Barbara Lindsey's List: Critical Pedagogy

• he NAEP Tests (National Assessment of Educational Progress) have remained stagnant since NAEPs heavy handed policies went into practice in 2002
• One of NCLB/Helter-Skelter's main effects has been the labeling of thousands of schools as failures even though some of those schools have made admirable progress under trying circumstances and have been judged favorably under state standards.
• NCLB has made shame and punishment such a condition of life for schools that many states have been "gaming the system" by adopting easier tests and lowering standards.
• Because NCLB initially looks at just the reading and math scores of schools, schools at risk have taken to handing out double doses of math and reading while eliminating other types of learning that go untested and seem little valued. The notion of "the whole child" has been sacrificed
• Ed Department officials conspired with some state officials to allow unconscionably large group sizes to apply before a sub category of student might be counted in judging AYP. Those states that set high numbers thereby allowed their affluent and suburban schools to ignore the plight of their disadvantaged and minority students.
• While conservatives have been unable to put into place their dream of privatization, lurking behind the blame and shame is the hope that failing the public schools will set the stage for a free market approach.
• Pressure to test all students has led to a series of serious problems with the quality of the tests being administered and the kinds of learning goals measured. Costs have dictated lowered standards in many places.
• n many schools, NCLB has created so much pressure for rising test scores that staff will focus efforts on a special segment of students closest to the passing line while abandoning those at the top and the bottom.
• prevalent mode of instruction built into many of the so-called approved learning programs emphasizes heavily scripted, mind-numbing kinds of learning activities.
• A decade of teacher and school bashing creates serious morale problems when combined with the standardization of teaching methods that effectively de-skills teachers and treats them like factory operatives rather than professional decision-makers. They go quietly into the good night while the press covers other stories. It is tragic, their loss, but it goes unmentioned and unnoticed.
• It should be noted that ERIC was reorganized by the Bush administration in ways that may have changed what gets reported. The few articles reported in ERIC regarding teacher morale in 2005 and 2006 were not really research studies.
• The pressure to create good scores also rewards schools that can shove students out the door.

  • And thus ensures higher status and higher paying jobs for privileged middle and upper class students
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• students barred from the after-hours games, crafts and ice cream because of poor grades or bad attitudes.
• began essentially grounding middle school students whose grade in any class falls below 65, or who show what educators describe as a lack of effort
• ocial rules that govern nearly every minute of the day, from riding the bus to using the bathroom, as part of a program known as “positive behavioral interventions and supports.” Students are required to keep to the right of the dotted yellow line down the middle of hallways. They are assigned seats in the cafeteria and must wait for a teacher to call them up to get food. If enough students act up or even litter, they all risk a declaration of “silent lunch” in the cafeteria.
• A child who only has detention to look forward to at the end of the day is less likely to come to school
• it does not begin to touch upon what engages the students in school.”
• its enrollment has gone from overwhelmingly white and working class to 35 percent black and Hispanic in recent years as minority families have moved in from Buffalo. And nearly half the students are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-price lunches.
• I know I have to have a stronger hand.”
• students without their ID cards are served last.

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• Traditionally, the greatest power that governments have held over their people has been information. The promise that connectivity brings to Africa is that people are now using that abundance of information for oversight of government and more interaction with administrations. To say that the propagation of internet and mobile connectivity in Africa has been disruptive is an understatement.
• When the Ethiopian government instituted an SMS filtering service to censor mobile communication, the developers behind Feedelix responded swiftly. They created their product Feedlix, a java-based client that supports Amharic, Chinese and Hindi characters. The application then uses GPRS, through internet protocols, to mimic SMS and bypass the censoring filter put in place by the government.
• Sokwanele is a civic action support group campaigning for freedom and democracy in Zimbabwe. Their website includes an 'election violence map' that provides detailed information related to localized occurrences of violence related to the election. During the most recent crisis in Zimbabwe, Sokwanele was used to get information out of the country when the government began restricting communication.
• When Moroccan blogger Mohamed Erraj was jailed for disparaging the government in his online magazine, Hespress, it was through the efforts of other bloggers (like the writers at GlobalVoicesOnline) and people using applications like Twitter that his story made international news. The added pressure of having the whole world paying attention is perhaps what convinced the Moroccan government to let him free where traditionally his actions could have resulted in much harsher punishment.
• Africa is producing some very unique and innovative technologies
• The most exciting aspect for me, however, is the decreased reliance on developmental aid and foreign groups to provide these solutions. The number of African developers who are beginning to create applications that offer solutions for their own communities is increasing and that, more than anything else, will shape the future of Africa.

