as much "do this now, it represents teaching." Some have criticized this as "too theoretical" and not enough practical. I am not sure I agree, but just because I don't know if "theory" is the right word for what we're doing. I think we're talking and listening to each other as opposed to absorbing from a centralized source. I suspect that a statement the class might agree with if it were presented clearly to them is the following: when one attends a high-level specialized course on teaching and the instructor doesn't do a lot of direct instruction, one may receive the impression that the instructor doesn't know the material and that the students cannot learn it from each other. To me, this represents a bet of sorts that by year's end we can unlearn our automatic preferences for direct, teacher-centered instruction.
In contrast, TE407 lab as the word implies is more about getting hands dirty. We will be designing lessons, and we're asked to do more homework-y type assignments. More on this as time goes on - I think that I don't yet understand all of what's going on conceptually in lab.
Final thing I'll mention for the post: for those who don't know, TE407/TE408 are segregated by major area, so I'm in a section that is just for secondary social studies folks. There are two such sections, and the idea is that probably both sections will be staying together through both semesters (i.e., the people in one's 408 section are the same ones that were in one's 407 section).
Looking forward to a good year, and more things to say on this blog in 2008-2009!
This is the original draft of the speech that I gave today as my final presentation. Before the text, here's the YouTube version:
Debate is changing.
Ten years ago, the activity of policy debate was about speaking 300 words a minute, about using tools of reason and communication to talk about big ideas and big government initiatives. For decades now, this formula has worked well to get kids from suburban schools, rural schools and fancy private schools to come to tournaments every weekend. But it’s been hard to get kids from urban schools to succeed at the top levels of debating in the traditional manner: talk faster, research more, know everything about the far-away lands of policy and politics. Recently though, several urban schools have started a new approach: make it personal. Suddenly kids are showing up at tournaments and winning by asking new questions: how does debating affect me? How does its elitism exclude us? How can we use its tools to break it down and put it back together again as something that connects to our experience? We’ll get back to these questions in a bit.
Education is changing.
In America, it’s always fashionable to talk about the latest change and how we can grab onto it, how the old way of doing things is obsolete and should be replaced. Education has always been changing; lately it’s been changing in a way that attempts to put the experiences of students front and center. Think about the questions Adie asked of us for this final project. “How can we bring students’ backgrounds into our teaching?” Not whether, not why, those questions are assumed to already be answered. This narrative that MSU wants us to learn isn’t about progress, it isn’t about saving American jobs; it’s sort of about saving the American soul, about healing the wounds of divisiveness and hierarchy. It’s about making education relevant to students; in short, making it personal. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Avner Segall, the professor in charge of secondary social studies for all of us going that route. One of the things Professor Segall said to me was that TE250 is the real social studies curriculum, which I thought was a very revealing statement.
I am changing.
I got into teaching to be an agent of debate within schools, to gain the power of a teacher so I could spread my message like some kind of missionary for competitive speech. And don’t get me wrong, I still believe that. But I’ve been slowly waking up to something else recently, too. Teaching as a craft, as a science, as an art is not abstract. Great teaching is personal, and to be a great teacher I will need to know a lot more than just a body of theory or a handbook of guidelines, I will need to find out how those play out in every single one of my students. I am not a particularly good social studies teacher, in any area save perhaps government and civics. Here’s a factoid for you history folks: I have taken exactly zero history courses thus far at MSU. So I’m nervous about my lack of content knowledge, but after TE302 I’m way more nervous that I won’t be able to connect with some students in my classroom. All I can hope for is that my skills at learning and communicating along with my habit of trying to think my way through life will help me to figure that out. Because after this class, I’m convinced that making connections is critical.
Here’s the other big picture idea I got from this class: teaching is bloody difficult! I think of teaching as a conversation between a teacher and a group of students, and man there are a lot of things to pay attention to in the midst of that conversation. I plan on keeping conversation moving to get the class into a team spirit of working for a common goal, which I have my coaching background to thank for. I want to let kids’ voices be heard, and that means more than just making sure everybody talks. It means stepping back sometimes and letting their interests come out, trying to find points of connection between what they know, what they like and what we’re thinking about that day. I want to test them in ways that allow them to have perspectives and beliefs. And this all sounds nice but at the same time it’s terribly subjective and I don’t really know yet how I’m going to be fair about it.
