SIS: H21742, Group 3

SIS: H21742
Group 3
ED 145, Jin Li
10.18.06 Mid-term

1. A teachers tacit attitude toward teaching and learning creates the framework for folk
pedagogy. This mental model of education may be unconscious, formed outside of the
classroom. Natural preferences for teaching may indeed be codified in progressive, studentcentered teacher education programs. Yet today, this type of progressive pedagogybe it
folk or learned in a teacher education programis often incongruent with professional
pedagogical demands. Schools exist as arbiters of accumulated knowledge, and seek to
preserve and disseminate that knowledge even beyond the provenance of its initial gnostic
holder. Such ossified knowledge demands memorization and formal assessment in
standardized tests. Yet according to progressive pedagogy, such testing does not reflect actual
learning, and may even contradict student-centered approaches to education.
Attitudes about teaching fall within trends formalized by Torff and Sternberg. Their
second folk pedagogy ascribes to the theory of mind as a blank slate. Teachers dictate and
students memorize objective facts. This is the most traditional and widely practiced
pedagogy, for it efficaciously aligns with the institutionalized diagnostic structure of school.
The third folk pedagogy stems from thinkers such as John Dewey, William James, and Jean
Piaget. Learning comes through interaction with ones surroundings and concrete experience.
This model is called constructivist. Teachers facilitate rather than dictate to students, and let
students arrive at their own conclusions through hands-on experience and invention. By
drawing upon concrete experience, students can then form abstract knowledge and apply that
knowledge to a constellation of situations. Learning takes place either through assimilation or
accommodation. In assimilation, the experience of creation fits well with the students prior
beliefs; in accommodation, a student has to re-contextualize a belief after trying and failing
to apply it to active experience. For instance, an art student may be inclined to draw an image
at the very center of the picture, but may soon realize that the composition seems lacking. A
teacher might inform the student about dynamic principles of composition. Given a second
chance, the student may try to activate the image by erasing it and drawing a new one offcenter or slightly angled. Here, failure is pivotal to learning because it changes prior belief
through memorable concrete experience. This process stimulates learning, but finds no apt
reflection in the current mania for testing and standards. In fact, a student is punished when
he or she fails on a standardized test, without a chance to find out why.

How can a progressive teacher reconcile the learning needs of students with the
institutional needs of school? Piaget advocated that teachers diagnose operational skills at the
beginning of the learning process, and measure achievements at the end. For instance, a
science teacher could assess recall and knowledge of the ultraviolet spectrum, and then ask
the student to photograph leaves as fall turns, changing from green to yellow, orange, and
red. The teacher could ask, Why dont the leaves turn blue? A student should infer that the
color change reflects the ultraviolet spectrum, called ROYGBIV. If the dying leaf went the
other direction, leaves would turn blue, indigo, and then violet. By tethering concrete
experience to the ultraviolet spectrum, student performance of institutional knowledge should
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increase on a standardized test. Yet this knowledge would work well within a progressive
folk pedagogical approach, and it avoids the rote blank slate theory of education.

2. In his theory of constructivism, Jean Piaget advocates learning by invention. A student
inhabits the learning process only through repeated failure, transformation, and the restrained
guidance of a mentor. By interacting with objectsbe they the colored pegs of childrens
play, crayons, or musical instrumentsstudents can develop abstract thought. The ability to
apply this abstract thought can only come after concrete, active experience. Students exist at
the center of the learning process. Received knowledge remains at the pressure-free
periphery until students arrive at their own conclusions. These conclusions should interplay
with canonized knowledge. After all, those who comprise the canon went through a process
similar to the students, developing abstract ideas out of experience and interaction with
surroundingsMozart composing variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star; Archimedes
measuring gold in a bath tub; Camus feeling estranged in a crowd.

