I have already mentioned one of the points Labaree makes, which is that a focus on social mobility decreases the value students actually put on learning.  I think that this is a fairly accurate description of the effects of social mobility, since it does indeed promote extrinsic instead of intrinsic rewards.  Not that the presence of a grading system will necessarily erase any and all intrinsic motivation for learning, but the presence of the other rewards, such as entrance into a certain college, certainly might.   I don’t think that social mobility is the one and only reason for outside motivations to take over a learning experience- parental pressure or peer groups can also have an effect.  However, these pressures could also come from social mobility goals on the part of others as well.

Labaree also blames the lower standards that have come to be the norm in our schools on the presence of social mobility goals.  He says that schools are now promoting “an educational system that is willing to reward students with formal compliance with modest performance requirements rather than for demonstrating operational mastery of skills deemed politically and socially useful” (p. 56).  Again, I would say that if people are merely using schools to get high grades that will reflect well on them, then this could definitely lead to lower standards as teachers struggle more and more with the low motivation to actually master content.  There are other reasons, in my opinion, that could also add to this effect.  One example would be standardized testing, since teachers may need to change what is expected of students so that they will score higher on tests.  This brings the argument full circle, then, because standardized test scores are also a means through which students can gain access to more opportunities.

As critical pedagogy is a new idea to me, however, I would like to think about how I could possibly use it in my future classroom, as I plan on teaching either English or social studies at the high school level.  I feel I would have to go about teaching students to recognize social injustices by starting with an exploration of what exactly that means to different people in a variety of contexts.  This could easily be done through topics found in literature, history, cultural studies, or several other topics.  Once this initial discussion has taken place, however, there is the question of how to infuse students with the feeling that they should be actors against social inequalities.  As cited in the article, Freire would say that recognizing one’s own place in an unjust system leads to action.  He is talking about teaching a group of people to recognize that they themselves are being oppressed in some way, and if I were to work this into my classroom I would probably start with a discussion of the rights of students in an American high school.  I would ask questions about whether or not they were ever informed of their rights as students, whether or not they have ever felt those rights to have been violated and under what circumstances, and what they have the ability to do when they feel their rights are being compromised.  This entire discussion could be linked to other topics of injustice in society, and the action of analyzing their own experiences should help students understand the need to act using their knowledge about power systems and basic rights.

I have problems with the realist view, which seems to treat schools as places where academic subjects will be drilled into students and mastery of subject content is the main goal of the academic process.  I embrace a view that includes some problem solving or decision-making, not pure memorization, which is more consistent with pragmatism.   Learning from experience and changing curriculum and instructional methods with the changing times seems like it would better equip students to deal with a changing world.  The focus on interdisciplinary education is another positive aspect that I think comes out of the pragmatist view.  However, the scientific method is promoted as the sole problem solving mechanism, which might clash with some students’ cultures.

The parts of these philosophies that it is hardest to wrap my mind around are those that deal with the way philosophies shape values.  The abstract nature of the subject, and the knowledge that the values of my students come from such a variety of experiences, makes a discussion of values derived from philosophy hard to apply when thinking about a classroom setting. This is why existentialism is harder for me to understand, since the philosophy in general is based so much on forming one’s own values.  After some reflection, it seems to me that the goals of an existentialist classroom environment would certainly create some problems in schools, especially when it comes to that ever-looming threat of school assessment through standardized testing.  While the concept of letting students explore topics freely and without any type of curriculum structure at all may be difficult, I think the idea of the teacher “creating an awareness in each student that he or she is ultimately responsible for his or her own education and self-definition” is interesting.  When I think about it, students really are, to a certain extent, responsible for their own education in that they decide how to do assignments, what to include in projects, how to participate in discussions, and ultimately how they decide to use new information in their lives.  My point to all of this is, basically, I find it hard to embrace the ideas of one philosophy in particular, but it seems like each one results in some practice that I think may be applicable to the classroom.

Finally, if teachers feel the need to withhold information (either through fragmentation, omission, mystification, or simplification), students will not be presented with the foundation on which to build a further understanding of the course topics in the future.  Of course, I am not blaming any one person, whether student, teacher, or administrator for the practice of defensive teaching; rather, I agree with McNeil’s assessment that there are a number of forces that have shaped the way teaching is done, including cultural/ historical influences, the basic need to keep order in classrooms, and the pressure of standardized testing.  My point is that, regardless of how it came about, defensive teaching is not a strategy that is conducive to a meaningful classroom experience.

A secondary issue brought up in McNeil’s writing is the incidence of teacher burnout.  From her research, it seems that many teachers become tired of dealing with unruly students, goals for standardized test scores, meetings about discipline, and complaints from students about projects or difficult assignments.  The reason I want to briefly discuss this is because burnout, or simply not being about to put up with so many pressures any more, is something that I think we all may have to face at some point in time while we are teaching.  While some of the teachers interviewed for this article chose the defensive teaching strategy as a way to deal with these pressures, I wanted to try to brainstorm some alternate ways I might deal with burnout when I am teaching.  The first thing I might try to do is look to my closest resources, my fellow teachers, and ask if they have found any successful strategies for classroom management.  I might also try to adjust my classroom management practices slightly, possibly by looking to the suggestions made by Weinstein in our last reading.  I may also have to think about how I am scaffolding the work of the students because I may need to give more support to the students.  If they are feeling completely lost and become disengaged from the topic, that would cause more discipline problems and more pressure.

