A year ago, as the ‘methods’ person, I joined a team of doctoral students and faculty engaged in social action projects with high school students at a school that has social action as part of the curriculum. That semester, we read and analyzed the groups’ notes on success and failure, surprise and disillusionment. Drawn in by the reading, I decided to jump in and facilitate a group myself. Last semester 6 groups (comprising 8-10 high school students and one facilitator in each) met at the school every week, and my group examined truancy.The students at the school were used to having ‘volunteer...
Community Organizing and Urban Education VII: In Youth Action, Power Precedes Engagement, Learning, and Understanding
[To read the entire series, go here.][To see our full presentation on our youth action project at AERA in messy MS Word Format on GoogleDocs go here.]People don’t do anything unless they are motivated to action first. As Saul Alinsky stated,If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it. Why start figuring out how you are going to spend a million dollars if you do not have a million dollars, or are ever going to have a million dollars—unless you want to engage in fantasy? (p. 105) Alinsky argued that it is only when people sense they have...
A suggestion for content on AESA’s new website
A suggestion for content on AESA’s new website to support the teaching of social foundations courses.This posting is prompted by my reading a very nice review, at the Education Review, of a recent reissue of Peter McLaren’s Life in Schools, which has become a social foundations textbook of sorts.I have argued for a while that AESA should develop a resource site that compiles comments, reviews, synopses, and basic information (e.g., table of contents) of a wide range of textbooks for social foundations coursework (including sub-disciplines such as philosophy of education, history of education,...
Soon All Government Agencies Will Be Subdivisions of the Department of Homeland Security
Critics Question Education Department’s Screening[NYT] As a condition of his work for the federal government, Andrew A. Zucker was willing to be fingerprinted and provide an employment history. But then he was asked to let federal investigators examine his financial and medical records, and interview his doctors.Dr. Zucker was not tracking terrorists or even emptying the trash at the Pentagon. He was studying how to best teach science to middle school students. He was stunned at the breadth of the request for information.“To me, personally, it’s shocking,” said Dr. Zucker, who worked for a contractor...
The Snake in the NCLB Woodpile Exposed
I heard James Lytle speak on a panel discussing NCLB at Teachers College a year or so ago, before he retired as superintendent of Trenton Public Schools. When someone asked about how parents were responding to the growing list of failures that NCLB guarantees with its impossible performance targets, he noted that parents in Trenton have concerns other than what tests their children are being humiliated with: they are more worried about their children being shot on the way home from school. One may suppose they still are, just as their children are still expected to score the same on the State...
Beyond K-12: “Education” that Falls Between the Cracks
Historians of education like Lawrence Cremin, along with other foundations scholars, have stressed for decades that a great deal of “education” happens outside standard k-12 classrooms. Education of many different kinds, especially for impoverished youth, takes place in a range of community-based settings outside families, including churches, youth groups, boys and girls clubs, child-care centers, foster-care placements, group homes, correctional institutions and more. Yet schools of education focus nearly all their attention on schools and on positions in schools that require professional licensure.There...
Kipp Schools Revisited
I was just reading an interview today with Paul Tough (http://thisweekineducation.blogspot.com/2006/12/nyt-magazines-paul-tough-on-hotseat.html) the author of the New York Times article “What it takes to Make a Student” from the November 26, 2006 magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?ei=5088&en=365daca642ddcb2f&ex=1322197200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print).The article has been almost universally hailed as a sensible reply to the problem of poverty and American schools. While I’m sure there is some success in the KIPP school approach, there...
Liveblogging from a philosophy-of-education conference
This afternoon I'm in the plenary session of the Southeast Philosophy of Education Society meeting, at a comparative session, Philosophy of Education: Global Perspectives. Sikharini Majumdar (University of Alabama) discussed Tagore's Ideals of World Education. Rabindranath Tagore was the Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1913, describing the ties between Tagore's life and education. Majumdar argues that while Tagore is best known as a poet (and the person who tagged Mohandes Gandhi with the "Mahatma" label), he also had significant influences in education, including the university he founded....
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