Constructivism reigns as the pedagogical theory of museum education; for instance,
visitors in science museums may interact with exhibits, and they often self-select their topics
of interest. At one museum, the idea of centripetal force can be made more concrete by
spinning pennies down a basin, built so that the penny whirls to the hole at the base in circles,
concentric and diminishing. Most visitors to museums regard such exhibits as fun, and
learningso often associated with arduous tasksbegins to take on a subversive glow. This
active way of learning can find apt application in school settings. It weds well with the art
classroom. Art students must perform and create during class hours, with the teacher
facilitating the process rather than dictating canonized knowledge. In other classes, teachers
could consider structuring tasks in a similar way. Rather than write an essay or review of a
book, perhaps an English student could write a short story using some of the highlighted
effective principles in the textstructure, figurative language, and imagery. Or the student
could transform the received text into a visualization or piece of artwork. This process of
transformation may stimulate critical thinking skills, and offer the opportunity for reflection
about similarities and dissonance between art forms.

Yet this theory could also apply to more subtle situations. For instance, the principles of
fiction follow Piagets theory of learning. An effective story must begin with concrete
experience before it can move the reader into the realm of abstract thought. Readers can only
understand what they first feel; a story about innocence lost, for instance, could open with the
image of a box of feeble baby rabbits, to borrow an example from the novel Child of my
Heart, by Alice McDermott. Often, writers construct metaphors so that abstractions feel
palpable to the reader. A teacher cued into the process of writing can relate this knowledge to
students who might otherwise see the text as inert. Rather, the student should learn that
writers create texts so that they may be distilled and transformed in the subjective
consciousness of the reader. Though many students find reading dull and less active than
playing a frenetic video game, the teacher can show how writers construct their works as
flexible objects of interaction.

Teaching in a constructivist way might demand a great deal of time, because it focuses on
process and discovery. But American schools tend not to be reservoirs of time. The process of
learning by accommodation, where a students expectations conflict with the results of active
experience, may seem especially incongruous. Trial and error, and even failure, remain
integral to the constructivist learning process. But most standardized tests offer no
redemption for failure. Students cannot even see why they answered questions incorrectly.
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For the teacher, constructivism has pragmatic disadvantages: a time consuming, subjective
process might not yield the quantitative results desired by administrators.

3. The Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky built upon the constructivist theory of
Jean Piaget to emphasize the society in which learning occurs. In fact, societal discourse and its
artifactssuch as the tools of the trade, language, maps, and signsoften shape the learner even
more than an individuals facilitated interaction with his or her surroundings. For instance, some
societies stress the moral dimension of learning, so that educated means not only intellectual
prowess, but also social and family commitments. This discourse can manifest itself in the
subtlest ways, from the question and answer discourse between mother and child while reading
picture books in Euro-American middle class households, to the empathetic approach favored by
Japanese mothers and their very young children. A Japanese mother might ask her child to finish
his vegetablesthe sight of unfinished food would upset the farmer who cultivated the
vegetables. In this way, young children develop according to models honed by society, and they
bring this cultural framework of knowledge to the place of education.

Vygotsky defined a students actual developmental level as what he or she could
accomplish without the guidance of a mentor, and the potential developmental level as what
might be achieved through the guidance of a mentorthe distance between the two areas
constitutes the zone of proximal development. As a mentor comes from a particular society, the
student learns to interact with not only an object of thought, but with a societal discourse
generations in the making. A visual example of this practice can be found in the ateliers of Dutch
artists from Rembrandts time, who painted with a particular style and range of subject matter,
often culled from the bible. To this day, scholars have difficulty divining Rembrandt paintings
from the work of his pupils.

This interaction still occurs in many craft-oriented fields and traditional societies, and is
called a cognitive apprenticeship. A master might only tacitly understand a craft, especially one
deeply embedded in the collective memory. But through observation and an active partnership,
the student learns. A Mayan woman working her loom provides a present-day example of this
practice. The master of the loom must explain what she is doing as a cognitive model, while the
student observes and attempts to imitate this model. Eventually, the guidance provided by the
mentor falls away until the student learns to weave. The example of a girl learning how to use a
loom applies well to an American school. The student at the loom has learned in the context of
developing an actual product, and this provides motivation in learning. Teachers should have
students work toward a product that has a real world context. In fact, with web publishing
software, student poetry can easily be published or posted as audio files. At the same time, the
cognitive apprenticeship theory deflects the clich, Those who cant, teach. Teachers should
reflect upon their skills when teaching a unit. An English teacher who writes poetry could
provide a portfolio of his or her poems as a model, and explain the process of creating the poem.

