Archive
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Recovering our Histories: Studying Educational History through Stories and Memoirs
Comments Off on Recovering our Histories: Studying Educational History through Stories and MemoirsContemporary educators suffer from a curious case of professional amnesia, in which opportunities to discuss and learn from the history of education are scarce. Presently, history of education occupies a marginalized position in teacher education, and its place as a foundational subject of study in education is dubious.1 As it stands, our plight is similar to that of the protagonist in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Following an abrupt and severe automobile accident, this protagonist forgets the story of his own place in the world. Having lost his personal history, the story’s main character is in lost in a fog. He no longer knows where he stands, where he was headed, and from whence he came. As educators, fixed in the immediate and pressing concerns of the present contexts of work and life, we must likewise reconstruct our professional memories and stories. Literature, stories, and memoirs have great potential to open up discussion about educational history in relation to educators’ lived experiences.
Historical stories can be hinges to critical thinking about educational contexts and spaces. These stories can reach beyond the limits of an individual teacher candidate’s personal experiences and background knowledge. They can connect new teachers to past and lost traditions, places, and faces in education. Factual stories about the teaching profession can dispel the fallacy that the swirling, swimming chaos of classroom pedagogy somehow happens in isolation, unique from all other experience. Our professional amnesia need not be neglected.
Correlating History to Lived Experience
Early in his career, John Dewey was loosely affiliated with a group of educational thinkers and reformers we refer to as Herbartians due to their fondness for the writing of late 19th century educator Johann Friedrich Herbart.2 They subscribed to the principle of correlation, by which the rough divisions between subject areas are purposefully blurred so that learning activities might not artificially divide ideas into disciplinary boxes that bear no resemblance to lived experience.
In the first half of the 20th century, correlation became a vital principle in curriculum planning and instructional design. As an overarching theme, the concept of correlation would integrate skills and subjects across the curriculum, including reading, writing, editing, proofreading, media, technology, arts, social studies, and science. If students are immersed in the creation of a classroom newspaper or webpage, for instance, they are correlating the language arts with any number of subject areas that forms the publishable content.
Dewey’s conception of correlation went deeper than his predecessors’; he saw that all areas of studies, despite their abstracted and differentiated presentation, emerged from real human experience and history.3 The idea that we have to integrate various subjects takes for granted the assumption that they are fundamentally different things that we, from without, bring together.
Dewey argued that they are, in fact, fundamentally united and are made authentic through children’s lives and experiences. The correlation of knowledge, then, must not happen only among academic subjects, but also among the problems, needs, and concerns of human life and action.
It follows, then, that educational history should not be presented to student teachers as an impractical or disconnected body of knowledge, for it emerged – and continues to emerge – from the lives and experiences of actual teachers and learners. History can be a powerful tool for exploring our stories and our place in the world, but it is, like all bodies of knowledge, rendered meaningless unless it is wedded to human activity and experience.
Personal Stories as a Stimulus to Self-reflection
Reading educational stories that represent past and distant educational contexts can correlate the discipline of educational history to lived human experience, opening up discussion about the pedagogical past. Doing educational history – examining and thinking critically about actual pedagogy – can present educators with the experiences of others that might run contrary to their own, encouraging them to reflect upon educational practice and beliefs. If we can imagine that our belief systems resemble a web of ideas linked together by experiences we have had, a notion articulated by philosophers W.V. Quine and J.S. Ullian, we begin to see the entire network as interwoven and interconnected.
The re-evaluation, or rattling, of some of our underlying assumptions and beliefs influences all elements of our understanding.4 This web can be understood as a complex system whose individual component parts cannot be entirely understood without taking into consideration the way in which they relate to other parts and to the whole.
I am not proposing that we present teacher candidates with a reading list or canon of stories and work through them methodically, but rather, that contemporary teaching and learning can benefit from an understanding of past contexts of schooling. In university Faculties of Education, the reading of stories and memoirs can lead to open-ended discussion in which points of controversy can encourage engagement with personal or professional questions about teaching and learning.
