Lessons from learner-center syllabus

Last session in GEDI class we talked about learner-centered syllabus. I have been teaching a large class this semester and from the beginning of semester I think about learning process and how I can stimulate learning environment in class.  The problem in a large and heavily lectured class is most of the evaluating process determines by tests. In a class such as principle of microeconomics  where more than 100 students sit in a class and there is no final project, assignments and exams are only the available tools for evaluation, learning will immolate and the mindset of students become all to get good score rather than learn stuff. It makes sense and it is a rational decision for student to get the good score which means to be good in tests in this situation. I think writing a syllabus using learner-centered is not enough in this situation. The problem is even you emphasize on learning and try to give some roles to students as the learner of the class, at the end of the day students will evaluate based on their scores on tests and everyone knows this game and as a result the rational decision asserts that students just focus on materials which tend to be part of the tests rather than learning in a general way. From the early of the semester I have this challenge and I could not solve this problem yet. For me, learning is more important than the grade. I think my responsibility is to teach in a way to transfer knowledge as much as I can to my students and try to stimulate learning process and critical thinking about the concepts of microeconomics. However, even I emphasize on learning and not memorizing a lot, students know the rule of game and the rule of game pushes them to get the best point as much as they can. For some students the shortcut to getting good points come from memorizing the materials and this strategy unfortunately works partially. I try to solve this challenge both in class and mostly during my office hour to bring examples from every day life. I also refer students to their intuitions as they ask me questions. Although these strategies  work, the challenge  still remains and in a heavy lecture based large class with having tests and assignment as only tools for evaluation, preparing learning community environment in class becomes a great deal.

 

GIS: A Useful Tool of Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy suggests that teaching and learning should be contextual and aim at raising critical awareness among students. Critical pedagogy has been used by educators to refer to a broad range of pedagogies that employ critical theory, feminist theory, anti-racist theory, multicultural education, inclusive pedagogies, and so on.

Geographic information systems (GIS) is an useful tool of critical pedagogy becasue it has the potential to help reproduce or transform oppressive conditions in society and it can be used to examine and build contexts that maximize students’ ability to analytically observe, consider, and respond to the world in which they live (Crampton and Krygier’s “An Introduction to Critical Cartography”). Below are two examples to illustrate how GIS can be used for critical educators to engage students in critical thinking.

Veronica Velez, Daniel Solórzano, and Denise Pacheco explore the role of race and racism in shaping the historic, evolving spatial relationship between south Los Angeles high schools near the Alameda “Corridor,” and their surrounding communities. They apply GIS within a critical race methodology to examine geographic and social spaces, identify and challenge racism within these spaces as part of a larger goal of identifying and challenging all forms of subordination. They spatially examines how structural and institutional factors influence and shape racial dynamics and the power associated with those dynamics over time.

Matthew W. Wilson’s Critical & Social Cartography seminar in Harvard Graduate School of Design asked students to think and make pretty maps by their analytical skills. In order to make pretty maps to reflect reality, what information should be included or excluded? How to represent different variables or types of information?  How might a map designed to meet the needs? What would the students be required to do in order to create this map? Through the process of problem-posing, students were encoraged to think critically.

Merging GIS and critical pedagogy requires that we ask how GIS can help students theorize from multiple perspectives about the role that space and spatial relationships play in their immediate lives, local communities, and beyond. As a widely applied tool, GIS can be applied to critical pedagogy.

How hard is it for a teacher to admit that he was wrong!

In the readings and the video about Paulo Freire this week, I stopped at his sentence “It is necessary in being a democratic and tolerant teacher to explain and to make clear to the kids that their way of speaking is as beautiful as our way of speaking“. Actually, this is concurrent with one of the controversial topics in social media in the last few days. This post , is about a father who stood up for his daughter who was being made to feel bad because she had a better (or a different) answer than the other kids. The girl got the question “What is the largest number you can represent with 3-digits?” in a standardized test. The intuitive answer is 999, however the girl came up with the answer 9^9^9 (written as superscripts without the power operator). Whatever the answer is correct or wrong it is a big debate and others are getting other formulas with larger values. What concerns me here is that, the teacher and the school’s principal did not show any flexibility with this answer. The teacher claimed that they did not study powers yet!. Which forced the girl’s father to go the long way to get his daughter’s right.

