Are high schools still sites of conflict?

(cross-posted with What Sister Ray Said)

A few friends of mine recently made a passing reference to the period of time starting in the post-grunge years (1994) to some unidentifiable terminal year that has only recently passed, as being a kind of “neo-Sixties.” Their evidence, and none of them made any kind of claim to academic accuracy, was the resurgence of pot use, focused demonstrations against global capitalism (notably the Battle In Seattle and anti-G8 protests), and other protests against the “unjust wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. While this might be superficially true, I’ve always thought that the general rebelliousness and questioning of institutions during the 1960s was much more far-reaching than we tend to remember it today. One of my favourite classes of stories was the surprisingly common one I call “The Day the Hippies Came and Took over My High School.” The number of incidences of “hippies,” whether they be actual bearded longhairs, or members of the SDS, SNCC, Weathermen, sympathetic Black Panther group, or other civil rights/anti-war group, storming the local high school to institute “teach-ins” is pretty high across the eastern US. The same cannot be said for the period 1994-present. Part of this might be the difference that the Internet has played in distributing information, but I wonder how much might also be the case that the K-12 system, and high school in particular, is no longer seen as the part of the general “system of coercion” that it appeared to radicals in the 1960s. Or maybe that idea is now just taken for granted, but attacking it is assumed to be futile. I’m not sure, but this extended 1971 quote from Michel Foucault seems to outline the thinking at the time pretty good:

“…in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society in such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attach them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of supports; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible, the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.”

- from The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature

Thoughts on iBrain and engaging students

Last summer I was part of a reading group that looked at the book iBrain by Gary Small. I was also part of the selection committee that picked the book. We were looking for something that would prompt teachers to think about changes that young people were undergoing both in terms of how they lived their daily lives and the way they thought about particular things. At a Reaching & Teaching presentation earlier that spring, Ian Jukes seemed to endorse the book (he might also have just as likely been name-dropping it, to give the appearance that he had read it).

After distributing the book to our reading group, and explaining our hope to have conversations around it over the summer via Twitter, we left them to their thoughts. Our efforts to have teachers use Twitter ended up not amounting to much. In retrospect, I think that had we prompted via email teachers more over the summer to use Twitter, we might have had better uptake.

When we returned to discuss the book in face to face meetings in the fall teachers quite upset over some of Gary Small's ideas. Part of the problem lay in a misunderstanding that teachers had regarding our purpose. They thought that we had picked the book in order to discuss how best to implement it, not as a discussion prompt. Many teachers reported breezing through the first few chapters, until they got to one of two parts. For some, Small's use of the word "evolutionary" to describe his idea about how children's use of technology causes the rewiring of a child's neural network, caused them to question many of Small's scientific credentials. For them, "evolutionary" refers solely to a process that occurs on a multi-generational scale - "adaptive" might have been a better word choice for what Small had in mind. For other teachers, it was Small's endorsement of a study that seemed to link TV-watching to autism. Once suspicious of Small, they became far more critical about what they were reading.

My thoughts on the experience run as follows:

1. I was surprised that teachers did not begin reading the book critically from page one. It seemed that the very fact that we suggested the book gave it a critical endorsement. Since teachers accepted our informal expertise (insofar as it went towards the book selection) they accepted that the book had a certain intrinsic merit. The conversation we wanted to have was actually about whether the book had that very same merit, whereas the conversation they expected was about how best to implement the merit of the book. I can't help but assume that this same confusion over purpose happens everytime we ask students to read something.

2. Teachers believed the book had merit, then felt betrayed when their own experiences caused them to question certain aspects of it. I think this is a very important part of the reading process, the bringing to bear of personal experience, and part of the question then becomes, how do you prepare students to read books on subjects that they do not necessarily have any experience in.

3. After falling out with Small, teachers were extremely reluctant to endorse any of his ideas, but curiously, did not link Small's idea that use of digital technologies causes a change in the ordering of dendrites, to those of Marcia Tate, of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites fame. If you accept that Tate and Small are both talking about worksheets, ipods, and computers as tools that aid in learning, there is no real difference in their argument. I know a fair number of these teachers are big fans of Tate, so there appears to be a bit of a disconnect there.

Building a Better Teacher

Last week The New York Times ran a piece on education reform. It's a topic that's quite near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued. The article was essentially a pre-release interview with Doug Lemov, the author of a new book entitled Teach Like A Champion. Lemov's basic thrust was that teachers lack the basic vocabulary to describe the act of teaching and this undermines many of their efforts to teach better. My experiences with teachers and teacher improvement certainly validates this idea. True, teachers have no shortage of conceptual frameworks to explain and support the activities that they are having students engage in, they are considerably weaker in using language to describe their day-to-day activities to their peers. This is an important shortcoming to remedy because it prevents teachers from properly identifying what it is that's working in their classrooms as well as offering each other constructive criticism aimed at improving weak practice.

In the last five years or so, I think there has been a tremendous degree of improvement in the language of assessment; teachers have a better capacity to explain what they are assessing, when, how, and why, but assessment and instruction are not the same. I'd like to think that the one follows the other, that from a better understanding of assessment, we will be better able to zero in on what exactly students need to do better in order to understand better.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed to see that much of the article's focus was on techniques for classroom management, rather than instruction. I am intrigued enough to have ordered a copy of Lemov's book, but I find that conversations that focus on classroom management tend to miss the point. When looking at ideas related to classroom reform, I ask myself the following questions:

- who decides what the student will learn on a given day?

- who decides how the student will learn?

- who decides when the student is done learning?

People who answer these questions with "the teacher" are not moving in the same direction as me.