When I was young, I remember hearing the phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It seemed it was a common understanding that becoming a fully realized, intelligent, adult required more than what was going on in the house and home. By interacting with ideas that differ from what is presented in our homes, we widen our understanding of a subject while also practicing the powers of empathy. Lev Vygotsky looked at the way culture affects learning with his theory of sociocultural learning. This theory suggests that those within our culture, including parents, peers, mentors, etc. are a major asset in developing higher order thinking (Cherry, 2022). This theory continues with the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development which theorizes that to learn most effectively you must stretch your current knowledge, but if you stretch it too far you enter an area that you are incapable of with your current knowledge (Cherry, 2022). By students collaborating, playing, and simply socializing, students can learn effectively and in a more fun and culturally enriching way. In my experience, my best learning comes from reaching out for help, collaborating, and discussing with others. I attempted to capture the benefits of sociocultural learning in a time lapse video. This was meant to be stop motion, but it sort of turned into a slideshow. My intention was to illustrate that learning together leads to more empathy and peaceful coexistence. Please view the video below: My best experiences in my professional role are learning from my colleagues, but more importantly, from my students. I am eager to learn from them. I have recently moved to a wide variety of choice menu assessments for my English 12 class. For example, students are able to make playlists, short podcasts using Anchor, or pieces of art as chapter assessments highlighting theme, symbolism, plot development, or even major plot points. They then explain their assessment models in a low stakes writing scenario. I am not interested in perfection, but a personal connection to the main ideas of the text. Every year, I understand the books that I teach, and I understand how my students see these texts in a much clearer way. I graduated high school 22 years ago. I was a student during the infancy of the internet and broadband. My childhood was defined by a pre-internet world. I watched what was on TV, because it was the only thing that was on. I want to hear about their experiences having everything “on demand,” and how that shapes their interests, education, and learning. These choice menus allow my class to turn into a learning environment where we are all learning from one another, and because the students are connecting the material to their experiences and contexts, they are often eager to share. This model would not have been possible without support from my colleagues. Once again, our wild ideas become refined and possible through collaborating.
Years ago, we said “It takes a village to raise a child,” but lately it seems that tradition has fallen out of fashion. Politics has led us to believe that public schools are places for indoctrination, and that person down the road may be a predator or bad influence. We seem to be more inclined to shut our doors to ideas that shake our contexts, traditions, and morals, even though several theories support that this is exactly how we strengthen our convictions, shake those same convictions, learn new things, and become more empathic. Despite that being the sentiment on social media and popular cable news networks, that is not what I am seeing in my class. My students are more homogenous than when I was a student, they are eager to learn from one another, use technology to do so, and try new things. I hope these same kids enter the adult world with their eyes and minds as open as they are in my classroom, and I will still be there waiting to learn from the next batch that I have the pleasure to meet. References: Cherry, K. (2022, June 3). Sociocultural theory of development. Verywell Mind. Https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-sociocultural-theory-2795088 McGregor, D (2022, July 22). My Learning Theory Stop Motion. [Video]. YouTube https://youtu.be/TwJRU6F-834
0 Comments
As a public school educator I am often asked to rethink ideas, modify lessons, and attend professional development that, ideally, helps me on this journey. However, I am rarely given time to do so. One of the advantages of the masters in Education Technology program at MSU, is the time I have been given time to think critically and creatively about my professional role. Being an English teacher, you would think that I would be confident with creativity, and practice it frequently, yet I, like many, rarely think of myself as a creative person. I think we all need to start to respect the type of creativity that we participate in everyday. From solving common problems around the house using an odd solution, composing an email to our boss, or simply breaking out a quick dance when no one is looking, we all take some time to be a bit creative. While these past two weeks have seen me dabble in creativity from a variety of lenses, abstraction felt like I was back at home in my classroom. According to Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, abstraction is isolating your focus to one view while ignoring its other properties, thus focusing on one feature that is of importance (2001, p. 72-73). By looking at themes, settings, characters, etc. we use abstraction in the ELA classroom often. However, with more time to play, I was able to abstract ideas and then combine them with my personal interests, hobbies, and context to come up with deeply personal abstractions that connect myself to the content. For example, I took my love of board games, and combined it with my intention to revise my Macbeth unit, to create a Macbeth card game. Abstractly, this looks at the component parts of a stage production. Players take cards to put together the best stage show. Please see my video for more details: After leveraging my interests and combining them with Macbeth, I