These discussions can then become a public crossroads for multiple perspectives, where considering “the other”– as well as alternative or suppressed perspectives – can happen at the intersection of differences in background, belief, privilege, and aims.
In teacher education programs, reading and discussing historical stories can foster exploration of the relationships between teaching, learning, culture, and language.
To be most effective as pedagogical tools, texts used for discussion and analysis should be provocative and stimulating, provoking alternative and dissonant educational beliefs or experiences. This might mean, for example, juxtaposing the narrative of a female teacher in rural Ontario at the beginning of the 20th century with that of a missionary Jesuit in 18th century in New France. Teaching memoirs, as exemplified by Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man, draw the teacher into the minds of a community of teachers whose experiences and feelings paint vivid and accessible scenes of the otherwise forgotten – past and distant.
In teacher education programs, reading and discussing historical stories can foster exploration of the relationships between teaching, learning, culture, and language. As an indicative example, consider the case of Mary McLeod Bethune, whose life experiences elucidate some of the struggles that women of colour had to overcome in order to pursue higher education. The daughter of former slaves in South Carolina, Bethune had 16 siblings and was the first to be born “free” following the U.S. Civil War.
She worked in the fields until a single one-room schoolhouse was opened miles away from her home. Following her elementary schooling, because there were no high schools for blacks nearby, she returned to the fields until receiving a scholarship to study up to the age of twenty. For most of her life, Bethune was the only African-American student in her school. Throughout her life, she encountered resistance and prejudice, but she succeeded in working as a teacher, directing a school, founding an institution for the education of African American girls, assuming the position of college president, becoming a national leader for the black education movement, and touring the world as an international advocate and spokesperson for equity in education.
While the questions, triumphs, and defeats experienced in contemporary classrooms are sometimes particular and unique, more often they are not.
While a single, descriptive paragraph does very little justice to the complexity of Bethune’s story, even from this brief description of her life there emerges a set of rich opportunities for debate and discussion. How did the Canadian context of the same historical period compare to this U.S. situation? Are there, in the present multicultural environments that make up our classrooms and schools, students and educators whose family histories or personal experiences resemble Bethune’s? How might such experiences affect the worldview of my students, their parents, and my co-workers? Do women today, particularly women of colour, deal with the same kinds of discriminatory social behaviours that Bethune overcame? Do I, as an educator, unaware of my underlying assumptions or biases, contribute to discriminatory practice?
Not only could personal histories, like Bethune’s, represent imbalances in power, they could stimulate personal reflection and, potentially, transformative action. The questions posed above are the products of the kinds of analyses that pounce out of the texts when we engage with, discuss, and debate powerful stories.
These stories emerge from the historical record and are extremely relevant to present classroom action and practice, as demonstrated by the Bethune story. Stories about educators and educational contexts from history can, while opening up forums for rich discussion and study of the past, correlate the content of history to the lived experiences of educators and teacher candidates. While the questions, triumphs, and defeats experienced in contemporary classrooms are sometimes particular and unique, more often they are not.
Conclusions
The study of history via personal stories and narratives is an opportunity to develop the interpretive tools that enable educators to reflect deeply upon the implications of the setting and situation in which education happens. It provides an occasion to grapple with the complex understanding that education is intimately related to the situational learning context. In order to discover where we are, it is essential that we consider where we came from, who came before us, and how our living, learning, and working environments were shaped. These considerations all relate to educational history, and they are all topics that should be explored through stories and critical discussion rather than with textbook summaries, drill, and recall of dates.
To conclude, as educational historians are ushered increasingly and hastily to the margins of educational study, they might rally behind the thought that history is an eminently human quest to recover human experiences and stories. Far from theoretical, the history of education can be seen as vital to the study and practice of teaching if anchored in the cultures and contexts of stories. The aim is not to foster a backwards-looking reverence or revulsion for things old and passed; rather, a forward-looking, hopeful, and imaginative vision for education requires a robust understanding of the past and of the evolution of ideas.
