My Commentaries from the Course Blog

Consortium for Worker Education Class Visit

I really enjoyed our trip to the Consortium for Worker Education and our meeting with Joe McDermott. I was impressed by his liveliness, curiosity, and dedication to the people of New York. The only fact of placing seven thousand people into jobs for the last two years says a lot.

He mentioned the life-long learning movement that started in the late 1970s. I think that the philosophy of CWE is very close to what the movement advocates, namely "the freedom, opportunity and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their families and in community, to choose to learn what they want, when they want and how they want -- to self-learn" (http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/resources/lifelonglearning.htm). I looked at the description of the courses that are available at CWE, and they are incredibly useful and address a whole range of different needs starting form basic skills, computer literacy, service job training to French conversation-oriented classes and leadership development workshop.

Finally, it was pleasant to meet the man who helped to "save" our program. Thank you for this great opportunity.

Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose

I greatly enjoyed reading Lives on the Boundary because it is abundant in vivid images, lively and rich language, meaningful examples, and deep insights into the American education. I found many answers in Rose’s narrative about the educational opportunities for diverse student population, accessibility of education, students’ needs and the ways they can be fulfilled. The chapter on “The Politics of Remediation” helped me to understand the importance of tutorial centers and basic writing courses as effective means to address students’ difficulties with the required work of academia.

Also, I was struck by the politics of educational institutions that believed (and I suspect some of educators still believe nowadays) that “remedial “ courses and tutorial centers only waste the money on educating those “intellectually unwashed” students who do not deserve to be in college anyway. Rose describes the situation when the Tutorial center was almost closed under this assumption –it was regarded as the place unworthy to be housed in the university walls. I appreciate the struggles of many educators who for the last decades were working hard to defend students’ human right on education. It is sad that very often the ground for assumptions about diverse students with different backgrounds, languages and cultures, first generation students, adult students, single parents students is built on false believes, such as test scores and different measurements that are not properly analyzed. Besides, educators could not find a balance between the research and teaching parts of the academia and regarded the latter as a less intellectual thing to do. Thus, these attitudes created a situation in which the real needs of students – especially freshmen – are overlooked.

I agree with Rose that every person has an ability to succeed in learning if his/her needs and difficulties with academic work are understood and addressed. Rose himself is an illustrative example of that belief because he could only succeed in his studying with the help of responsive and sensitive professors that knew what he was missing, believed in his abilities, and were willing to help. So, the first step to overcome “literary crisis” is to understand the multiple reasons of students difficulties with learning, such as different belief system (Lucia’s issues with reading Szasz), misunderstanding of academic conventions (Marita’s plagiarism), fear to recognize one’s difficulties and shyness to ask for help (students that always succeeded before), loneliness and distance between professors and students (Kathy’s experience), different kind of skills that were required (thinking and applying knowledge, but not mere memorization), different from mainstream cultures, languages , and backgrounds (Rose’s own example), and different students expectations about the content of the courses. Furthermore, in order to help students to succeed, all professors should understand that they play an important and sometimes crucial role in the lives of their students who regard them as role models and are looking for help in the difficult journey of learning that they had courage to undertake.


Preparing for Success

“Adult educator Malcolm Knowles stressed the importance of providing instruction that addresses the needs and interests of adult learners. In his introduction to "Andragogy in Action" (1984), he presents an instructional model that builds on the following assumptions:
* Adults are self-directed learners.
* Adults have a rich reservoir of experience that can serve as a resource for learning.
* Since adults' readiness to learn is frequently affected by their need to know or do something, they tend to have a life-centered, task-centered, or problem-centered orientation to learning as opposed to a subject-matter orientation.
* Adults are generally motivated to learn due to internal or intrinsic factors (such as being able to help their children with homework) as opposed to external or extrinsic forces (such as a raise in salary)" (17).

I found the ideas of Knowles to be very important to keep in mind when teaching adults because his assumptions indicate how different children and adults are as students. Consequently, teaching adults requires different approaches that would take into account their experiences, needs, and motivation. The traditional content-centered classroom would not work for adults because it does not teach the skills that are needed right away in their workplace, at home, and in the community life. I think that it is central for adult education to teach how to learn, communicate, plan, organize, solve problems etc., rather than "deposit" simple and isolated facts or information. For example, we were talking already how much better the combined basic skills and vocational training programs work for adults who can see the real results in their lives.