The question here, “Is the teacher’s behavior pedagogical?”. I don’t think so at all. The teacher could be right in some part, but he dealt with the problem in a superficial way. To put together other unprofessional activities from teachers, I suggest reading the post. The post is entitled “Great teachers: perfectly imperfect“.   The post mentioned two situations where teachers caused deep effect to young kids with their way of humiliation. I want to quote the conclusion of this article “The point isn’t that we should hold ourselves to a standard of perfection in our interactions with students. But we should hold ourselves to perfection when it comes to owning our imperfections and their impact on students.

On the other hand, there are brighter sides in this story. Another teacher wrote an article entitled “Five of the biggest mistakes I made as a new teacher“. I think this an important article for new teachers. The article gives five critical mistakes that this teacher committed which are: She took things personally, she avoided dealing with parents, she waited too long before intervening with students, she was afraid of making mistakes, and she were trying to cover everything. From these points, I want to stress that she discovered that it is not the world’s end if she made a mistake.  She was making up answers for the questions she does not know, in order to remain the smartest person in the class.  However, when she let her students see her making mistakes and then admit them and further taking steps to correct them, this made it okay for students to make mistakes too.  The more she took risks in the classroom, the more she made it safe for students to take risks.

Finally, I want to conclude with a story that happened to me in a networking class two years ago. The homework for this course was only short answers. The professor gave us the questions and I made everything correct and I found that I got only  90%. He graded one question as wrong while I felt it is correct. I contacted him and explained my view point, we were to calculate the length of one packet in bytes, (the packet is a combination of ones and zeros). The packet length varies according to the type of the packet. The type mentioned in this problem does not use some of these ones and zeros, so I just ignored them. When I explained this to him, he gave me partial grade. I again felt unfair, I looked in the protocol specification and I found that I was right. I contacted him again with the protocol. He thanked me for this information, informed me that he thought the packet length was fixed whatever the protocol. He gave me full grade and asked me to share this protocol with my class mates. What concerns me here is the instructor was very flexible. He gave me and other students with the different answer, the full grade. I believe that is what Paulo Freire meant in his talk to be a tolerant teacher.

Problem-posing education: Roger, a goat and a rabbit

Chapter two from Paulo Freire was probably the best thing I have read in the course thus far. I would assess his argument as partly being anti-intellectual in that it inspires subjects to receive an education that makes them active doers in the world. There is a spiritual echo present here that chooses ‘becoming’ over ‘being’, action over intellectual description.

Perhaps in an effort to begin the process of a dialogic, problem-posing education would be to open up what Freiri calls the banking concept of education (i.e., an act of depositing knowledge from active subjects to passive recipients). Freire gives a (humorous?) analogy of the banking concept of education that deals with a form of knowledge that has no bearing on reality. Thus, we teach a “vital question” like “Roger gave green grass to the goat” only to instead come to learn that actually “Roger gave green grass to the rabbit”. I would love to begin a dialogue on what you think this analogy is meant to represent within the banking model of education? I have an idea, but need further clarity from other disciplines.

Chomsky sees the education of Freire as consciousness raising. I also really appreciated how lucidly Freire shows the relationship of language to power and ideology. Cultivated languages essentially masquerade as ideology and power. Nevertheless for Freire, one must have an acquaintance with the dominant linguistic pattern, but it is not necessary that they imbue the dominant pattern. Their learning it is for different reasons than say aspirations for wealth or prideful articulation. Rather, it is so they can voice their oppression so it be understood by others. His reinterpretation of Marxism, fused into a spiritual liberation theology that is active, focusing on education for life, that is anti-necrophilia has, after a long time, convinced me that we can and should do something to change our educational system, one teacher at a time — beginning with YOU.

 

The Times They Are A-Changin: The age of peer-to-peer lending

The entire Paulo Freire reading was passionate and emotional (just look at this video of how he moves his body when discussing about critical thinking). I can strongly relate to some of the arguments that Freire makes based on my experiences in Nepal and India. However, I also feel that the situation is not as dire now as it probably was during Freire’s time. I discuss both these contradicting perspectives below and conclude with learning/teaching implications that I feel we could learn from Freire’s work.

When I was working in India, there was a growing movement of right-wing Hindu nationalists (the party power) to enforce Hindu teachings in schools. This movement has been termed as saffronisation. Rajasthan, a large state in the western part of India, has decided to change the textbooks from 2016 onwards. These new textbooks has far more content on Hindu movements, and allegedly, downplays on works involving other religions. Likewise, Karnataka state, where Bangalore city – the “Silicon valley of the east” lies, has also decided to change their textbooks from 2017 onwards following the same line as Rajasthan.

If we think about it, these policies assume the “banking model” of education, and unfortunately, they are not wrong. Education system in India and Nepal are mostly follow the banking model especially in public schools. It is fairly common to see teachers as the center of the learning process, and pupils as mere objects whose mind is being filled. The learning practice has been such that students rarely question teachers or argue against the information being provided. This is so prevalent that many students feel that they insult the teacher if they question anything. Critical thinking is not something that is usually taught or discussed within the school boundaries. This makes adding Hinduism-laden content in the textbooks a very effective way to influence young students.

This brings me to the second part – and the relevance of the title. The time in which Freire experienced inequality was quite different – huge economic inequality existed in Brazil, people needed to be literate to vote so that meant the voice of the poor was extremely suppressed, and there were very few alternate sources of information other than formal education. Additionally, until 1960s behaviorist approach to learning was prominent. All this would have culminated in an environment where the privileged teachers who could expound knowledge and influence behavior could so in their interest (or as Freire writes by “changing the consciousness of the oppressed”).

In modern days there are far more free information sources (although it remains highly debatable how “free” each of them are). Particularly, access to Internet, the decentralized repository of a vast range of information, has empowered lots of people. Teachers are no longer center of the learning process. Rather, “peers” who produce information over the internet have become far more influential. Since it is decentralized and enormously connected, a person of influence in one setting may be the influenced one in the other setting.

Although learning has become peer-to-peer and more decentralized, the importance of critical thinking is equally, if not more, important. There are all sorts of information out there and to figure out the relevant ones, and filter out the wrong/misleading/useless ones require a well-rounded understanding of the world. Freire uses the term “consciousness” to highlight the levels of situational awareness – moving upwards from “magical consciousness” to “naive consciousness”, and further towards “critical consciousness” and finally to “political consciousness”. These terms may seem like a hyperbole but the underlying fundamental idea that Freire expresses remains highly relevant. The time may not be of a banking model, but “action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” – which Freire terms as “praxis”- is imperative for our society to progress either be it to ensure justice and equality, or to mitigate oppression (corporate, political, social, emotional) and suffering. Understanding the world through the words and acting upon it is highly important, as Dylan writes:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again

The post The Times They Are A-Changin: The age of peer-to-peer lending appeared first on Aakash.

Beyond the Dimensions of my ‘Horticulture Box’

In horticulture, relating course material to broader cultural and social issues is sometimes neglected. In short, students want to know how to successfully grow plants so they can get a job. Yet, according to the ideals of critical pedagogy defined by Paulo Freire, I, as a teacher am responsible for raising awareness of issues that go beyond the dimensions of my “horticulture box.”

But what does horticulture have to do with social justice?

While linking ornamental crop production to issues such as social inequality may be a stretch, relating plant production to state- or country-wide environmental issues does seem achievable.  I admit, I don’t often do this when teaching horticulture courses. Nonetheless, the following would be my attempt at leading horticulture students to discover how knowledge of a large-scale environmental issue and the solution to this issue can help them circumvent future obstacles.

This is what I might say to a classroom of horticulture students studying ornamental plant production.

Environmental Issue:

“As some of you may know, most of Virginia is part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in which agricultural runoff (namely nitrogen and phosphorus) is the leading non-point source of surface-water pollution. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the Chesapeake Bay have led to wide-spread fish kills which have, in turn, negatively impacted the fishing industry. If we don’t find a solution soon, Virginia seafood prices will likely skyrocket.”

My attempt to engage horticulture students in this issue:

“How many of you plan on owning your own nursery some day? Given what we know about fertilizing ornamental plants, why may ornamental crop production be a substantial contributor to the aforementioned agricultural nutrient runoff?  What potential environmental regulations might ornamental plant nursery have to deal with in the near future? For those of you who hope to own your own nursery, what could you do to avoid having to deal with these tedious regulations?”