EN BREF – L’histoire est une quête éminemment humaine visant à récupérer les expériences et récits de l’humanité. Loin d’être théorique, l’histoire de l’éducation peut être considérée essentielle à l’étude et à la pratique de l’enseignement lorsqu’elle est ancrée dans les cultures et les contextes des récits. Dans les facultés d’éducation, la lecture de récits et de mémoires peut mener à des discussions ouvertes dont les éléments controversés peuvent amener les participants à considérer des questions personnelles ou professionnelles liées à l’enseignement et à l’apprentissage, faisant éventuellement charnière à la réflexion critique sur les contextes et espaces d’éducation. Ces récits peuvent dépasser les limites de l’expérience personnelle des enseignants en formation, les reliant à des traditions, à des lieux et à des visages perdus du passé. Ils peuvent contribuer à dissiper l’illusion que le chaos de la pédagogie en classe se produit isolément et se distingue de toute autre expérience.
1 Theodore Christou, “Gone But Not Forgotten: The Decline of History as an Educational Foundation,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 5 (2009): 569-583.
2 K. M. Kliebard, Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum History and Theory (London: Routledge, 1992).
3 John Dewey, Lectures in the Philosophy of Education: 1899 (New York, NY: Random House, 1966).
4 W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1978).
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Brain Science, Adolescence, and Secondary Schools: A Critical Disconnect
Comments Off on Brain Science, Adolescence, and Secondary Schools: A Critical DisconnectOur argument starts not with statistics about secondary schools, or even comments about various political initiatives, but rather with a kind of fable.
Of all the animals in the woodland surely it is the deer that most excites human imagination. A peaceful herbivore, the deer’s survival has depended on its ability to sniff out danger and run off to safety faster than any other creature. Over millions of years it has developed the sleekest and most powerful combination of bone structure, muscle, and tendon, making it a veritable icon of animal fitness.
It takes all of two years for the young fawn to learn enough about the art of survival from its mother to live on its own. Once responsible for itself, the young deer has learned not to panic when danger approaches, but to stand stock still so as to attract no attention; to sniff the air for the scent of danger; to hold a leg just off the ground to detect the slightest vibration of an approaching predator; and to flex its ears to pick up the faintest of sounds. All those skills have been perfected by its ancestors over vast periods of time and have become part of the instincts that create the character of a deer. A powerful set of survival skills, it seems – but no longer quite enough.
Setting out on its own as dusk creeps over the woodland, the deer comes on a clearing of unnaturally level and hard ground. Suddenly, around a corner approaching at high speed, comes a noisy contrivance sporting two bright headlights. The young deer does everything that its instincts have taught it to do – in an instant it becomes immobile, sniffing the air furiously, sensing the vibrations and testing its muscles for action, but unsure of where to go. Mesmerized by the lights, the young deer remains rooted to the spot a split second too long, and that young prince of animals, the ultimate descendant of an ages-old line of evolution, is killed instantly as it is hit head-on by a car. The car is probably a write-off, and the driver – if he is lucky enough to survive – curses the animal for its “lack of intelligence” in not getting out of his way.
Like the deer, humans too are the result of a long saga of evolutionary adaptations that has taken us to the point where we have the intelligence and motor skills to build a car, send a man into outer space, and carry out complicated medical operations using the power of the new nanotechnologies. Because humans have evolved big brains, rather than a deer’s athletic anatomy, it takes our young far longer to grow up. Unlike the fawn, whose brain was nearly fully formed at birth, human babies are born with brains so premature that two thirds of brain growth happens after birth (an evolutionary compromise made necessary by the narrowness of the woman’s birth canal resulting from our species learning to stand upright). Consequently most human brain growth is shaped not simply by genetics, but by the lessons we draw from real-life experience.
