Edu 15. A most uplifting book is Herbert Kohl, The Discipline of Hope.
“I met professional hostility to the idea that what could be done with eight students in a rural setting, off campus, and with no administrative constraints is IRRELEVANT TO PUBLIC EDUCATION.”
Kohl was sixty when he wrote this book, but the first chapters start when he was 24 and teaching sixth grade in Manhattan. He was born in 1937, and now he’s 86.
I have three chapters of the book, including that first one. I highly recommend all three, which I’ll give download links to.
The second chapter I have, is about how he taught kindergarten, (about 10 years later), to experiment how much free-form could be injected into school, and how it might inspire enthusiasm and greater learning.
In the third chapter that I have, in the late 80’s he taught a senior high school combined level of sociology, economics and civics, where the one-year class project was to design a new community from the ground up. Later in that chapter, in 1996, he was teaching a college course in multi-cultural education to 52 college students. The four situations were entirely different and nothing proceeded by formula. It was all learning on the ground, confronting whatever came up, and making a curriculum out of it.
Later Chapter on Graduating into Kindergarten:
Chapter five, Fresh Waters are ever Flowing:
I found that I had this last chapter also, which starts slow but is very good. I won’t talk about it, but if you like these first 3, here is the last one that I have: From the same book “The Discipling of Hope”.
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His goal was to experiment with different ways of teaching a mandated curriculum, and to overcome the separation of content and process.
✓To Engage in some of the pressing social, economic, and civic problems in our society in an intelligent and personal way.
✓To Understand something of the historical and international contexts of these problems.
✓To Envision solutions and think through ways to turn plans into concrete action.
✓To Have appreciation for the privilege and obligation to be a part of society struggling to become a working democracy in a more complete way.
He also chose to slow people down, and begin to develop the habit of comprehension, which is the internalized refusal to read something through without understanding it. It is querying the claims of the author, looking up strange words, and going over again any text that doesn't seem to flow. This has been central to his total career.
What is the ulterior meaning behind the dialog? What are the issues. Scientific evidence has an important regulatory role in the development of ideas.
Understand a new, non-judgmental, yet highly critical way of functioning as a group.
All of the people that participated in the civics class felt comfortable being part of an intellectual community. The learning was the focus. The seduction of the subject began to take over. It was a world larger and more problematic than usually presented in school. Time must be filled up with measurably meaningful activity. Work must have an edge that proves it is serious. Following enthusiasm and responding to events are the essence of substantive learning.
The five planning groups in the community building project were:
Surveying, and Land development, Finding resources; and Research Laws and Government, Transportation and Housing; Water usage and Waste disposal; Communication, Economic development, and Entertainment.
What questions do we have to answer?
All these questions demonstrated the miracle of everyday life, in which the simplest and most ordinary activity presupposes the many complicated structures that are in place, and functioning. A dramatic illustration of culture, through social institutions and the norms of organized behavior. All just reduced to the word "infrastructure".
We need to make sense out of bewildering complexity, which leads to theory building. What is the process of planning. What are the relations between theory and practice?
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In College students learn to expect little from their teachers. Self-esteem is tied up in every little response, and for some students the fear of failure is so great that it paralyzes all creative energy.
These are the cynical times, (to make sense of). It was (1995) in Carleton College in Minnesota, with 52 students on Multicultural education.
Self-questioning seldom becomes central to the process. Culture, with all of its strengths and biases, as well as it bonding and alienating characteristics is most often antagonistic to the questioning of itself. Understanding how culture also filters the world through unquestioned modes of perception is central to cross-cultural understanding and communication.
Placing yourselves outside of so-called multiculturalism and creating a fictive zone of normality, is a form of racism. Pained by issues of categorization. White students can't swallow that they are the beneficiaries of "white privilege". They have easy accesses to community resources. They had no way out of the social and cultural traps in a racialized society. Learning to say what you actually feel and mean is difficult when so much speech is judged and monitored in school.
Cultures configure the world as Us vs. Them. Understanding cannot come from a single cultural narrative. Shifts in perspective are the essential tools of intelligent living.
Having the problem on the table is always better than having it hidden and unspoken. The silence would turn into resentment and suspicion, this could plant the seeds of racism. That someone "of race" was even asked, or forced to listen to confessions of confusion on issues of race, is painful. Lively young people act stereotypically because they have no precedents for dealing with issues of race, and no mentors with that experience either. Professors also "wish the problem would just go away".
The situation was a trap that inhibited learning. Unspoken hostility and un-articulated self-doubt. What’s the "shape of the class" so that life and learning are convergent. Student's voices are part of examining the subject.
Fear has to be expressed, and rage has to be channeled into intelligent argument.
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