I guess it's worth reaffirming here that this is a personal blog. As ambitious as I can be about wanting to change global education culture at the levels of policy and philosophy, I must continually realize that my biggest qualification (and contribution) for discussions on education is my ten years of experience in the classroom, and a dozen or so invited lectures, conference presentations and the like.
It's interesting to reflect on these ten years, and to think back on what Kant said about the distinctives of the Dessau school: it's not that the teachers in the old Prussian system really knew what they were doing, so much as that they conferred, sought advice, continually experimented, and--though one certainly hopes it was not merely for novelty's sake--never contented themselves with thinking that they had education all figured out.
This, I think, might be a mistake I've made in recent years. I'm thankful to many cohorts of students for thinking that my libertarian and inquiry-based approaches were a good launching point. I'll probably keep those in many of my future pedagogical thoughts, and practice. But how to do them better--especially for students who are not quite as well prepared to launch into independent thinking, to express themselves in any form whatsoever (let alone formal academic essays), or even to schedule regular times of research and writing.
Even here, I can't really claim my methodology as a cure-all for the ills of contemporary liberal arts instruction, but I wonder: where others perhaps have different ideas for encouraging their students, yet as immature as mine or in some cases even more so, how can I be of service? "Faculty development" is clearly a key phrase, and an important if sometimes under-appreciated activity for teachers at the college level (and other levels of education).
30 March 2015
26 March 2015
Teaching Notes
Interesting to see that Finland is moving to a pedagogy based on "topics" more than "subjects," perhaps in part to maintain their reputed educational lead over the rest of mankind. I think it's easy to see the "topic" thing and think, "well, that's neat," but what might be lost in the mix is a much more important word: change.
Good to see Finland's government and teaching establishment acting nimbly, and in response to the right stimuli. It's not about testing and the state-level Bureau of Statistics, or profit margins for textbook companies, or the latest demand from teachers' unions. It seems to me that the major impetus for change in Finland's school system is really one coin with two sides.
Good to see Finland's government and teaching establishment acting nimbly, and in response to the right stimuli. It's not about testing and the state-level Bureau of Statistics, or profit margins for textbook companies, or the latest demand from teachers' unions. It seems to me that the major impetus for change in Finland's school system is really one coin with two sides.
- As a society, reflected through its government (the Nordic countries themselves are not perfect at this, but we'll say pretty good…), the Finns are expressing an interest in adapting to changed circumstances in the global economy, and still wanting to be world beaters.
- Like parents in so many other countries, Finnish parents want the best for their kids. But perhaps unlike in other countries, they have a good and responsive venue in which to express their wishes.
Note #1: keep track of student wants and needs.
Note #2: adapt accordingly, and creatively.
Note #3: keep adapting.
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Another note set, from a book I've been reading: How to Write A Lot, by Paul J. Silvia.
Note #1: read this book. It will seriously change your life as a writer.
Note #2: some great teaching techniques in here, as well, about getting students beyond content, beyond even forms, to even more fundamental structures of learning. Yay schedules.
Note #3: Pilot some of these techniques in my own life and among a few peers, before I inflict them on my students.
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Last note set, from reflections on a variety of inputs from different cultures.
Note #1: The psych and anthro people say that people broadly all learn in similar ways.
Note #2: My older forays into inquiry-based learning didn't turn out too bad. Contrary to the first note set, don't just change for change's sake. Make sure to keep what works.
Note #3: Question: what does learning mean for cultures at varying levels of literacy / pictography? Can I oralize and kiesthetize my learning outcome assessments? How so? And are oralize and kinesthetize even real words?
17 March 2015
A Different Kind of Privilege Check
I've recently been reflecting on the plight of contingent faculty in U.S. higher education, and running that thought against a recent little scandal at Princeton, in which students were asked to "check their privilege."
I think the Princeton exercise was a little uncharitable to the students. It reminds me a bit of Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899): the actual builders of empire--soldiers, sailors, merchant-mariners, teachers, postal workers, lower-level bureaucrats--see their efforts satirized and maligned, while the genteel upper-crust of imperial society (American and British in this case) revel both in their own insulation from getting their own hands dirty, and in the notionally-positive "judgment of their peers" in the last line--fellow genteel imperialists.