Here is the secret of our phenomenal brain: every baby is born with a variety of inherited pre-dispositions that enable it to so internalize such real-life experiences that it is literally able to grow its own brain (in a way that the fawn does not) and so reflect the increasing complexity of the environment in which it finds itself. Thus humans have the capability to adapt, in very quick time, to almost any environment – always providing that they keep every one of their mental antennae alert to further environmental change.
Within the past 300 years (a mere split second on our evolutionary time-scale), our ancestors have developed a range of technologies that have enabled our species to spread out across the globe. There are now some 20 times as many of us as there were when the first steam engine was invented in 1728; ten times as many of us as there were in 1824 when the first railway engine enabled a man to go faster than on the back of a horse, and two-and-a-half times as many as there were at the start of World War II, less than seventy years ago. This vastly inflated population (some would say a population waiting for Mother Nature to carry out a savage cull) has only been made possible by turning much of the world’s population into “specialists”, people who so concentrate on the efficient production of the individual components of a machine or a process that they have little understanding of how the various parts connect.
Two hundred years ago, most young people learned about growing up by participating in family farms, businesses, or community projects for which they had to learn how every subpart contributed to the usefulness of the final product. They had to know how things worked, for theirs was a world in which connectivity was obvious – the strength of a chain was well understood to be dependent on its weakest link, just as the speed of a convoy depended on the speed of the slowest ship. But over the last two centuries, ever fewer young people have had this experience. Ours is a world of information saturation, where the power of computers doubles every eighteen months, and it is estimated that the world produces about five exabytes of new information per year (an exabyte is a billion gigabytes). That’s about 37,000 times the amount of information held in the Library of Congress. This brings enormous opportunities: ten years ago who would have thought of “Googling” an old friend and five years ago who would have known what a “wiki” was? But it has also brought problems.
In our search for greater material rewards, we seem to have decided that there is no longer any reason for young people to learn, as did the apprentices of old, by working alongside older people. Instead, and especially in the past 60 years, we have decided that youngsters should spend longer and longer studying in ever greater detail – in theory rather than practice – a single aspect of a sub-component, or a sub-discipline, as defined by somebody else. This, we are told, will enable the wonderful productivity of the present technological world to thrive.
While it is entirely appropriate that a young fawn should grow up as a mirror of its parents, for a human child to grow up as a clone at a time of rapid cultural and economic environmental change would be nothing short of disastrous.
In exchange for what was once the satisfaction gained from a job well done, as shipyard workers cheered when the boat they had built together for two or three years finally slipped into the water, people are now paid good money for a job that may have little or no intrinsic satisfaction. It gives them a wad of cash to spend in their free time, but not the satisfaction of a job well done. Too many of us don’t even realize how vulnerable this makes us, because we have readily exchanged wealth today for any sense of personal responsibility for the future.
To support this materialistic mindset, education has come to mean doing what you are told and not asking awkward questions. But is that what our brain evolved to do?
Pushing the Evolutionary Envelope
“Cultural speciation” – cultural change requiring people to modify their behaviours and attitudes – proceeds infinitely faster than does “biological speciation”, the development of biological adaptations to changed sets of circumstances. In other words, what we are now expecting from individuals in our so-called advanced culture has far outrun those adaptations inherited from the past which, when properly utilized, streamline the operation of the brain. While the human race is wonderfully empowered by its ancestors, it is certainly constrained as well. We are very adaptable, but not infinitely so. Being driven to live in ways that are utterly uncongenial to our inherited traits simply drives people mad
In the past 20 or 30 years scientists have learned much about the grain of the brain. We now know that, because of our initial physical vulnerability, we learn a whole raft of skills in the first seven or eight years of our lives through closely imitating the actions of our parents and teachers. Like the young deer, young children’s learning is clone-like. But while it is entirely appropriate that a young fawn should grow up as a mirror of its parents, for a human child to grow up as a clone at a time of rapid cultural and economic environmental change would be nothing short of disastrous. Within our lifetimes, the next generation must be equipped to go where no one has gone before. To equip them to do this, we must not forget the past. But at the same time, we have to recognize that to 21st century man, the past is only a partial clue to the future.