Vygotskys principles could also apply to the cultural artifacts of the classroomthe
books English students read. Here, literature is a window rather than a mirror of the individual
consciousness. While reading texts in the context of a particular time period, the teacher could
show how the authors attitude might be consistent with given beliefs of that time. Maps could
provide memorable visuals of cultural perspectives, from those of fifteenth century Italian
seafarers and explorers, to current map projections that distort the size of the United States and
put it at the center of the world. The teacher could then show how the voice of a writer embodies
the spirit of the times in which he or she worked. Such discussions would work especially well in
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units that stress an interdisciplinary or thematic approach, such as The Year 1913 (an actual
college course), which might encompass literature, visual art, and political developments.

4. America has a hegemonic structure, and it actively and passively conforms to Euro-American
middle class values. Often, only middle-class Euro-Americans claim to see the world in
monochrome. Progressive Euro-Americans who claim to be color-blind may be trying to diffuse
the unfair power dynamic in America, and to deflect concerns of racism in the classroom.
However well intentioned this claim may seem, progressive Euro-American teachers should be
aware of ethnicity, and the diverse cultural models students bring from home into school. For
instance, many Latino students come from immigrant families that stress family obligations and
community more than middle class Euro-Americans. Notably, researchers have shown that
Mexican students have a more favorable view of school and authority figures than EuroAmerican students, but this attitude declines for Mexican American students and those born into
later generations in America. Perhaps this decline in positive attitude represents a shift away
from the viewpoint of school as community and family-centered, and to a place peddling norms
foreign to the cultural values of home.

Because this is a sensitive issue, I will discuss it not only in socio-cultural terms defined
by research, but also by personal experience. When I was traveling in the hilly, verdant Chiapas
region of Mexico this spring, I saw communities in small Mayan towns arranged around central
plazas, with families congregating at the center to cook and wash clothes collectively. This
model differs from the Euro-American suburban model of isolated homes and picket fences,
where success is determined in some part by the degree of social isolation one might attain from
other families. This summer, my teaching mentor who works with Latino students claimed they
want to collaborate on homework more than Euro-American students. Some teachers might
misconstrue this tendency as cheating or copying. In classrooms with many Latino students of
immigrant parents, teachers should allow students to collaborate in small groups, and at the same
time, the teacher should actively foster a sense of classroom community.

Researchers in Tucson, Arizona developed a lab school to explore the merits of directly
involving families in school practice. They viewed education in Vygotskys terms; cognitive
development can only occur in a social context. Mexican and Mexican-American students
learned to plan a community. First, students interviewed many of their parents, who were
involved in construction; in this way, teachers honored the funds of knowledge stored in many
Latino households, that may not have apt reflection in schools that stress de-contextualized skills.
Teachers acknowledged schools as integral to individual learning, community, and family.

Family history often plays an important role in Latino names, even as adolescents
conform to the universal egocentrism of their age. Euro-American students tend to develop their
identity in contrast to their families. In classrooms with many Latino students, teachers should
look for texts that work as mirrors in which students can see themselves, and as windows that
open up into community and society. But even before bringing in an outside text to the
classroom, teachers should invest in the family story of their students. They could have students
create a family tree and compose personal narratives based off that family tree. These narratives
could be developed through interviews of family members, and can even be elaborated by the
imagination. In this way, the teacher has involved family and community in the classroom. If it
relates to their family name, the student may take more pride in the quality of the writing.

Family trees could provide scaffolding for a text such as One Hundred Years of Solitude,
by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This text is culturally relevant in comparison
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to other canonized texts, such as Shakespeare or Steinbeck. At the same time, it opens with an
elaborate family tree of the Buendia family, and the students would have a visual metaphor for
family heritage, which they could understand in the context of a literary masterpiece.

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