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• In other words, closing the so-called digital divide is about much more than providing access to computers and the internet, he said; it's about providing all the opportunities for learning that technology affords.

                             

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  "The digital divide helps widen an even more alarming problem," Resta said--"the knowledge divide."

• The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has a goal of connecting villages, schools, hospitals, and libraries to the internet, ensuring than at least half of the world's population has access to modern technology by 2015, Resta said. But one of the key challenges to this effort is the cost of broadband services.

   

  Resta showed a graphic that indicated the average annual cost of broadband service is only 2 percent of the total income for high-income populations--yet it's more than 900 percent of the annual income for low-income populations.

• You see what we are trying to do is build a space on the internet where the volunteers can share information and ideas on how to further the development projects in their countries. We are doing this outside the confines of Peace Corps Washington and therefore it is on our measly salaries to get this thing off and running.
• The main purpose behind the wiki though is too make volunteers more successful in their service by giving the easy access to volunteer ideas and information that has already been field tested by their predecessors.

• Before the wiki we had no way of 1) sharing ideas, 2) storing them in an easy or searchable way, 3) communicating with other volunteer countries and 4) making this information accessible to volunteers who hadn’t arrived in country yet.

   

  What we have done with the wiki is begin to collect the volunteer created resources and sort and group them so that volunteers can quickly and easily find what they are looking for.
• Our first success story is how a volunteer from Madagascar was able to get on the wiki and post all kinds of amazing resources on ideas to try for business development, agricultural business and other wonderful ideas. This information now is consolidated in one place and can be quickly utilized by volunteers who have little internet time and need to make what they do have count.
• Our biggest problem that we are facing is lack of internet connectivity. We think that as infrastructure improves and volunteers awareness of the site increases that we will see a more daily use of the site.
• People with basic internet skills are able to create pages in minutes and the format is very easy for them to follow. We have also made a nice little how to edit the wiki page (http://wikisarvn.pbwiki.com/How-to-Edit-the-Wiki) that shows with simple to follow graphics, the 1,2,3’s of making page and editing the wiki.

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• The program—called the Virtual Computing Initiative—would expand a concept that has been in use at N.C. State since 2004, when the school and IBM started the virtual lab, which university students can use from remote locations. N.C. State also said it would make the programming code that underpins the system available to other universities around the world, so they can set up similar cloud-computing systems for schools in their regions.
• using the virtual computer lab could give them access to less costly—and in some cases, free—software that is frequently updated. They also could use less-expensive computers to access the system and need less technical support, because the software would remain on the virtual lab's servers, said Samuel F. Averitt, N.C. State's vice provost for information technology.
• The only requirements to participate are broadband internet access and a computer or mobile device capable of accessing the internet.

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• The Obama campaign, well before the election was over, started putting a plan in place for all its leftovers -- one that the Obama campaign says is in alignment with a priority for President-elect Obama: education.
• "Tens of thousands of dollars of resources have been put into schools across the United States in less than four days," said Valarie Swanson, marketing director for iloveschools.com. "The Obama campaign was specific that they wanted all their resources to go to schools."

• The challenges and obstacles facing the evolution and revolution of education can be traced back to a few key ideas – those of stratification, hierarchies, institutionalisation, power, and control. Essentially, characteristics that have nothing to do with education and learning, but everything to do with how it is controlled, dictated and managed.
• Schools are sharply and artificially divided into homogeneous demographics, grouped by age, ability, intelligence, gender, religion or worse still, sometimes even race. Classes are generally held indoors, separate from real instances of the subjects that they study; the learning objectives defined by the school curriculum, not the learner.
• Industry is increasingly consulted by schools and universities interested in establishing ties and long term relationships.

  • Giroux and McLaren criticisms as well.
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• schools – particularly higher education – have adopted a much more industry-focused approach, in which learners are actively prepared for a productive life in the workforce. This extends to adopting similar terminology and processes such as “business rules,” tasks that are “owned,” SWOT analyses and the “rise of new regulatory regimes that impose an ‘audit society’ on the previously autonomous society” (Peters, 2007)
• Effectively schools are artificial structures, covering compulsory subjects in disjointed fashions for arbitrary groups of passive, segregated learners. This is hardly an environment that fosters personal ownership of learning, or a recognised personal relevance to existing educational processes. As Illich argues (1971), “The creature whom schools need as a client has neither the autonomy nor the motivation to grow on his own.”