Debate is changing, education is changing, I am changing; seems like there’s change everywhere I look. And with change in mind, I hereby announce my endorsement of Barack Obama for … oh wait, wrong speech.
In the introduction to this course I posed a question for everyone, namely what is the purpose of education? Well at the end of the class, I want to ask a different question out loud, namely what is the purpose of my education? After taking this class and working more with kids and thinking a lot, I think the answer is simple: make it personal. I am creating myself as a teacher using the tools I have available. After almost 15 years debate is woven through me like threads in a tapestry. I think philosophy is important so I want to understand what’s going on in the field of education and why. And I have a new appreciation for the challenges and rewards of teaching that I didn’t have before.
To finish up, here’s a one-sentence summary of the history of human thought. Every time a group of people comes up with thinking tools in pursuit of some goal, a different group of people will use those same tools to ask “why that goal, why not another one?” and wander off. In debate, urban kids are asking big questions about what debate is and why it exists. In education we’re looking at kids in new ways, with the big idea that maybe what kids think really matters. And for myself? I’m still wandering off but now I call that learning. And helping other people to do the same? I call that teaching. Thanks for being my classmates.
I promise to limit the number of posts like this that I make in this blog. The last week has been a blur of one task to complete after another, and it's not done yet by any stretch. I can't write very much today because I actually have to write a paper in the next hour or so, before getting some work done for my job and facilitating a debate meeting and preparing to lead a debate session and preparing to lead a discussion in my TE302 class and ...
The only reflective thing that I figure I can say about the busybusybusy I've been experiencing lately is, "sounds like a teacher's life." Especially a first year teacher. Well, I suppose if I survive this it's a good indicator of the future. When you see another post from me when I surface for air again, you'll know that I didn't actually have that nervous breakdown I was contemplating at 4:30 AM this morning while writing my syllabus assignment for TE302.
This last Thursday I finished up my final segment of tutoring at a local middle school for TE302. Before we started tutoring, as mentioned in a previous post we did an exercise trying to understand and remember middle school. We were first asked to describe our own middle school experiences, then asked for a word to predict what the middle school kids would be like. For the second question my word was "unpredictable," mostly because I hadn't worked with middle school kids in a long time and didn't know what to expect. To be honest, I also used that word because I was playing it safe by choosing an ambiguous word. The word unpredictable can have many different meanings that are either positive or negative in bent; sometimes many meanings will be true at the same time. So, I'm writing today with some disambiguation of today's post title.
Getting students motivated can be hard, hard work. Maybe it's fair to say that I knew this already, but only in the abstract. Also bring everything that you know about to every student encounter, because you never know what part of your experience will interface with the experiences or interests of each student. Both of these are lessons about how to teach that I learned.
It's never too early to start thinking of ways to teach specific content. I was tutoring in math, and had a great but challenging time coming up with ways to make the most abstract of subjects engaging for kids. I remember a panel discussion by new teachers that I attended, where many of them talked about the amount of time they spent just trying to innovate in lesson planning because of the relentless pace of their classes. This, some would say, is the meat and potatoes of teaching, so I'm glad that I learned at least a couple of specific lesson outlines for getting kids to understand math.