The brain may, in fact, have evolved to help us. Scientists are now discovering massive structural changes in the adolescent brain through extensive functional MRI scans, changes that apparently shake the internal mechanisms of a teenage brain to its roots. If this is true – and all the signs suggest that it is – these must be seen as essential evolutionary adaptations that ensure the survival of the human race by forcing teenagers to break away from their parents and teachers. “Get off my back,” adolescents down the ages have pleaded. “Leave me alone. Give me space.” Adolescence is about growing up and no longer thinking like a child. It’s about ceasing to be a clone. Sitting still (if only for part of the time!) may be an appropriate learning environment for the pre-pubescent child, but it is largely inappropriate for adolescents, whose biological pre-dispositions, we now know, urge them to find out things for themselves.
And here is the crux of the present advanced world’s dilemma. Little more than 100 years ago, American psychologists started to define this rebelliousness of adolescence as a disease, an aberration that made teenagers a threat to themselves. Psychologists and educational bureaucrats alike concluded that something had to be done to prevent teenagers from threatening the carefully controlled world that teachers had created.
Educational administrators saw only one answer to this problem: put adolescents into school for longer and longer, and give them so much studying to do that they wouldn’t have the time or energy to question what an adult society was actually doing to them. We’re still doing this today. Policymakers, with little background in the neurological processes, expected that, by the age of 22 or 23, the next generation of young people would have been “broken in” to the currently defined way of doing things. Their thinking resembled that of horse breeders who, until very recently, thought it necessary to break in a young foal after it had run relatively wild for two years. Now horse breeders carefully study the temperament of every foal, and then define unique training programs that build upon what each can do naturally. Human adolescents crave and deserve no less. Deep down, there stirs within them the urge to climb the mountains of the mind and see what possibilities lie before them; they are innately “big picture” thinkers and frequently upset older generations by questioning the compromised lives so many of us lead. That is their nature; it is what their brains have evolved to do. It is the apparently unreasonable dreams of adolescence that, years later, drive the progress of what we are proud to call our civilization. It has always been so.
And yet, society has so outlawed the natural rebelliousness of adolescence that most people simply accept the specialized roles that have been created for them and have but a limited capability to look beyond their restricted worldview to see the ecological, environmental, and social crises that are hurtling towards them – crises that the unfettered adolescent brain may have evolved to tackle.
Going with the Grain
By misunderstanding teenagers’ instinctive need to do things for themselves, society has created a system of schooling that goes against the natural grain of the adolescent brain and ends up trivializing the very young people it claims to be supporting. By failing to keep up with appropriate research in the biological and social sciences, current educational systems continue to treat adolescence as a problem rather than an opportunity bequeathed to them through the genetic transfer of important mental pre-dispositions to learn in particular ways. These predispositions, once activated, transform the clone-like learning of the pre-pubescent child through adolescence into the self-directed learning of the mature adult.
We have effectively lost the plot: adolescence is an opportunity not a threat. Understand that, and it changes everything.
By using our schools to subvert the natural processes of growing up in order to fit more comfortably into our present economic state, we have created whole generations of young people and adults who are now mesmerized by the bright lights of a way of living that is hurtling, out of control, towards us. Like the young deer, we too are transfixed by the lights that are about to destroy us. Because we have effectively told young people not to think for themselves, far too many of today’s so-called “educated” people know of no way to find a solution that has not already been prepared for them and described in a text book.
This kind of thinking gave birth to the modern secondary school, which became a kind of holding ground in which the problems of adolescence could be worked through so that eventually youngsters would be mature enough to deal with adult society. School became the exact opposite of apprenticeship. Schoolchildren were required to sit docilely in classrooms, listening to the received wisdom of the teacher and reproducing that knowledge when tested. Independent and creative thinking was not encouraged, for that threatened the teacher’s control of the rest of the class. Young apprentices, on the other hand, had to be put through their paces so that the older they became, the less dependent they were on the craftsman and the more confident they were in demonstrating their ability to solve problems. Every skill learned, every experience internalized, increased the apprentice’s sense of autonomy.