The discussion in the text about block scheduling realistically highlights some of the benefits and problems with using blocks instead of traditional hour-long periods. My high school switched to blocks just before my senior year, and this structure does provide a day with fewer interruptions caused by attendance, getting settled down, and other beginning of the day transitions. However, there were several problems with the system that I think make it a poor choice for maximizing efficiency in the classroom. One is simply the length of the classes- even if a teacher had a class full of at least semi-interested students, it was so hard to stay attentive to one topic for so long that everyone’s mind was wandering by the end of the class. The instructional time might have been maximized, but the engaged time was not any more. I think the more frequent switches in the regular school day helped with attentiveness. A second problem occurs with lunchtimes, since some classes had to leave class, go to lunch, and then come back for the second half of the class. This means that for one class, there had to be two transitions back into the period. Also, I personally had to wait until right before my very last class to eat lunch, and I would get so hungry that I couldn’t concentrate on much of anything. Finally, the AB-block system presents another problem when a class only meets twice a week. This causes too much time to pass between opportunities for instruction, and some instructors had to spend a lot of time on a Tuesday going over what was covered the Friday before.

Moving on, I can’t help but notice some of the strategies mentioned in the reading were things that teachers did that absolutely drove me crazy as a student when teachers used them in high school. If I knew that I would have to go into a classroom and start on a transition assignment right away, I used to be angry because I felt like I was losing some of my five minutes of down time. Yet, looking back on some of the chaos that used to be the beginning and end of a few classes, I can understand the need for the transitional activity. With the two perspectives in mind, I think that if these beginning of the class period activities should be something easy, such as the map exercise mentioned in the book, in order to let the students have a mental break. I also remember not wanting to turn in different parts of an assignment (bibliography, rough draft, etc.) because I felt like I had to freedom to work at my own pace. Now, I wish instructors would make us do that more often as a way to pace the work, and I definitely see the advantages of using this strategy to monitor how students are doing in order to make efficient use of time in the classroom.

Running along this same theme, I was very pleased that Brophy included in the strategies to help learners some suggestions for how to enlist the help of others.  This is showing recognition that teachers are only one of many people that influence a student’s life and that what the teacher does in the classroom will be even more effective if supported by others.  (It is also helpful for those of use who will be dealing with 180+ students at a time!)  On page 124 of the reading, for example, Brophy suggests enlisting the help of other students, parents, or other adults to help low achieving students.  I think that this would be a crucial part of enhancing other strategies for helping low achieving students, such as extra monitoring and consistent feedback, because the student would feel supported from many other angles, not just teachers.  These extra helpers would be able to give meaningful feedback to the teacher if they were able to spend some one-on-one time with the student.

Brophy offers up two more suggestions that I feel are particularly noteworthy in this excerpt and would like to comment on.  The first can be found on page 125 and deals, again, with low-achieving students.  Brophy says that in order to help students master material, they could be assigned as a tutor to a younger student who needs help.  I can’t think of a better way to help someone enhance their understanding of a topic- when you want to teach something, you have to have the material organized in your head and be able to explain it to yourself.  After helping out a classmate with work, I always find that the information sticks in my head much better than if I merely repeated it to myself, often because I have to think of a few different ways to explain it.  Not only will this help with comprehension but it could certainly give the student a feeling of self-worth at the same time by showing them that they can help another student.  The second suggestion has to do with students with failure syndrome and can be found on page 136.  He simply says that students should be given an opportunity to signal for help in a discreet manner.  While this is a very uncomplicated idea, it could make a world of difference for a student who really has the ability to improve yet has very uncomfortable feelings about asking for assistance.  If they have come so far as to be able to identify when they do or do not need help, I think that working out a system for them to ask for help would give them that extra opportunity needed to continue to change their attitude about what they can achieve.

Another topic that seems to go along with motivation is self-fulfilling prophecies.  As Brophy suggests, students should not make their attributions of success or failure on a permanent view of ability (such as “I failed because I’ve always been dumb”) but should measure their performance based on current ability to do the specific task (such as long multiplication problems).  Sometimes, however, teachers or others in the school community will make attributions of a student’s performance based on a permanent view of their ability.  If a teacher sees a student as being “not too bright overall,” then the student can internalize this view and fulfill the teacher’s prophecy about them.  It goes without saying that students who think that they are not smart will have very low expectancy and, therefore, lower motivation.  We as educators are going to have to do more than just model good attribution practices- we also have to monitor our more unconscious attitudes about students so that we do not convey, for lack of a better phrase, a negative vibe.