If one would like to see the Princeton equivalent of those genteel imperialists of 116 years ago, one needs look no farther than the faculty. I don't mean to single out Princeton's faculty, but it may be worth your effort, dear reader, to look at most U.S. faculties, in any department, at any university--and especially the Liberal Arts. Among the faculty, see if you can find Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Cambridge, Yale, Columbia, California-Berkeley, Oxford, Brown… and then try to look for the schools where the vast majority of the population actually do their learning: Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, Liverpool, Western Michigan, Colorado State, Bristol. These are also good schools, and they do, some more often than others, occasionally place their Ph.D. graduates into reasonably good departments. And yet in the scarce academic economy of the present day--whether actual or artificial scarcity might be another matter…--it's not just the elite students who need to check their privilege. It's the elite former-students, as well.
And as in Kipling's poem, it's not just the lower-level functionaries--the students--who are confronted with the subjects of this intellectual empire. It's also the detached, genteel administration and faculty, whose platitudes about privilege-checking and the tragedy of subjection to empire (by other names) fall a little flat as they name, rename, sanitize and broadly ignore the plight of the real subjects of their empire, the ones upon whose backs they stand in their privilege: graduate teaching assistants (who now do a lot more than merely assist…), part-time and full-time lecturers, contingent faculty, adjuncts.
An astute student of history might recall that Kipling's empire--the British Empire--experienced rapid and violent decline within about two generations after his poem. The judgement of Britain's peers made itself manifest precisely when Kipling wrote, as plucky American and Japanese societies joined the imperial game; within a decade the rise of the German Kriegsmarine made it clear that Britain had viable and hungry challengers among its peers; and the two World Wars--especially the second and its immediate aftermath--starkly revealed Britain's limitations as an Imperial power. The concentration of wealth and power, and the gentrified concern that fretted much and acted little, anticipated doom for the empire in the face of more vibrant, better-balanced societies that valued, not just the upper crust of their communities, but also the oft-excluded middle. Today, 116 years after Kipling, it may be worth reflecting on some societies that are doing exactly that, "broken" as they might seem from the outside: places like China.
So in sum, we have a critique of adjuncts' position not only from the well-established Left, with its tropes about workers' rights and so forth; but also, and critically, from what might be called the Imperial Right. From this perspective, there is simply a way of doing things that predicts a flourishing empire--like the middle-class rhetoric of British society 150 years before Kipling's poem--and a way of doing things that does not. So as the faculty and residential life folks at Princeton continue their salutary "privilege-checking" exercise with students, here's an invitation not only to turn that gaze upon themselves, but also to shoulder differently the burdens of their academic empire.
I think the Princeton exercise was a little uncharitable to the students. It reminds me a bit of Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899): the actual builders of empire--soldiers, sailors, merchant-mariners, teachers, postal workers, lower-level bureaucrats--see their efforts satirized and maligned, while the genteel upper-crust of imperial society (American and British in this case) revel both in their own insulation from getting their own hands dirty, and in the notionally-positive "judgment of their peers" in the last line--fellow genteel imperialists.
If one would like to see the Princeton equivalent of those genteel imperialists of 116 years ago, one needs look no farther than the faculty. I don't mean to single out Princeton's faculty, but it may be worth your effort, dear reader, to look at most U.S. faculties, in any department, at any university--and especially the Liberal Arts. Among the faculty, see if you can find Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Cambridge, Yale, Columbia, California-Berkeley, Oxford, Brown… and then try to look for the schools where the vast majority of the population actually do their learning: Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, Liverpool, Western Michigan, Colorado State, Bristol. These are also good schools, and they do, some more often than others, occasionally place their Ph.D. graduates into reasonably good departments. And yet in the scarce academic economy of the present day--whether actual or artificial scarcity might be another matter…--it's not just the elite students who need to check their privilege. It's the elite former-students, as well.
And as in Kipling's poem, it's not just the lower-level functionaries--the students--who are confronted with the subjects of this intellectual empire. It's also the detached, genteel administration and faculty, whose platitudes about privilege-checking and the tragedy of subjection to empire (by other names) fall a little flat as they name, rename, sanitize and broadly ignore the plight of the real subjects of their empire, the ones upon whose backs they stand in their privilege: graduate teaching assistants (who now do a lot more than merely assist…), part-time and full-time lecturers, contingent faculty, adjuncts.
