Sit with your kids. Sit with your faculty. Sit with your class.
Watch this.
Talk about the role you play in letting this happen.
Talk about what you’re going to do to make it stop.
Month: December 2011
Things I Know 295 of 365: The Street’s still got it
“C” is for “cookie!” That’s good enough for me.
– Cookie Monster
It was a blue plastic suitcase-looking thing. Open it, and you found a record player. Over and over again, if you entered my bedroom, you would hear Big Bird singing a song in which he mistook the alphabet for one word. I remember listening to it because I liked the song. I remember realizing what was going on in the song. I remember trying to sing the alphabet as one word. I never quite could. I’m still chasing the cool of Sesame Street.
I remember what must have been a re-run of “Farewell, Mr. Hooper” and how sad I was that Big Bird was so sad at the end.
I remember coming in from playing in the woods behind my grandparents’ house to sit on the couch after my grandmother passed me an old margarine tub full of apple slices and whatever was fresh in the garden. Then, I would watch Sesame Street followed by Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
I met up with all the regulars, sang to 12 with the people who lived in the pinball machine, laughed at how the Twiddle Bugs didn’t understand how small they were compared to the rest of us and kept pulling for Super Grover (Grover was always my favorite).
I’m in the midst of finals and papers and tying up the semester here. It’s a world that’s far from learning to bring words together, the joy of rubber duckies, and that Oscar wasn’t so bad.
Then, tonight, I looked at the Facebook group for HGSE, and my friend Aaron posted the video below under the heading “Writing Break!!!” For 1 minute and 58 seconds, I was on the couch eating apple slices.
The Street’s still got it.
Things I Know 294 of 365: Students are rich in Funds of Knowledge
…children in the households are not passive bystanders, as they seem in the classrooms…
– Luis Moll et al.
One of my favorite texts this semester is a reading from Luis Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzalez entitled “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms.” It’s better than it sounds. Let me distill:
“Our claim is that by capitalizing on household and other community resources, we can organize classroom instruction that far exceeds in quality the rote-like instructions these children [from working-class Mexican communities in Tucson, AZ] commonly encounter in schools.”
“We use the term ‘funds of knowledge’ to refer to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being.”
“[Home] networks are flexible adaptive, and active, and may involve multiple persons from outside the homes; in our terms, they are ‘thick’ and ‘multi-stranded,’ meaning that one may have multiple relationships with the same person or with various persons.”
“When funds of knowledge are not readily available within households, relationships with individuals outside the households are activated to meet either household or individual needs. In classrooms, however, teachers rarely draw on the resources of the ‘funds of knowledge’ of the child’s world outside the context of the classroom.”
“[Fund of knowledge] is more precise for our purposes because of its emphasis on strategic knowledge and related activities essential in households’ functioning, development, and well-being. It is specific funds of knowledge pertaining to the social, economic, and productive activities of people in a local region, not ‘culture’ in its broader, anthropological sense, that we seek to incorporate strategically into classrooms.”
I’ve been in many a conversation that came close to these ideas, but Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez put it in simply relatable terms and their full work is worth your time. Here’s the citation:
Moll, Luis et al. (Spring 1992). “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms,” in Theory Into Practice, XXXI(2), 132-141.
Things I Know 293 of 365: The glacier of higher education is drifting toward collaborative learning
If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.
– Wilson Mizner
I’m in the throws of finals at the moment. Today was spent reading the relevant four sources to be synthesized and analyzed in the essay final I’ll be writing tomorrow for one of classes. Contrary to my instincts, it won’t be available for viewing here until after the due date for submission has passed in keeping with the explicit instructions that we are allowed to discuss our ideas for the paper while we are planning and thinking about what we’ll write, but not once we’ve begun writing.
While I understand this guidance as keeping with the College’s policy of preserving “the status of the work as the student’s own genuine intellectual product,” I also wonder what effects such policies have on our abilities to build a fund of knowledge or work collaboratively.
Much of the work I’ve been doing over the course of this semester includes ideas around setting policy at the organizational and systems levels. This work has asked for definition of purpose and principles of design. It has asked for the articulation of beliefs as I would integrate them into organizations and systems under my supervision.
At the same time, the refinement of those principles and beliefs has largely been done individually.
There should be road testing.
Instead of my design principles, I’d love the chance to work within the context of a 70-student course to come to consensus on our design principles. Imagine the process of starting with 70 disperate ideas and the discussion surrounding their integration. Imagine the learning of the experience.
To be clear, this is the faulting of the system, not any individual. Much of the work done within higher education has to do with looking at the writings of those who have come before us and working to invent something just different enough so that we might call it unique. Given the plurality of ideas accessible in a globally networked world, such a process is intensely competitive.
In one of my courses this semester, we were asked to move toward a collaborative process. In teams, we were asked to set a research agenda and share our findings. Though not planned, this led to the sharing of resources across teams to the point that the course’s teaching team created and online space for teams to archive their research. Once allowed, the sharing was contagious. Not only was each piece of work created for that assignment each student’s own genuine intellectual property, it had the added benefit of drawing from the depth of a commons shaped by all the minds in the room.
This is an excellent start.
Still, we can do much more to foster individual thought built through communal knowledge.