Recent research in cognitive science and neurobiology makes it obvious that apprenticeship was a culturally appropriate response to the neurological changes in the adolescent brain. Apprenticeship was a form of intellectual weaning whereby the more skillful and thoughtful the apprentice became, the less he or she would depend on the teacher. The German philosopher Nietzsche put it succinctly: “It is a poor teacher whose pupils remain dependent on him.”
If Western society is to survive (and it really is as serious as that), it is essential that all those involved with young people escape from that assumption made a century ago by early psychologists, that adolescence is an aberration and an inconvenience. While the human brain has evolved to enable each of us to function effectively in complex situations – we naturally think big and act small – modern education has become side-tracked into creating specialists who are well-qualified in their own disciplines, but unable to see the wider impact of their actions. Because formal schooling has done its best to neutralize the impact of adolescence, recent generations of young people have been deprived of the strength that comes from fearlessly making difficult decisions – and if necessary picking up the pieces when things go wrong. We have effectively lost the plot: adolescence is an opportunity not a threat. Understand that, and it changes everything.
An education system that truly went with the natural way in which people learn – we call it “going with the grain of the brain” – would prepare children in their younger and prepubescent years for the self-defining struggle that is adolescence. A delightful story illustrates this well. A man, seeing a butterfly struggling on the sidewalk to break out of its now useless cocoon, bent down and with his pocket knife carefully cut away the cocoon and set the butterfly free. To the man’s dismay the butterfly flapped its wings weakly for a while, then collapsed and died. A biologist later told him that this was the worst thing he could have done, for the butterfly needed the struggle in order to develop the muscles needed to fly. By robbing the butterfly of the struggle, he had inadvertently made it too weak to live.
Children need the struggle of adolescence to sort themselves out and put away those childish behaviours which earlier had served them well. Sometimes alone, often with their peers and supported by the guidance of wise and caring adults, adolescents need a careful mixture of guidance and the space to work things out for themselves. Through the struggle of adolescence they develop the strength for adult life. To waste adolescence is to deny future generations the strength they will need to respond to the serious problems facing our civilization and our planet.
EN BREF – Au cours de leurs sept ou huit premières années, les enfants acquièrent une multitude de compétences en imitant de près leurs parents et enseignants. Mais il serait désastreux que les enfants grandissent comme des clones pendant une période de rapides changements environnementaux, culturels et économiques. Nous savons maintenant que les enfants ont besoin du tumulte de l’adolescence pour s’affranchir de ces comportements infantiles. D’après les recherches récentes en sciences cognitives et en neurobiologie, l’apprentissage – une forme de sevrage intellectuel réduisant la dépendance de l’apprenti sur l’enseignant au fur et à mesure de ses progrès en matière de compétences et de réflexion – constitue une réponse culturellement plus appropriée aux changements neurologiques du cerveau adolescent que ce qu’offrent nos systèmes scolaires actuels. Gaspiller l’adolescence, c’est nier aux générations futures la vigueur qu’il leur faudra pour résoudre les graves problèmes confrontant notre civilisation et notre planète.
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Are we really committed to the idea of critical thinking?
Comments Off on Are we really committed to the idea of critical thinking?“Which one do you want?” I asked my 3 and a half year old son as I placed the two fruit smoothies on the kitchen table. Luke approached the glasses, happy to have the choice, but unaware that I had slightly transformed our early morning breakfast ritual. For the past two weeks I had been filling two identical glasses with equal amounts of liquid. Each day he had carefully examined the contents of each glass and made his choice. Today, however, I had switched things up a little by using two new glasses, each the same height, but of different diameters. Not surprisingly, Luke chose the glass that had a higher fill line, He was satisfied with his choice, thinking that he was getting more smoothie; I was satisfied knowing that I was!