An astute student of history might recall that Kipling's empire--the British Empire--experienced rapid and violent decline within about two generations after his poem. The judgement of Britain's peers made itself manifest precisely when Kipling wrote, as plucky American and Japanese societies joined the imperial game; within a decade the rise of the German Kriegsmarine made it clear that Britain had viable and hungry challengers among its peers; and the two World Wars--especially the second and its immediate aftermath--starkly revealed Britain's limitations as an Imperial power. The concentration of wealth and power, and the gentrified concern that fretted much and acted little, anticipated doom for the empire in the face of more vibrant, better-balanced societies that valued, not just the upper crust of their communities, but also the oft-excluded middle. Today, 116 years after Kipling, it may be worth reflecting on some societies that are doing exactly that, "broken" as they might seem from the outside: places like China.
So in sum, we have a critique of adjuncts' position not only from the well-established Left, with its tropes about workers' rights and so forth; but also, and critically, from what might be called the Imperial Right. From this perspective, there is simply a way of doing things that predicts a flourishing empire--like the middle-class rhetoric of British society 150 years before Kipling's poem--and a way of doing things that does not. So as the faculty and residential life folks at Princeton continue their salutary "privilege-checking" exercise with students, here's an invitation not only to turn that gaze upon themselves, but also to shoulder differently the burdens of their academic empire.
09 March 2015
Gramsci the Libertarian?
I don't think I would take this little article as the best or last word about Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on education, though they are rather provocative. Gramsci was a noted Italian Communist in the 1910s and 20s, jailed and eventually executed by Mussolini's Fascists. His prison notebooks gained international acclaim in the 1970s, and they continue to inspire social theorists up to the present day. It is interesting to note Gramsci's seeming appreciation that schools in nationalist Italy (one would guess Fascist Italy only more so) were too centralized, and too much under the control of the state. How neat, also, to see his ideas line up with the notably Libertarian rhetoric in Richard Neal's book, Escape to Learning.
It is obviously a step too far to see Gramsci and Neal on the same political page, or promoting anything like the same pedagogy. Notwithstanding the obvious anachronism of the comparison, it is nonetheless striking to see their broad agreement on local schools and raising individual consciences. Likewise with their shared, strident-yet-thoughtful opposition to their respective (and remarkably similar) "Educational Establishment" regimes. They even appear to agree that the primary-secondary school system imprisons students' minds in an ideology that supports a stable status quo, rather than being truly generative of new ideas and societal progress--what Gramsci would identify as the seeds of revolution.
Gramsci and Neal broadly agree on the need for students, parents, and the larger society to be aware of shortcomings in government, the state, and the education system. Both call for activism of some sort: Neal for market-based rejection of the state monopoly, Gramsci (and his Communist-leaning contemporaries even more so) for violent revolution against the ruling classes. As with Kant in my previous post (albeit, again, anachronistically), I am left with the impression that Gramsci and Neal would like to see education most in the hands of teachers, students and their parents, with support from the state, perhaps, but as free as possible from its control.
It is obviously a step too far to see Gramsci and Neal on the same political page, or promoting anything like the same pedagogy. Notwithstanding the obvious anachronism of the comparison, it is nonetheless striking to see their broad agreement on local schools and raising individual consciences. Likewise with their shared, strident-yet-thoughtful opposition to their respective (and remarkably similar) "Educational Establishment" regimes. They even appear to agree that the primary-secondary school system imprisons students' minds in an ideology that supports a stable status quo, rather than being truly generative of new ideas and societal progress--what Gramsci would identify as the seeds of revolution.
Gramsci and Neal broadly agree on the need for students, parents, and the larger society to be aware of shortcomings in government, the state, and the education system. Both call for activism of some sort: Neal for market-based rejection of the state monopoly, Gramsci (and his Communist-leaning contemporaries even more so) for violent revolution against the ruling classes. As with Kant in my previous post (albeit, again, anachronistically), I am left with the impression that Gramsci and Neal would like to see education most in the hands of teachers, students and their parents, with support from the state, perhaps, but as free as possible from its control.
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