It is interesting that adult learners are motivated by intrinsic factors rather than instrumental or extrinsic forces. I always thought that the most important reasons for learning would be to get a better job or to get a raise in salary etc., but not such personal matters as helping children with their homework.

I also looked for the definition of the word "andragogy," and found that it is defined as the process of engaging adult learners in the structure of the learning experience. The term is derived from the Greek word “andros” which is translated as “adult man” and “ago” which means “to lead." Consequently, andragogy means adult leading that is opposite to pedagogy which literally means child leading. The term “andragogy” was first used by Alexander Kapp, a German educator, in the 19th century, but only later it has been developed as a theory by Malcolm Knowles who published “The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus pedagogy”(1970).

It is a very interesting topic. You can find more information at http://www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/andragogik/08/andragogik/andragogy/index.htm


Ruben Rangel’s Class

Thanks to Prof. Rangel for visiting us last Tuesday. I enjoyed the Freirean classroom in practice, but I found it a little intense because the True Word activity provoked us to open up and to talk about the conflicting situations in our lives. It felt like a counseling session in the positive way of the word that helped to identify where I am now and where I want to be. Besides, it created the sense of communion and made us "partners in crime" - the crime of learning together and from each other, but not individualistically.

I definitely see the place for this activity in my classroom as well as other types of Freirean exercises. I believe that any curriculum can be based on the problem-posing model of education even if some particular material is required to be taught. If a teacher believes in the horizontal dialog and sees students as partners in learning, then his/her teaching style will definitely reflect this philosophy.


Freire’s Ideas about Consciousness

Last semester I visited the Literacy Workshop, presented by Michael Orzechowski. Although we talked about Information Literacy, Freirean kinds of consciousness created a base for our discussion.

In the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire talks about a lack of a critical understanding of the reality by the oppressed that makes them live in an imaginary world imposed by others. Only through the problem-posing education the oppressed can awake from that sleep in order to transform their reality and become critical thinkers with critical consciousness. Nowadays, critical thinking abilities seem to be valued in our society. However, we still hear words like "it must be true because they said it on TV" or "because it is written in that book." And how about the Internet, the reliable and unreliable sources of information?

In the "Education for Critical Consciousness," he identifies naive, magical, and critical consciousness. Orzechowski gave us an interesting handout with the examples of each one.
"In magical consciousness a person tends to feel fatalistic, needing to submit to some higher power, and rational considerations of causality are ignored."

For example:

"We saw what was happening for years, for decades [referring to current economic crisis], but we ignored or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really had it over the falls. The US auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter century[...]Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies." Kurt Andersen, "That was Then and This is Now," in Time Magazine, 4/6/9.

"In naive consciousness a person that he/she is superior to facts, in control of facts and free to understand them as they please."

For example:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality based community,' which he defines as people who 'believed that solutions emerged from your judicious studies of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off... 'We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality...We are history actors...and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.'" Ron Suskind, interviewing an anonymous aide in Bush White House, in New York Times, 10/17/04.

"In critical consciousness a person will represent things and facts as they exist empirically in their casual and circumstantial relations. It is integrated with reality and leads to critical action."

I though it will be interesting for you to read it. Sometimes I also find myself up in the clouds. Now back to earth!


“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”

The article that I recently read in The New York Times can give some reasoning behind the steady increase in the High School Graduation Rates. One reason is that teachers give better grades than students really deserve (Humaira was also mentioning that), another reason directly refers to the quality of teachers' instruction.
I am posting just a short excerpt from the article "Can Good Teaching be Learned?" by Elizabeth Green that I found very interesting - and controversial. The whole article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

"...Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.

That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”

The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance."

What do you think about firing "the bad teachers" and replacing them with better ones whose evaluation is based on their students' grades?


“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”

Hey Jane, I read that article, and I agree that the teaching techniques sound too much as belonging to the banking model of education. It seems that there is no place for the students in there, but just the teacher's image alone is in the center of learning. Besides, the "cold call" will only create unpleasant atmosphere of fear and worries among students who do not have what to say at a particular moment. Yes, this way the class will be quiet, but not because students are afraid to miss the teacher's words, but because they feel insecure. Is this a real learning? It is definitely not a Freireian classroom.