Up to this point in my blog writings have all seemed to be running on a common theme, namely, how my personal experiences tie into the material we are covering.  After reading this article that pattern came up once again as I started to evaluate my own motivations and self-efficacy while I am doing schoolwork.  I noticed that I display a lot of the tendencies that are not very beneficial to learners; I focus on evaluation (grades) instead of having a mastery orientation, and when I make mistakes I tend to forget about all of the other things I have done well instead of attributing failure to factors in the specific situation.  Fortunately, am trying to take some of the information in this article to heart that I believe does apply to many learners, especially the ideas of incremental theory.  If I can learn to be patient with my abilities and let them build up over time, I think it will be a lesson that I can pass on to my students in the future.

Perhaps a survey could be taken of groups of people in very small geographic areas asking them what kinds of skills or education they feel that they are lacking and whether or not they feel that the opportunities exist in their communities to gain those skills.  Quite a bit could be done with this information, depending on your purpose, from locating cities with few options for adult education to locating broader geographic trends in types of services people wish were available.  As far as the survey goes, it could pose questions that go way beyond the normal “prose, document, and quantitative” measures in asking about what people really want for their communities.  Perhaps this has already been done in some manner and I am just not aware of it, but at the moment I do not have the time to search the vastness of cyberspace to find out if this is the case.  Anyway, it is my opinion that we should really think about how we interpret statistics and what we mean to use them for in order to get some practical information out of our research into literacy.

Also, just a quick note on the idea of requiring an online course for high school graduation.  If appropriate courses can be identified and a system set up that makes it easy for teachers to evaluate their students, I think it could be very valuable for enhancing all of the different kinds of educational experiences students could be exposed to.  I have never taken an online course in college because I feel that I learn the best in a classroom setting, but I think that has to do with my areas of study (social studies and English) where class conversation is an important part of what goes on.  Back in high school, however, an online course probably would have been a welcome change of pace, and it would be useful not only for the sake of learning about technology but also for the general skills of self-monitoring and responsibility if the students were given enough independence in taking the course.

The multiliteracies combination of cultural and critical approaches also seems vital to me in that it treats work as a distinct culture in and of itself, with a new set of knowledge needed to make meaning out of what is going on, while still maintaining the position that people should not become drones of the educational or work system.  They also seem to have pinpointed what I feel is the most important aspect of thinking about literacy- cultural and linguistic diversity.  Without taking different backgrounds into consideration, no definition of literacy or approach of teaching will help us make progress.

 As for the second part of the article, I would have to say that I would agree with the idea that “business as usual” is another factor, along with lack of technology, that would keep a new way of teaching (or a “new literacy,” as the authors would say) from working in the classroom.  Even if the new ideas are there, all teachers grew up in classrooms structured around the traditional reading and writing definition of literacy, and the ingrained nature of the system must make it hard to change.  I myself feel that I have grown up in that kind of system, and I wonder how it will affect me as an educator later in life as culture and information continue changing.  Will I be able to truly meet the needs of my students?  I feel that I am, indeed, one of the “outsiders” already when it comes to technology.  Yet, as an educator, I can always encourage students to use whatever is at hand to express themselves, and if this means use of electronic/digital space that I am not familiar with then I believe it would be one of those priceless opportunities for me to learn from my students.

As a student of social studies, English, and occasionally Spanish as well, I have come to realize that nothing that can be taught is confined to one area of study.  Geography, history, cultural studies, economics, politics, and literature written in any language all overlap in content, and subject matter from all disciplines can be used to enhance understanding in the others.  Having students realize this is one of my prime goals as a teacher, as it will make it easier for them to connect information and use critical thinking.  For these reasons, the kind of literacy I would like my students to obtain would include elements from both the cultural and critical definitions in the article by Steve Tozer and Arlette Ingram Willis.  I take this position from the perspective of a high school teacher in one of my subjects of study; had I been looking for a definition of literacy to use at a different grade level or to use as a United States census count, my conclusions surely would be different.

Cultural literacy would be a useful approach because of the focus on teaching students to use what they know in order to understand more about what is happening in the world around them, whether it be what they read in the newspaper or what they are taught in the next class period.  This goes along with an approach of forming connections across subject material.  However, I must agree with the argument presented in the article that a generic “shopping list” of things for students to learn would not be an effective approach to gaining the cultural knowledge necessary to understand written media.  Instead, I am of the opinion that students should be presented with challenging material and asked to consider what cultural forces may be behind it, and in that way introduced to the background of different subject matters.  The Eurocentric nature of information presented is another problem presented in the article; when dealing with literacy, world literature and other media could replace some of the more traditional texts.

The definition of critical theory adds one more missing element to the definition provided by cultural literacy.  It asks that literacy include the ability to analyze one’s own situation and to apply what one knows about social conditions, politics, etc. to the world around them.  This would not necessarily have to result in liberation from some overwhelming oppression, but in today’s society it could help students become more aware of stereotypes and other negative influences.  They would then be in a better position to be liberated from these influences and achieve full potential, whatever that may mean to them.  This could only happen, in my opinion, by the incorporating the exploration that takes place through the cultural approach.