A scan of a child psychology text from my teacher education program warns me that I can probably count on just one or two more years of this type of “thinking game” with Luke before he’s on to me. While I expect that there are aspects of thinking that develop quite naturally in most people, there are other more sophisticated forms of cognition that need nurturing, attention and application if they are going to become fully functional and useful in our lives.
I’ve been musing during these waning days of summer about the type of thinking that is most often promoted in our schools. Although our professional development activities, curriculum documents, and even our lesson plans are often peppered with talk of critical thinking, I’m not convinced that our collective hearts are committed to all that this entails. After all, in most of our jurisdictions, teachers are told rather explicitly what to teach, how to teach it, and what students are expected to understand and be able to do once it has been taught. That doesn’t leave much time or space for the exploration of ideas, perspectives and alternative ways of seeing, all of which form the foundation for good, honest critical thinking.
So why do we, on the one hand, inscribe the value of critical thought—the desire and ability to seek what it would make sense to believe in a given situation—into our foundational teaching and learning documents, and then fail to nurture the infrastructure to support it in our schools and classrooms. A few possibilities come to mind, and I’ll very briefly outline them here.
First, it’s quite possible that a good number of us (myself included) don’t have a really clear sense of what we mean when we talk about critical thinking. Perhaps it is just one of those terms that is so used that it has lost some of its meaning and, therefore, its power.
Second, while I have met several people who are really trying to transform the learning that goes on in their classroom using the rubric of critical thinking, larger scale implementations are difficult to find and even more difficult, I would imagine, to maintain.
Third, many of us who find a home in this place we call school weren’t raised in critical thinking classrooms. Oh, we may have been exposed to programs involving time set aside each week or month to work on skills related to critical thinking, but most of us weren’t exposed to its subtleties, nuances and the real-world applications that would allow us to become proficient and confident critical thinkers. And to quote the familiar adage, “you can’t give what you don’t have!”
Finally (and this is a little more disturbing), perhaps we really don’t want to nurture a critical stance in our students. Perhaps the conversation and action to which true critical thinking can lead is best left to the edges of our communities. Perhaps we’re a little reluctant to put the powerful tools of critical thinking into the hands of the general population.
So, as a parent, I will likely continue to take advantage of and enjoy the fact that my children are just beginning to think for themselves, but the case for the type of deep, critical thinking that could transform our schools, our communities, and, indeed our world, extends well beyond my breakfast table manipulation. It is a vision that requires serious, confident and consistent work at all levels of our educational system. We must find a way of nurturing the vision in our policy-makers, supporting it in the professional development work we do with teachers, and making it a viable and vibrant part of the lives of our students!
My role as a parent is to teach my children how to become active thinkers in the world; is my role as a teacher much different?
Lots more to chat about here, but I’ll leave you with some questions.
Where have you seen good work being done in the area of critical thinking? As an educator, what are some of the things that would encourage you to explore critical thinking more in your work with students? What are some of the things that might cause work in this area to be put on the back burner?
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CEA’s What did you do in school today? initiative featured in collaborative education research video
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No child Left Thinking: Democracy at Risk in Canada’s Schools
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Student Engagement and WEB 2.0: What’s The Connection?
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Alterative Education Programs in B.C.: Meeting the Needs of Vulnerable Students
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From the Editor / Le mot de la rédaction
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Beyond “Doing School”: From “Stressed-out” to “Engaged in Learning”
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Holding on to our Kids in a Peer Culture
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Back to the Future: John Dewey, Jacques Delors, and the New Brain Science
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Nourishing the Learning Spirit: Living our Way to New Thinking
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Imaginative Education Engages Aboriginal Learners in Prince Rupert
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WIER: An Innovative Online Writer’s Salon Marks 20-plus Years
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New School Answers the Question: What Do We Value?
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