I posted the excerpt from this article as an answer to Mighty's question about the High School Graduation Rates. You can see it above.


Integrating Vocational and Basic Skills Education

Thank you Amy and Wynne for the great presentation. It was very interesting for me to look at the GED Bridge Program at LaGuardia from a different perspective: not from the inside - the classroom point of view, but from the outside - the administrative position.

I can situate it now in the wider specter of different educational programs. The GED Bridge Program is designed not only to prepare students to pass the GED exam, but also to transition them into the post-secondary education. Thus, it is a good example of a program that contextualizes basic skills learning. Besides, different services like financial aid and career counseling are explained and presented to students, so they do not have any difficulties when seeking help in those areas. We did not talk a lot about student services, but I find them to be one of the key components of students' success because they can help to plan further career steps and, the most important, to eliminate one of the biggest barriers, namely hardship with tuition payments. So, I find this integrated system (basic skills+career orientation+student services) to be an effective mechanism that facilitates students in moving towards college credentials.

If to speak about classroom environment, student-instructor and instructor-instructor relationship, I imagine constant communication, feedback and reflection network. Only continuous interaction can build an atmosphere that is responsive to students' needs and can help them not only with the short-term plans, but also with their longstanding goals.


The Stigmatizing of Non-English Language Speakers in the USA

I strongly agree that the discussion about stigmatizing of non-English language speakers is very important, and - unfortunately - usually ignored. I think that a better word for stigmatization would be discrimination on the ground of language and culture and that is against all human rights. It seems that it is very normal for many people in the US society today to judge and categorize others because of their accent and country of origin. Many times I was asked where I got that weird/cute accent from, and when I say Ukraine, people say:"Oh, Russia!" (It is the same that to say to an American that you are a Canadian.) After that the following assumptions are common: " So you must have many brothers and sisters in your family that lives in the place where it is always cold and snowy!" There are other questions also:"Do you have cell phones there? Does everybody wear golden teeth?" I feel like I want to say:"Hey, Ukraine is on the planet Earth!" Sometimes it gets even worse. One of my friends, an exchange student from Bulgaria, was looking for a summer job a few years ago. She was refused from one of the restaurants because of "all these foreigners that come,take our jobs, and American economy is getting bad." The whole "American dream" was a nightmare for her. She does not want to come for another summer and urges all her friends to avoid it. She said that the pink glasses that she saw the USA through got stepped on. Unfortunately, this bad image of "the land of freedom" will stay with her for a long time. Unfortunately,she did not experienced that great America, those great people that are not biased against others with an accent. Damage was done not only to that person, but to the image of the US abroad, to the country that is fighting for the democracy in the whole world.

These examples are another reason to fight with the prejudice against "something different" than mainstream views and myths. Education is the strongest and the most important weapon that can bring immediate results. It might seem like an impossible task, but a long journey always starts from the first step.


National Assessment of Adult Literacy 2004

The 2004 NAAL report is another proof of the common myths, such as "the USA is a monolingual nation" and, as a result, "only English literacy is worth being measured." Like many other reports, it ignores the fact that for just the decade of 1990-2000 about 9.1 million immigrants entered the USA (according to U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Although it is just 3.2% of the total population of the US, it is a huge number that equals the entire population of Sweden, for example. If we look closer, the other numbers in the USA today are striking: 37.7 million are foreign born, and 55.1 million speak a language other than English at home (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ ACSSAFFFacts?_submenuId=factsheet_1&_sse=on). The latter number alone - either bilingual or monolingual in a language other than English - represents 19.6 percent of the US population. It means that a "national" survey of US adults' literacies did not notice a few dozen millions people that stay "transparent" for the policy makers as well. Let's just pretend that they do not exist!

That is why I think that the numbers of US adults' literacies fail to represent the real picture, as they do not take into account the literacy level in other languages. For an ill person, a wrong diagnosis can bring great suffering or even death. Unrealistic numbers, as history shows, can only aggravate the problems that already exist and impose ineffective policies that fail to benefit the nation as well as the particular individuals.