The more interactive a learning community, the more interesting the result. We have had to post a tutoring log each day of tutoring that answers the questions "what, so what, now what" about something we did each day. On top of that, we had to respond to at least two of the logs of our classmates. This was a lot of writing. That's for sure why I haven't posted a blog entry since the first day of tutoring, and it was sometimes hard to find time to write the log entry for each day because I wanted to make an honest effort to think through an aspect of the day each time. The quick pace of the tutoring in the summer session (four days a week for three weeks) was intense in a good way, and I really value the opportunity to not just do my own reflecting but to peek inside the heads of my classmates as they worked through their tutoring time. Many of the comments that people would post on each others' work were words of encouragement and praise, and while I liked that I especially liked the opportunity for us to really start short dialogues with each other, to prod our thinking in new directions. I am frankly awed by the obvious facility with teaching and ease of engagement that some of my classmates demonstrated. I dare say that we all learned lessons about each other these last three weeks even without a single class period together and I'm looking forward to getting to see my classmates again.
Empathy in teaching is challenging and good. The tutoring plan that I'd created before the first day of tutoring was sort of like a philosophy of teaching statement, now that I think about it. I wrote about teaching as building bridges from what students know to what you want them to understand, in a shared conversational space built by both the student and the teacher. In an effort to reflect on my own analogy I said one of the flaws was that it left out my own intellectual location, presuming that I could work with students no matter where they were at. I'm glad I thought a little bit about that problem beforehand, because I wound up thinking about it quite a bit in the last three weeks. I think I had to build a lot of bridges of my own just to get from what I know (and how I know it) to what the students know and how they're thinking about things.
Writing about your own teaching can be educational even before anyone looks at it. In some ways, this statement is just about the benefit of reflecting on one's experience. I have been collecting information about my own teaching in the context of debate coaching for some months now, but I think that writing about teaching really forced me to organize my thoughts more productively than just remembering or even reviewing it. I've never been one for journaling in general (this blog is not a natural behavior for me if you are wondering), but in the last three weeks I've very much dug it. I hope that I can find time to keep a learning journal to continuously improve my future teaching practice.
I might go on I suppose, but I'll stick with those for now. Our class also read two books in the last two weeks, and I've been trying to think about what to write about those as well. Onward to classtime!
I'd post a picture of me with my MSU Tutor name tag, but this sentence along with the title will serve as sufficient description. I am now a tutor in a math class at a local middle school, and wowzers is it - middle school. See, I've been working with high school kids for the past eight years or so and to suddenly jump to middle school kids was darned strange. Middle schoolers seem like high schoolers in some respects: they are very diverse in terms of intellectual development, some of them are forward-looking and others live only in the moment. Unlike many high schoolers though, all middle school kids seem to constantly be in a massive state of flux.
In our last TE302 class period before three weeks of tutoring started today, we did an exercise where everyone posted a word about their middle school experience on the wall of our classroom. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that our class didn't have the most sanguine of middle school experiences. Only one person used "fun" as his word and there was sure a lot of "awkward" and its ilk on our walls. I think that that was an excellent reminder of just what we're stepping into with these tutoring situations, on top of all the other contextual bits and pieces we're seeing firsthand.
We have to post tutoring logs every day that answer three questions: what (describe an event), so what (name its importance), and now what (reflect on future implications). I think the compressed summer class format will yield some really intense development inside these tutoring experiences and the resulting discussions, for two reasons. First I think that being in the same classroom four days a week will lend a magnificent continuity not otherwise possible; we will become vital and supportive elements of functioning classrooms and who can resist getting pumped about that? Second, the discursive layer of reading, writing and responding to tutoring logs will be continually fresh in everyone's memory and that feels like just the right set of conditions for an honest-to-goodness three week long conversation between all of us at once. Hooray for the educational possibilities of sustained, reflective, critical dialogue!
Last thought for the day and I'll stop. We had to create a tutoring plan before starting to tutor; I turned mine in this morning, just-in-time delivery as is my wont. I wrote it as a themed paper around my favorite analogy to individual teaching encounters, that of bridge building. So today I wrote this tutoring plan and also my discussion posts for the same class, and the two had radically different tones. When I get my paper groove on I use a very specific voice in my writing: dry, intellectual, wears-big-glasses language like "to form inferential conclusions about aspects of pedagogical practice." When I wrote tutoring logs on the other hand I used decidedly casual, bloggy English like "hats off to substitute teachers!" I think both are authorial in the sense that I really do talk like both of those characters at different times, but I'm fascinated by how naturally I slip into them when the parameters of the assignment demand it. At my first tutoring day today, I used my informal banter voice most of the time, blithely tossing in "y'know" and "c'mon" and even sillier forms like "wassup with you folks?" (To my friends reading this, go ahead and have heart attacks while you imagine Orion acting like he owns this type of language.) What about you, other preservice teachers of America? Do you have one voice or many? Is this something you are (self) conscious about? When you talk to kids do you change your use of English, and if so how much depends on the kid? And the sixty four thousand dollar question - is it good to have different voices for different audiences?