had a newfound interest in stage production. I continued to think about how I could abstractly “score” various components of a stage in a way that made sense and even spent some time reading about how theater performances are put together. Connecting the content to my real life saw me more inspired to find out more. I can only hope that my students can make similar connections and find themselves interested in learning more. Abstraction also works as we detect symbols throughout the pieces of literature we discuss. To students, symbolism can feel like cruel and unusual punishment. It seems like a puzzle that English teachers have put together just to torment them, but again, these abstract concepts are what connect us to literature. Symbols connect literature to the real world. Similarly, themes connect us to ideas that guide who we are. I often tell my students that themes and symbols are why they love a book. When they find an aspect of themselves in ideas or objects with symbolic representation, they connect with the story. To play with this, I used Craiyon, an AI that can generate original art based on text prompts. I started plugging in specific ideas from Macbeth, but quickly dove back into abstraction, and started to move away from the tangible to intangible ideas. The creations were magnificent, eerie, and evocative. Craiyon still has a permanent tab on my phone’s web browser, and I frequently dump large text prompts in it to see what new horrors it bestows upon the world. After playing with it, I immediately put together a draft assignment so that my students could explore how this AI “paints” their abstract ideas, and then write about where they see the connections and what surprised them. I hope writing and thinking about these ideas, and even discussing how on Earth a computer can do that, will stoke the same interest it did for me. I think the reason abstraction excites me is that, to me, it requires empathy. It requires you to break things apart in the same way we can get into the minds of others, and experience the context of their life that makes them who they are. I can’t think of a more valuable skill as an educator than to break something into its component parts or ideas, and then reassemble them, with a fresh understanding and respect of their nuance and complexity. By abstracting, we better understand our material, but more importantly, our students. References
McGregor, D (2022, July 19). Macbeth Abstraction [Images]. McGregor, D. (2022, July 18). Stage Production Card Game. [Video]. YouTube https://youtu.be/QzWp0duWiNc Root-Bernstein, R. S., & Root-Bernstein, M. (2001). Sparks of genius: The thirteen thinking tools of the world's most creative people. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Education is inundated with “research based” curriculum and supplements that say they will improve test scores and engage students. However, with capitalist intentions taking over education, it is important to scrutinize these products that are “researched based.” Daniel Willingham, in his book, When Can You Trust the Experts? (2012) attempts to tackle this issue. One problem is that people like to be right. We want our beliefs to maintain our “self identity, values, social ties, and manage our emotions” (Willingham, 2012, p. 51). We are more inclined to believe things that reforce ideas that we have previously heard or make us comfortable. What has become more chilling is how pervasive social media platforms have become since the publishing of Willingham’s book. Willingham stated, “People believe lots of things for which the scientific evidence is absent” (p. 12), and this is even more true in online spaces and on social media platforms. As the world gets taken over by more and more social media platforms, humans are interacting with more information than ever before, much of which is dubious and created with an agenda. Much of this is occurring due to automatic algorithms that are designed to keep us interested, but an unintended effect is seeing us fall into “filter bubbles.” Eli Pariser discussed this in his 2011 TED Talk. As we browse our experience becomes our own, links show us what we want to see, and unfortunately our reality also becomes our own. Considering this TED talk was in 2011, I am disappointed that conversations about social media are not addressed in When Can You Trust the Experts? Despite that, the book does illustrate how sinister these forces can be at manipulating our reality. Part of the problem is education's obsession with seeking the answers. We see this in the classroom with students looking for the shortcut to the answers and limited creativity. Recently, our department made an effort to shift the focus of our English 12 class to a humanities course that utilizes creative assessment models and choice menus to allow students to be successful. Each year, it takes students a solid month to get used to this style of class. At first, they are terrified of essay tests or projects that represent test grades. We wanted students to “play” with the material and then give us some combination of the content with their personal experiences. We want students to take risks, dabble, iterate, and ask better questions. Curiously, dabbling, iterativing, and asking questions can comprise good science, and following that method can get us closer to discovering the trustworthiness of a particular source. I look forward to finding out what we do next. I want all the tools to ensure that I share methods with my students to ensure they can do their best to overcome the power of internet algorithms and then echo chambers that are affecting our political landscape, friendships, safety, and ultimately, our happiness. References:
Pariser, E. (2011). Beware online “filter bubbles” [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en Willingham, D. (2012). When can you trust the experts? How to tell good science from bad in education. Jossey-Bass. |
David McGregorI am an English teacher and cat lover from Genesee County, Michigan who is eager to learn new things. Archives
August 2022
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |