Empowering Education
Critical Teaching for Social Change
by Ira Shor
Shor's article is about empowering students in their own education; to create student based inquiry curriculum. Instead, we have an education system too focused on testing. Shor believes in a co-created curriculum; a collaboration between student and teacher. Instead, too many public schools are teacher centered. "Drill and Kill" this creates passive learning. Inquiry based curriculum inspires learning. It provides a place where students learn to better apply what they have learned to the real world. Students are able to question their experience in school. Shor stresses the importance of participatory classrooms. If children have interest, education happens. "Students are people, whose voices are worth listening too, whose minds can carry the weight of the serious intellectual, whose thought and feeling can entertain, transforming self and society." A few years ago, I had a student that was concerned about how fast cars drove by our school in the morning and after school. The concern came from an incident where a fellow student had been hit by a car while in the cross walk. He came to me and asked me if he could conduct an experiment. He and I went out to the front of the school and timed how fast the cars would go by the school. We did this in the morning and in the after noon for a week. The next week, he got four orange cones and put them on both sides of the cross walk. We timed the cars again. The cars slowed down. This was all his idea, he planned the entire experiment. I was merely there to "supervise". We brought his results to our principle who in turn called the local newspaper. A reporter came and interviewed us. We now have a crossing guard posted in front of our school.
Henry Giroux writes in his book: When Schools Become Dead Zones of Imagination, "at the core of the new reforms is a commitment to a pedagogy of stupidity and repression that is geared towards memorization, conformity, passivity and high stakes testing. Rather than create autonomous critic and civically engaged students. the reformers kill the imagination while depoliticizing all vestiges of teaching and learning." This quote reminded me of the frustrating, pointless testing our students have to endure. One of the middle schools in my city counted up all of the days that we test the students a year. It totaled over 40 days. Last year, when I told one of my students he was going to take another SLO test, he looked at me and said, "Mrs. Colannino, are we ever going to do science again?"
Sir Ken Robinson expresses in this video the importance of creativity in education. With all of the testing that is done in public schools today, creativity and especially the arts, is going by the wayside. He states, and I agree, that creativity is just as important as literacy. The we squash creativity in children. That we actually educate children out of their creative capacity. It is important to cultivate creativity in our schools and to include multiple types of intelligences as we educate our children.
I would agree that we over test our students but teaching is not enough. We need to know if the students are grasping the concepts we are teaching them so we can know how we can support our students effectively. We could be spinning our wheels without ever teaching the students anything because all they are really doing is writing down what we say and nodding their heads in agreement. My agreement with you is that we are repetitive with our testing without ever re-teaching the material that the students do not understand. We do not have enough time to re-teach the material because they want us to stay on pace.
ReplyDeleteI like the story of your student taking action. He saw a problem, came up with an experiment and created a solution. I believe this is exactly what Shor meant in his article. Learners need to feel invested in their education or they will not learn well. Also, creativity, as you pointed out, including the arts, is not emphasized. Kids do need to master basic skills before they can be asked to perform higher level types of thinking, but even skills can be learned creatively. I used to teach my ELLS memoir wherein, after reading models and determining criteria of a memoir through their readings of models, they would bring in family photos, objects with meaning, artwork etc. Then they would brainstorm if any of the objects were related to an "aha" moment in their lives or if they had memories of a lesson learned. Usually they did and from there they would start to compose their memoir. After drafting and going through the various parts of the writing process we would have a celebration day with their memoirs/pictures/art etc. and invite families for their readings. Today, of course, that cannot happen. There is no time for that. It doesn't follow the prescribed curriculum. And in the process of all our testing and of teaching skills in non-creative ways, we are creating bored learners.
ReplyDeleteYou said it best "testing our students have to ENDURE". The fact that a school spent 40 days (1 whole quarter) testing is ludicrous. There is yet another reason why our test scores are low. We are testing more than we are learning. The math there does not add up I know, but the point remains that same. The worst thing is that if we have such little say in the educational system, the students have an even more desperate problem than we may even realize.
ReplyDeleteMary, I love that you used Ken Robinson here! I posted my blog very close to when you did and I used him too. When teaching seniors I show the video that you posted here asking them if they agree with Robinson or disagree with him and why. At the end of their "required" education I think it is important for kids to reflect on it and think about the skills that they will take with them to college if they are going to college, or out to the real world if that is the route that they are taking.
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