I can't resist just one more, call it the sixty five thousand dollar question. Which of your authorial or conversational voices, if any do you think in?
Note: from now on, when a post is about an article my class is reading I'll try to start the post with the citation of the article. To save mental energy I'm going to copy and paste directly from the syllabus instead of re-locating the article, so I do apologize if the citation isn't perfect.
Kozol, J. (2005). Confections of Apartheid: A Stick and Carrot Pedagogy for the Children of Our Inner City Poor. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(4).
I didn't really like this article. Rephrase: I really didn't like this article. Sure, the schools in question were mechanistic and seemed very devoid of soul. I thought during his descriptions of the efficiency/authoritarianism measures taking place in many urban schools that I now know what it might be like to go to school in the Death Star. Clearly not desirable.
Still, I think that Kozol is comparing those schools to a very unclear, very idealized vision of suburban school that feels almost mushy in its romanticism. For example, one of the pullquotes in the article rhetorically asks "How much injury to state-determined 'purpose' would it do to let a group of children have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?" Go ahead, sympathetically shake your head at the absurdity of disallowing pumpkin parties, you know you want to. I felt tempted, but seriously. This one quote is so rich with troubles I honestly wonder why it made pullquote status. Let's enumerate:
Straw person fallacy: actually, the teacher in question had a party, she just had to try to justify its educational value. Me, I probably would have tried to use the pumpkin to talk about the historical origins of Halloween and the agricultural significance of foods like pumpkins, maybe the differences between Halloween in cities vs. towns. What Kozol doesn't say is that the kids in this class didn't enjoy the "multimodal pumpkin unit" the teacher thought up for them; if I had to guess, it was still fun. I would have been more sympathetic if he'd actually tried to justify the argument that fun for its own sake promotes good education somehow. Instead we get to tsk, tsk at an imaginary possibility: what if (gasp) the pumpkin party had never happened at all?
Bandwagon fallacy: this one's really easy. Yessir, everyone sure does have pumpkin parties in America. Why, just last week I listened to the national radio address condemning all Americans who didn't dance around gourds as unpatriotic. Plus, TE 250 anyone? How is pumpkin worship culturally relevant to these kids, or even "urban?" Maybe that quality of non-germaneness is what makes it educational, but if that's true what's this fuss about fun for fun's sake?
Sweeping generalization fallacy: to get at this I do need to quote a related phrase. "In some districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have been overtaken..." I would be curious to see the research (or theory, if we are to disdain the "determined emphasis upon empirical precision") that suggests just how pleasant and especially old-fashioned the pumpkin party is.
Here's another example that demonstrates the kind of empty contrast I'm having problems with. Kozol describes at length how in mechanized urban schools the bulletin boards are rigidly controlled and only describe perfect work, unlike "the lovingly assembled postings of the work of children that most grownups who attended school in decades past are likely to recall." Well I'm glad that in the good ole' days bulletin boards were assembled with love; did that make them good for kids?
Look, I don't disagree that if urban schools operate the way Kozol describes them that they have lots of problems. Kids regularly and uncritically referring to each other as "Level Fours" is horrifying evidence of depersonalization. Circular-logic methodology appears to be woven into the program such that the system becomes its own undefeatable champion. But indulge me if you will when I suggest the big-picture fallacy Kozol has up his sleeve, that if urban schools are bad then everything that suburban schools do that urban schools don't do must be good.