  • Great stuff. Have to read Illich.

• Illich (1971) argues further that:

   

  “…new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, “What should someone learn?” but with the question, “What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?”

  • To think this was put forth almost 40 years ago. Nothing has changed...
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• John Holt (1967) echoed this sentiment when speaking of childhood education, saying:

   

  “What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.”
• We must forget everything we think we know; and approach learning as though we’ve never done it before; never been taught, and never taught others.
• We can grow to learn in a different model, but first our perspectives on the roles of learner, teacher and school must change.

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• I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.
• Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”
• I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it - the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

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• I’m thinking “Rip-Mix Classrooms” or “Rip-Mix Workshops” or heck, “Rip-Mix Conferences.” I’ve been railing of late at all the paper note talking conference attendees whose observations and reflections and experiences will never be connected after the conference ends. And I know that we’re already doing this to some extent on the conference level and the classroom level (i.e. Darren’s scribes and others.) Problem is, most schools would probably attempt to shut this down and call it cheating, especially if, as this group is doing, they are collecting and adding tests and quizzes to the mix.

• With tens of millions of people blogging all over the planet, how do you avoid being overwhelmed by the information overload? How do you figure out who are the most influential or respected and credible bloggers or podcasters in any given country, especially those outside your own?
• These amazing people are bloggers who live in various countries around the world. We have invited them as contributors or hired them as editors because they understand the context and relevance of information, views, and analysis being posted every day from their countries and regions on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, videoblogs - and other kinds of online citizen media. They are helping us to make sense of it all, and to highlight things that bloggers are saying which mainstream media may not be reporting
• At a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, Global Voices aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. We’re using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, podcasts, photos, video, wikis, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our interconnected world. We aim to do the following:

• 1) Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world

   

  2) Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves

   

  3) Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution
• Global Voices, though headquartered at Harvard Law School, is a co-operative effort of contributors from every continent and dozens of countries.

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• The introduction of the OLPC program is meant to flip a switch and link poor, rural villages to the modern era.
• The country has bought and distributed more than 40,000 laptops so far, focusing on the poorest, most isolated villages, like Arahuay.
• Patricia Arregui, a sociologist in Lima, says the government is skipping over some basic steps.
• "Have children [who] are well nourished, [who] don't get to school without a breakfast. Provide roads that make it easier for kids to get to high schools, insurance so they don't get sick at schools that don't have any clean water nor electricity," she says.
• Arregui says that every new administration likes to kick off with a glitzy new project that makes people feel good.

• Arahuay is the poster child for the OLPC program and has received a lot of resources and training.

  Yet even here, many of the machines' capabilities are not used. Kids do not hand in their papers electronically — teachers read their work off the screen and then record their grades in a paper notebook. In many other ways, even experienced teachers are still struggling to make the laptops part of the curriculum.

• Quispe tries to reinforce what they've learned by asking them to turn to their laptops.

  As soon as they do, the magic spell that Quispe had cast is broken. The group seems to break down into 19 individuals. Some struggle to find an extension cord; others play games while they wait for class to resume.

• The laptops have no dedicated math programs, so students must rely on word-processing software. It's not easy, and the columns of numbers inevitably get jumbled.

  Milagros, a new teacher with only a day of training on the laptops, jumps from student to student trying to fix the columns.

  One child sits forlorn in the corner without a laptop.

  Milagros explains that his is broken.

  If the laptop breaks down, a technician is called. But if it can't be fixed, the family foots the bill.

  "Ultimately, it's the responsibility of the parent," Milagros says.

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• A high-quality public education is a civil right
• All children deserve access to an educational experience that fully and intentionally prepares them for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century
• We cannot demand equal outcomes from schools without equalizing the resources they provide. Therefore, a central role of the federal government must be to ensure that all schools are funded centrally and equally
• he shared mission of our schools should be to end the predictive value of race, class, gender and special capacities on student success by working together with families and communities to ensure each individual student's success.
• Instead of thinking of educational inequities as an achievement gap, we should view them as an education debt. This term references our country’s historic inequities in educational and economic opportunities, and invites us to think about how all of us, as members of a democratic society, are implicated in creating -- and addressing -- these achievement disparities.
• we must also address the powerful impact that out-of-school factors have on student achievement, such as the role of parenting, the availability of health care, and the challenges of poverty.
• Schools should model democratic practices that involve all voices. Schools should also honor diversity and build on the strength of their communities, deliberately and explicitly challenging all forms of inequity.

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