Group items tagged

mutually-enhancing learning process.

In traditional classrooms the teacher is seen as the information giver; knowledge flows only one way from teacher to student. In contrast, the methods used in a collaborative classroom emphasize shared knowledge and decision making.

Teachers may have a great deal of difficulty learning how to share control of instruction with students.

helping students make their own decisions will conflict with some teachers' learned experiences as well as their feelings about being in charge.

For some teachers this is a most difficult challenge

Similarly, students who are used to relying on teachers to give them so much structure, direction and information will have to learn to start asking themselves

"What can I do before I ask an adult?"

Some psychologists point out that fostering self-determination and personal efficacy can conflict with our goals for collaborative work (Sigel) unless we find ways to mold both goals into our instructional programs

self-direction can refer not only to the individual but to a group, a class of students, that decides upon goals, designs strategies and collaboratively evaluates progress on a group basis. As Vygotsky (1978) notes,

learning to think occurs within a social context; group speech gradually becomes internalized as personal self-talk about confronting life's difficult, complex situations.

Finally, personal efficacy means taking control of one's destiny

school restructuring and change

Some critics (Apple, 1979) suggest that schools help students reproduce knowledge of a dominant social, economic class, and not engage in producing for their own knowledge.

Further, many parents are concerned that a reorientation toward student self-direction and personal efficacy will diminish the influence of home and school and inadequately prepare students for the work force.

you shouldn’t try to optimize material for one kind of learning style over another, but rather, you should present course materials in a range of learning styles so that all learners can engage with it on multiple fronts.

Taking “stack” just means keeping a list of people who wish to participate—offer a question or comment—during the Q & A. Rather than anxiously waving your hand around and wondering if you’ll be called on, if you would like to participate, signal to me in some way (a gesture, a dance move, a traditional hand-in-the-air, meaningful eye contact, etc.) and I will add you to the list. However, we’re not just going to take stack, we are going to take progressive stack in an effort to foreground voices that are typically silenced in dominant culture. According to Justine and Zoë, two self-identified transwomen who were active in the movement, progressive stack means that “if you self-identify as trans, queer, a person of color, female, or as a member of any marginalized group you’re given priority on the list of people who want to speak – the stack. The most oppressed get to speak first.” As I take stack, I will also do my best to bump marginalized voices and those who haven’t yet had a chance to participate to the top.

As with any tool that confronts the effects of privilege and power head-on, the Progressive Stack makes some people uncomfortable

In a complete social and historical vacuum, level-playing-field equality is an excellent proposition. But in the actual lived world of our history, experiences, and interactions the idea of treating everyone uniformly “regardless of gender” or without “seeing color” simply strengthens already-entrenched inequalities

As the increasing number of targeted online harassment campaigns has shown us, once a concept or issue has traveled through the right-wing Outrage-Distortion Complex, there is little hope of reclaiming rational discussion. It’s been permanently stained. One might dismiss the frothing lamentations of white-genocide-via-classroom-pedagogy that bubble up from a subreddit, but the insidious trope of “reverse racism” has put its thumb on the scale enough to have distorted the conversation around the Progressive Stack

because the Progressive Stack calls attention to existing structures of inequality by replacing them with another structure entirely, it forces those of us who identify as white (and, particularly, male) to confront the ways in which we have been complicit in maintaining inequality

When you’re accustomed to privilege, even the suggestion of equality will feel like oppression

google “progressive stack.” Almost every result you get will take you to the fever swamps of right-wing Reddit and warmed-over piles of gamergate droppings. The common denominator is that “Progressive Stack” is simply anti-white “racism” dressed in fancy intellectual clothes

Giving up power, it turns out, is hard for some people. Especially when that power has been historically-constructed to be so pervasive as to render it unquestioned and indeed unseen in its hegemonic sway. Pierre Bourdieu calls this symbolic power: “For symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it”

It means there will be times when people who are not accustomed to their identity being a source of discomfort and exclusion will have to learn–in a managed and intentional space–what that feels like.

there will be friction and messiness and uncomfortable adjustments, because any education worth the name involves friction and messiness and uncomfortable adjustments