Education is Politics by Ira Shor

Three quotes that stuck out to me from Shor's "Education is Politics" are as followed:

1. A curriculum that avoids questioning school and society is not, as is commonly supposed, politically neutral. It cuts off the students' develop­ment as critical thinkers about their world. 

-I like this quote by Shor. I completely agree with how schools should focus on teaching their students the facts about the society we live in. Instead, talking about politics in school is considered inappropriate. We are teaching our youth to ignore politics and injustices in our society. And by trying to keep the youth ignorant to these injustices, schools are making a political statement. 

2.  If the aim of intellectual training is to form the intelligence rather than to stock the memory," Piaget wrote, "and to produce intellectual explorer rather than mere erudition, then traditional education is manifestly guilty of a grave deficiency"

-Shor is quoting educational philosopher Jean Piaget, who believes that schools measure intelligence only based on memorization of facts. Schools also view those who are dubbed intelligent as more superior than those who are viewed as not intelligent. Piaget argues that intelligence should be based on a persons enthusiasm for learning about the world around him or her, and their critical thinking abilities. I agree with Piaget on how there are many different ways of measuring intelligence, but I think that the best way of measuring a person's intelligence is how open-minded they are to other people and culture's outside their own. 

3. Social and economic values, hence, are already embedded in the design of the Institution we work in. in the "Ideal corpus of school knowledge "we preserve in our modes of teaching and in our principles. standards, and forms of evaluation.

-This quote should be very obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in the education system. The education system is extremely biased to those who are in a higher social and economic class. Especially in recent years with the price of college tuition skyrocketing at the same rate as the need for a degree to get a job with a living wage. 

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED538236.pdf

Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome

The reason why children with Down Syndrome and similar "disabilities" tend to be kept separate in school is because our education system is catered to one way of learning. If a student learns in a different way, he or she is labeled as "disabled" and is kept separate from the kids who are thought to be smarter than them. I really like what Kliewer says at the bottom of the 5th page of the article,

                 "Schools have traditionally taken a narrow position when defining and judging student intellect. The presence of a thoughtful mind has been linked to patterns of behavioral and communicative conformity associated with competence in logical-mathematical thinking and linguistic skills. Assessments of how well a student conforms to expectations (measurements through which students come to be defined either as smart or as lacking intellect) tend to focus teacher attention on the child's adeptness at responding to classroom-based math and language tasks. These evaluative instruments supposedly measure either a student's understanding of a transmitted knowledge base (hence, a preexisting one) related to math and language, or the student's ability to discover the knowledge base through carefully contrived activities. "

         One part of the article described a classroom in which was a student who struggled with Down Syndrome. One of the things that enabled him to flourish creatively and intellectually was by making a play with the other children. The children wrote the play, memorized the lines, and created the scenery, costumes and props. I like what Kliewer describes of this idea for the children,

 "The Wild Thing production was not an add-on to a preexisting curriculum. It reflected Shayne's unique approach to building community through the process of learning. Within the web of activities, Shayne and her co-workers systematically developed opportunities for their students to engage with literacy and numeracy skills, problem-solving, and critical thinking processes, and interpersonal capacities. Though the children may not have been aware of it, learning was always of central concern."

This approach to inclusive teaching uses methods that all different types of learners can benefit from. The kids were having so much fun creating the play that they didn't even realize they were learning without the frustrations of sitting at a desk and memorizing facts.

Another quote I like from this article addresses mathematics education and how it teaches students to view the world: "Mathematics teachers report that students are nearly always searching for steps to take in solving the problem-"how to plug the numbers into the equation, how to follow the algorithm." The more closely the ordering of words in a problem parallels the order of symbols in the equation, the easier the problem is to solve and the more the students will like it. Seeing mathematics as a way of understanding the world, of illuminating a phenomenon, as a kind of conversation or enterprise into which even a young person can become meaningfully involved is a rare occurrence. And yet, how can genuine understanding ever begin to come about with such an attitude?"

What do we learn about the world when we are taught that there is a right and wrong to every answer? One way to think? "abled people" and "disabled people?" some interesting food for thought.

This is an article called "Why Mixing Student's With and Without Special Needs is a Good Idea.": http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/06/25/special-needs-inclusion-good-idea, on this page is a cute video about a girl named Tessa who has trouble with her focus and behavior at school. It starts out with her talking about how she doesn't like school, until she enrolls in an inclusive special education program, and then concludes that school is fun.


Here is a chart that better defines inclusion, compared to exclusion, integration, and segregation.

Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children In Their Own Self Interest by Patrick J. Finn

I found this reading to be very interesting. What Finn is saying again and again throughout the chapter is that we are holding all students to an upper class standard of education. This reading reminded me a little bit of Becoming Something Different, because of how Esmé's school assumed she wasn't taking her education seriously and ultimately kept her from completing her degree. It also reminded me of Will It Help The Sheep, because many teacher's from this reading, according to Finn, just handed down their difficult student's to lower levels instead of trying to figure out how to get them more engaged and excited in their education. I was also reminded of the scene in Freedom Writers where Erin says "these kids know they're being given these [condensed books] because they know we think they aren't smart enough." Finn's question is, how do we get working class students to be excited about their education? Finn's answer to this lies Paulo Freire's work in Brazil. The poor and the illiterate of Brazil did not understand why they should need an education, and almost resented it as the rich and educated contributed to the inequality of wealth in their country. When Freire showed them how an education could help them get out of poverty, they became determined to learn how to read, and granting students the will to learn is winning half the battle.

Here is a link to Paulo  Freire's work "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
http://www.pedagogyoftheoppressed.com/author/

Here is an interesting map showing literacy rates by country:

From Belly Dancers to Burqas: Media Representations of Muslim Women

Today at RIC, a very intelligent woman named Dr. Afshan Jafar gave a lecture on Media Representations of Muslim Women. Dr. Jafar grew up in Pakistan herself, and now is a Sociologist working at Connecticut College. Her lecture was very interesting, I really enjoyed it. She spoke of famous media representations such as Jasmine from Aladdin, and the famous Steve McCurry photograph "Afghan Girl" that is an iconic image on the cover of a 1985 issue of National Geographic. She spoke of how the photographer of "Afghan Girl" never learned her name or her life story, and it reminded me a little bit of Esmé from "Becoming Something Different". Esmé's teachers and guidance counselors at school took one look at her and her ethnicity and assumed that she best belonged in remedial and ELL classes, instead of classes that would ultimately lead her to graduation. This is how many people saw the portrait of "Afghan Girl" with no identity besides her middle eastern ethnicity, just how Esmé's school couldn't see past her Mexican ethnicity.

Dr. Jafar compared how Muslim women dressed in coverings are seen by many Americans as oppressed, Muslims seeing Americans dressed very immodestly, for example, at the beach, could be seen to them as American women being oppressed and exploited for our bodies. Another comparison that opened my eyes was at the beginning of the lecture. Dr. Jafar asked us to finish the end of the sentence "Muslim women are...." on a piece of scrap paper. Many of the finished sentences ended with words like "oppressed" "controlled by men" and "silent." She then explained how when she asks groups of people to finish the sentence "Christian women are.." there are a million questions asked to clarify what type of Christian women. In this exercise, all Muslim women were generalized. This made me think of the reading White Privilege by Peggy McIntosh, because the less we know about a cultural group, the more we generalize them and think we understand that culture.

The third reading I connected to this lecture wasn't a reading, but the media representation presentation we did. Dr. Jafar explained to us how in Aladdin, the villain was made to be more stereotypically arab and "barbaric", while Aladdin looked and spoke more stereotypically American. This representation of muslim stereotypes in disney movies was a topic we covered in our project.

Attached I have an article explaining the identity of "Afghan Girl" more fully:
-http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2002/04/afghan-girl/index-text

I also have an article from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee about stereotypes in American media:
-http://www.adc.org/education/arab-stereotypes-and-american-educators/

This is another link debunking common Muslim stereotypes:
-http://teachmideast.org/essays/26-stereotypes/38-stereotypes-of-arabs-middle-easterners-and-muslims

This cartoon was also displayed in Dr. Jafar's presentation, it compares the judgements that both muslim and american women face based on what they wear and how that correlates to their oppressive culture:

Here is the famous "Afgan Girl" photo, the girl's name was unknown for 17 years until National Geographic tracked her down in 2002:

Becoming something different, Learning from Esmé by Fairbanks, Crooks, and Ariail

Two educational researchers track a young Mexican immigrant in a primarily Latina/o community from the time she was in 6th grade until the time she was in 11th grade. What we learn after reading the whole article through, that despite her participation, intelligence and most of all strong will to do well in school, Esmé didn't graduate high school. Since being an English Language Learner placed her in remedial classes, she never learned the material necessary for her to pass the standardized test she needed to graduate. On page four, the authors reference works from Gonzalez, Valencia, and Valenzuela, "Researchers argue that perceptions of Latina/o students as lacking English proficiency, adequate motivation, and parental support, combined with the school's devaluing of cultural practices different from the mainstream, too often position Latina/o students as deficient."

When reading the article we learn that Esmé was a very good student, she attended class early, did her homework, she was active in extracurricular activities, she was well behaved and made friends with peers who were also striving for academic achievement. We learn a very important lesson from the article, when a student does not graduate high school, it isn't always the student's unwillingness to learn, the system can fail certain students. If, for example, her guidance counselors had encouraged her to take on more challenging classes instead of writing her off as "deficient" because she was an English Language Learner, perhaps she would have learned the material needed to pass the TAKS. Perhaps if the school had seen her potential in the way the researchers interviewing her had, she could have the bright future she had dreamed of.

Here is a link that reviews some of the problems that English Language Learners face: http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/ELL_Policy_Brief_Fall_08_(2).pdf