The leading example of what is possible exists in Writing History in the Digital Age. Edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, Writing is “a born-digital edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series of its digitalculturebooks imprint.”
It signals a shift in how we can better leverage intellectual capital to build polycultural works.
What’s more, the research is coming to support such a shift. If you’ve got the time, look at the work Sarah Thorneycroft is doing to change academic publishing or consider Doug Belshaw’s transparent, conversational and deeply academic work on digital literacies.
While I’m frustrated by the lingering restrictions of classroom 1.0 I’m encountering in graduate school, I’m heartened by these bright spots highlighting ways in which networks can be leveraged to support both individual creation and communal refinement.
Things I Know 292 of 365: There’s a party going on
Celebrate we will, because life is short but sweet for certain.
– Dave Matthews Band
I just arrived home after a day of prepping for writing my final papers across all four classes.
As it turns out, we’re hosting a party in my apartment tonight.
As I type this, people are playing acoustic guitar, bongos and harmonica to “Country Roads.” A guy outside my bedroom door just yelled into his phone, “No, it’s still going. Come over! Right! Now!”
Tomorrow, this will all be an ironic college experience.
Tonight, I’m going to go watch the craziness unfold with no sense of irony.
Also, my roommate is walking around wearing this. I want one. First person to order one for me gets mad props.
Update: There’s now an accordion version of “Wade in the Water.” When did this become my life?
Things I Know 291 of 365: Here are my principles for designing a learning organization
As part of my final learning task for one of my courses, I must draft my principles for building a learning organization. Mine are:
- Processes for organizational review must be explicit and ongoing.
- Leadership and accountability are shared at and across all levels.
- Learning must be collaborative
- The physical and temporal learning spaces must be adaptive.
- All members are asked to complete quality work.
What do you think? How would learning of adults and children look in such a space?
Things I Know 290 of 365: Write a teacher a thank you, and you’ll make their day
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be making some suggestions of possible sources of gifts for the teachers in your life. Some will be products for purchase. Some will be ideas of things to make. All of them will be meant to help remember teachers as worthy of thanks.
At each schools year’s finish, I gave the same assignment. Rather than asking my students to write about what they’d learned in the school year as part of some essay that would be far from cherished and not have the time for attention as our other writing projects had, I had them write a letter.
I showed them an manilla folder that travelled with me from my first classroom. “This is the good stuff,” I’d say. “These are the cards, letters, sticky notes and snapshots from kids across the years I’ve taught. On days when I get to the end and I’m pretty sure I’ve screwed all of you up, I read one or two of these. It helps.”
The folder now lives on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. I think of its position as the foundation.
Then, I told my students about Mr. Curry, and how he taught me math in high school and also how to be a caring teacher. I told them about the e-mail I sent Mr. Curry once I was a teacher and realized how much of him was in my teaching. I told them about how he replied and told me it wasn’t nice to make old men cry.
And then I told my kids to think of a teacher in their lives who was their Mr. Curry or who had inspired them or whom they’d like to make proud. “Write a letter to tell them how you’re doing and what you’ve learned.”
And they wrote. They looked up addresses to old schools, addressed envelopes, and sealed their letters inside.
If the teachers were from my school, I got to deliver them and watch as they were read. They were narrative report cards holding only the good stuff – moments of reminders that what they did mattered, and they hadn’t screwed the kids up too badly.
Do that this holiday season.
If you’re a parent, write a letter to one of your kid’s teachers letting them know just how much you appreciate and honor the work they do each day to help your kid (a complete stranger) understand a little bit more about the world and their place in it.
If you’re a teacher, write a letter to one of your colleagues letting them know you see how much they do for your students, your school and your faculty.
If you’re a student, write a letter to a teacher telling them how they helped you learn.
Maybe you’ll be the first entry in their Good Stuff folder.
Things I Know 289 of 365: In teaching, the simple is complex
And so from that, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.
– Will Wright
In working toward completion of a final learning task in which I design a learning organization, I’m re-visiting the reading from this unit of study.
In one 2002 Teaching and Teacher Education article from Judith Warren Little, I found this description of a comment made in a meeting of teachers. One teacher, Leigh, has asked her colleagues if the will all be implementing silent sustained reading uniformly across their classrooms. It stuck me that Little’s description of the conversation captures some of the richest conversations a teaching colleagues can have:
Leigh’s questions thus becomes the occasion for revealing differences in the teachers’ instructional preferences, and for negotiating what it will mean for the teachers to work together in “piloting” a new course. These are not mere matters of technique or procedure; fundamental issues of principle and purpose figure prominently in that negotiation. Further, these are no matters that could have been fully negotiated in advance. They arise in and through the work itself. As Leigh’s question is posed and modified, engaged or deflected, individuals find occasion to state their own preferences and intentions, locating themselves in a variety of ways in relation to the collective project of the group (piloting the course, developing this week’s curriculum), past and present relationships in the classroom (student choice), and the group’s way of being (decisions).
A classmate and I were talking today about the perceived disconnect between external perceptions of teaching and the internal complexity of the work. Little is describing four teachers faced with a simple question or whether they will all be practicing the same reading method uniformly in their classrooms, and she describes the complicated nature of the attempt to answer that question quite wonderfully. This is tough work.