hey all,
now back from germany - slightly revised this - give it a look and a comment if you have a chance.
Personal/Political – Tentative Curriculum Map
Most Emphasized Skills:
1. Writing for clarity, power, and interest.
2. College-ready reading.
3. Problematizing and concretizing.
4. Discovering connections.
5. Conducting informal and formal research.
6. Collaborating for insight.
7. Creating in multiple formats.
Unit Plans:
1. Digital: Youth Surrounded by Screens
Key Concepts:
Changes in Consciousness
Compulsion - Short-Cycle Behaviors
Friendship and Community
Self-Presentation - The new celebrity for everybody - we're all in reality TV shows now
Resources:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121063808679386853.html
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,6248930.story
http://www.newsweek.com/id/138536
Everything Bad Is Good For You - Johnson
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
Generation Digital - Montgomery
Youth, Identity, and Digital Media - Buckingham
The Dumbest Generation - Bauerlein
Information Tribes - http://tagonist.livejournal.com/189177.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/us/06internet.html?hpw
Webcam lessons
2. Cool: Costumes, Shoes, Tattoos, and Blues - Self, Identity, and Social Status
Key Concepts:
Identity
Self-Presentation
Coolness
Mass Media
images of identity
Conformity
Anthropological Perspective
Sociological Perspective
Historical Perspective
Philosophical Perspective
Naturalist Critique
Marxist Critique
Musical Tribes
Sexuality as status symbol
Fashion
Resources:
Merchants of Cool
The Persuaders
Journal of Popular Culture
http://tagonist.livejournal.com/189906.html - Rat Park
3. School: K-16 Education Today
Resources:
Own Educational Narratives
Letters to Teachers
I Love College - Roth
Our Schools Suck - Su
Dumbing Us Down - Gatto
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/progressive_education.aspx#1E1-progrsved
My Pedagogic Creed - Dewey - http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Pedagogic_Creed
http://tagonist.livejournal.com/189906.html - Rat Park
Entre Les Murs
School is Hell - Groening
4. Other People
Friendships, Acquaintances, Colleagues, Lovers, and Family
Listening Skills and Intimacy
How to be effective at work
Different family structures and dynamics and advantages and disadvantages
Empathy
Love
Resources:
NonViolent Communication
Goleman book on Emotional Intelligence
17 Obstacles to Effective Communication
Key Pedagogical Principles:
1. Whether the student learns hugely or smally is primarily the student's responsibility. The student is the one who will enjoy the benefits of the learning for a lifetime - the student is the one to decide how hard to try, how to respond to difficulties, how to motivate herself. The student is the player, the teacher is just the coach.
2. Student interest and engagement and cleverness are important. Study habits and the devotion of effort and time are also important. Combine them and you become an intellectual.
3. Students should be allowed to devote most of their school time to topics of clear relevance to their own lives.
4. In a true collision of ideas the student is able to honestly consider the perspectives of others (including teachers, experts in the field, her own family) and rethink her own perspective, not simply barricade her own perspective or fully adopt the teacher's perspective.
5. The best learning often leads to insight and transformation.
6. Students benefit generally from the chance to deeply explore particularly important and engaging themes - but some contextual information and memorization helps too.
7. The natural phases of learning include- maybe in order although of course we loop a lot:
a. experiencing
b. brainstorming
c. thinking and talking
d. interviewing and surveying
e. quick reading and video viewing and thinking
f. talking and second writing and exchanging
g. deeper reading and thinking and note assembling
h. thinking and writing and
i. creating and embodying.
8. Learning in schools offers many advantages (leadership by teacher, peers to discuss ideas with, resources, set-aside time) and many disadvantages (distraction, coercive structures, competition, grades, etc). Since we will be learning together in a school setting we have to work together to optimise the structures and dynamics of our collaboration.
9. We're allowed to think different. We're also able to choose how much time and effort to devote to this course. And we come to the course with different skills and different abilities. Therefore we will do this course in a way that allows students to make individual and group choices - it can't be "one size fits all".
10. Since the primary function of grades at this level is as signals to colleges the grading structure that I propose is:
A signifies that you have demonstrated readiness for a serious college where the majority of the people are there to think and learn and well prepared to do so - Harvard or Oberlin.
B signifies that you have demonstrated readiness for a regular college where some people are there primarily to think and learn and are decently prepared to do so - CUNY or SUNY.
C signifies that you have demonstrated readiness for a community college or party school - where much learning is possible despite the relatively ill-prepared and disinterested students all around you.
D signifies that you have not demonstrated readiness for college.
F signifies that you have not demonstrated basic readiness for this level of high school - 8o% punctual attendance, some ability to complete assigned work, basic collaborative effort in the classroom.
Some Enduring Understandings I hope to emphasize:
1. We do not live autonomously. No border walls with armed guards successfully prohibit thoughts and energy and matter from crossing our skins and skulls in any direction. No one is an island. We swim together in an ocean, made of the ocean, come from the ocean, return to the ocean at death and with every breath.
2. Reality exists complexly swirled and blurred – everything connects to everything else.
3. People can live consciously – critically consider aspects of our lives that our cultures present uncritically. People can live unconsciously – “we don’t want anyone to mind us - we play the roles that they assigned us.”
4. Greater awareness of connections between aspects of reality allows us to choose – using criteria of beauty, justice, or creativity – where no choice was offered. In other words, critical consciousness reduces the proportion of our lives that we live as dumb puppets of the corporate, political, and traditional power blocs in our culture and increases our ability to resist those blocs – not as autonomous rational bubble-people – but as well-connected and phosphorescent swimmers in a larger ocean.
5. Our culture’s current set-up significantly requires domination, seduction, conformity, and the selling of various commodities and identities to hide the “quiet desperation” of most members of the society.
6. Members of our culture compulsively assemble masks and missions to gain acceptance and to construct a personal narrative.
7. Other paths might be possible but we should be skeptical of cartoon simple answers.
Underlying Resources and Connected Thoughts:
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContStar.htm
New Radicals in the Multiversity
Triads - 2nd commentor has to also comment on 1st comment
Use ASL - hyperlinked alphabet for most repeated comments
Opening routine is crucial
Create examples of various quality levels and their grades, comments too
Video blogging using webcams?
Train facilitators
Daybreaking - 101, contextual study, field trips, street interviews
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I'm really going to look forward to the "Digital: Youth Surrounded by Screens" unit. I'm specifically interested to see how students are going to respond when being called "The Dumbest Generation" and are having their lives, meaning the ones that they can sign on and off, attacked.
ReplyDeleteEmphasis on the "understandings I hope to emphasize"-
2. After seeing this documentary on NOVA, I've been remotely obsessed with fractal geometry. And I don't know if this would connect directly, but apparently there are repeating geometric patterns that are present outside the world we have created. You can watch it here, if you've never seen it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fractals/program.html
4. I'm not sure if most people can accept being "swimmers in a larger ocean." It'll make them feel like their insignificant beings, ones that are much less superior than we are brought out to be. I don't think many people would be too comfortable with that fact.
7. Perhaps this is where you can incorporate the convenience thing. Choosing a path that may be less convenient now, but possibly lead to a better result. Maybe just consider weighing out the two. (???)
I think that looking at the 4 different perspectives of the costumes, tattoos, etc. would be very insightful as well. For me, I've only scratched on the sociological perspective.
For the school unit, it may also be interesting to see it through the political aspect, and how politicians are using "improvement in education" as a reason to why they should be elected/re-elected. It's almost as though better education is a bonus, a card that politician needs to play to win, rather than a necessity for the well-beings of future generations.