Context. As you remember, I paused my work on this newsletter to devote time both to a new course I was creating and teaching, “Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education” and spend more time helping our graduate students as they began teaching. But it’s time now to get back to the newsletter, especially to report on what some of the students in that class and I discovered in working together.
The course provides me an opportunity to put directly into practice one of the suggestions I made in an article for the 10th anniversary of Pedagogy which asked contributors to project where they felt the field has to move.
We should deliberately cultivate alliances with our students as partners in examining and reforming their own education. We often ignore the best resource for informed change, one that is right in front of our noses every day — our students, for whom the most is at stake. We must be deliberate and patient, though, in giving them conceptual help and practice in reflecting on their own learning.
What the course I am teaching now tries is to put these activities at the center of our inquiry. I asked the students to begin by writing their own educational autobiographies in segments, beginning with the elementary grades and focusing on how they learned to read and write. One helpful resource I assigned is the opening chapters of Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (1996) with its vividly recollected memories that the transformed teacher she eventually became was able to conceptualize. We discussed both what was similar in the students’ experiences and how they diverged, and what suggestions we would now make for improvement. We then moved on to their middle school experiences with the help of social studies experts such as Edgar Z. Friedenberg and Carol Gilligan, who showed that at the very moment students are searching for their own identities about gender, vocations, and beliefs, the school system itself often clamped down that quest with mechanisms such as rigid schedules of separate disciplines and restrictions such as dress codes where order almost always trumps learning. We then try to trace how these early experiences, attitudes, and repression are not simply outgrown but persist in high school and college as a kind of “educational transference” that often creates education as an arena sometimes hostile to free expression. We try to keep in mind that although we’ve spent countless time in classrooms, we’re often so preoccupied with learning or teaching that we don’t fully notice what’s going on around us, and lose opportunities for the kind of reflection, we now call “metacognition.”
To help us foster this kind of awareness, we also read articles and books from what I consider the golden age of education writing and which inspired me to go into teaching, works like John Holt, How Children Fail (1966), Herbert Kohl, 36 Children (1967), James Herndon, The Way It Spoze to Be (1968), and George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School (1969). None of these writers had studied at schools of education and all of them had extraordinary literary abilities; they stayed close to the specifics of the classrooms and students where they taught but also were able to analyze and conceptualize these observations—traits I was trying to cultivate in the students of this class. Films also help the students negotiate between the concrete and analytical: we viewed both of Fred Wiseman’s High School films as well as Montessori: Let the Child Be The Guide, Freedom Writers, and Louder than a Bomb: The Parkside Poets [which can be found on this site]. Also effective is a series of short [less than 10 minutes] clips, called, of course, ED Talks, available at
https://www.colorado.edu/education/about/news-events/cu-boulders-ed-talks
I particularly recommend Valerie Otero, The Unexpected Physicist and Robyn Tomiko, Lifting the Veil: The Truth about Teaching. Since all the talks highlighted members of our university’s School of Education, I encouraged students to browse through them, visit the ones they liked in their office hours, or invite them to our class for discussions.
Not to wallow too long in personal nostalgia, I do want to point to two recent books in whose publications I see a hopeful and hopefully trend setting. The first came off the press, specifically Harvard University Press, just a couple of months ago developments. The latest is The New College Classroom by Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis The first three chapters, which occupy a section titles “Changing Ourselves,” are one of the most eloquent and convincing arguments for active learning I have read. The book is filled with excellent suggestions and their rationales. One of my favorites is the last chapter, “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” which responds to complaints of the other teachers who found some of the methods difficult. This reminds of a personal objection I had from one teacher I was trying to mentor: “Small groups don’t work; I tried that once” as if students were sprung from the womb knowing how to run discussions.” The authors’ main suggestion is that if things aren’t working out, go back and brainstorm with the students themselves about the situation, which reminds me of John Dewey’s comment that the best way to solve problems with democracy is more democracy. The other book is a couple of years older, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) edited by Susan D. Blum. (West Virginia University Press, 2020). Included are practical and insightful essay by teachers in a wide range of fields that follow a framing introductory essay by an ex-student of mine, Jesse Stommel [A shorter version of Jesse’s essay can be found on this site, along with links to the various research behind it.] The force of the entire volume suggests that questioning the grading system may become more widespread in our profession in ways advocated earlier by Alfie Kohn, particularly in his 2018 book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s Praise and Other Bribes. Mr. Kohn was kind enough to have a Zoom discussion with our class, which the students and I found very energizing; he was particularly relevant to the students in the class because he is so determined in spreading the word widely beyond pedagogical experts to teachers and parents.
Watch this space for more reporting and ruminating about the class. I am working on a longer article on the experience, but I want to get some of this information out soon to fellow teachers and to invite your comments.