Now, I want you to put yourself in my students’ shoes. If you were given the above information and were planning to start your own nursery in Virginia (just pretend), would you seriously consider diving deeper for a solution to this problem? Let’s say that these impending regulations would be a serious headache and will almost certainly be implemented if something isn’t done soon.

Learning to be a Learner

After reading chapter two: There is no Teaching Without Learning of Paulo Freire’s book: Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, it came to my mind what kind of knowledge should a professor acquire, so the cause of teaching will have a learning effect .

Most of you are currently struggling as teaching assistance because there is no other option to obtain that so well received assistantship. Since the first day, this has been a topic of discussion in every class, where students share their anecdotes to get feedback from the others to feel that they are on the right track and of course, to feel that most of them are in the same situation. But let me tell you something, I believe there is no right solution to these “issues” on how you should teach. You can’t decide whether you should only be “cool”, “funny” or even if you should talk about your daily anecdotes to make the students feel comfortable in your class.

Everybody has a different perspective of how should a college professor should be. Im sure most of you have seen the following meme that shows the different perspectives that people have about what it means to be a college professor. (http://metapreneurship.net/college-professors-meme/). The picture is self explanatory, but as you can see even the actual professor thinks he does something that he is not really doing.  Should we act like Mr. Burns as the villain and wreck the students lives or should we help students open their minds and find what they really want in their life as Robin William did with Matt Damon?

CollegeProfessorsMeme

Learning to be a Learner might be the hardest thing to accomplish since we are trying to learn what we should learn, to find our Authentic Teaching Self. Finding your Authentic Teaching Self can be a difficult task, however is not an impossible one to achieve. One of the things that I have noticed from the professors is how they behave to get the attention of the students during a lecture. According to a paper published by Diane M. Bunce et al, How Long Can Students Pay Attention in Class? A Study of Student Attention Decline Using Clickers, the authors mentioned that if a student does not have the enough motivation during a lecture, they will pay attention for an average of 10-20 min (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed100409p). This means that if you made the wrong choice on how to approach the students, you will see the effect of the attention decline after 10 min of starting the lecture. So, we ask ourselves again what could be the best practice to apply in college in order to not transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge, as mentioned by Paulo Freire?

As connected learner that we are the first thing that came to my mind was: “let me google best practice in college” to find the answer; the first thing that I found was: A Brief Summary of the Best Practices in College Teaching (http://teaching.uncc.edu/learning-resources/articles-books/best-practice/ins tructional-methods/best-practices-summary). Just by reading the title I told myself: “I finally got the answer that I needed”, but all of you know that is not that simple. Even though the document was divided into 12 specific and well explained areas that the author believe you should concentrate to follow the best practices in college, it will not make you find your Authentic Teaching Self.

There is a lot to cover in this topic, however the question will always remain open no matter whom tries to summarize best practices to become the “ideal college professor”. I believe the professor has two options, either he/she adjust to each individual student or treat every student as a whole. The problem with the first one is that due to the constant changing, the professor will not have a own identity and the second one will have an impact on the students since not every student have the same knowledge. You can’t speak only in English in a class with different student from around the world, you have to talk to them individually in their own language in order for them to learn from the one that was once a learner.

I Want to Believe!

I had never read the works of Paulo Freire before this was brought to the forefront of my education, and yet it feels like I have read everything by him. Every now and then I read a theorist’s work and I come to the realization that everyone that I have been reading is merely echoing the initial speaker. This was my experience with Paulo Freire. He was serving as the source for a great deal of theory in this class, as well as the others that I have taken part in. His work was being repeated and added to over the years and I had been seeing those additions without being able to recognize the original foundation. The problem that one encounters when they come across a work like this is the issue of contributing anything relevant to the conversation. I agree with Paulo Freire and have found his ideals to hold true in most classrooms. If we give students the ability to become collaborators in their education and in the world, then they will be able to shape the world that they live in. This is especially true in rhetoric which seeks to sway the opinions of others in order to accomplish tasks that one may not have the martial power to accomplish. Only through knowledge and a true understanding of the world can people begin to change their environments. However, there is a final component to Mr. Freire’s work that I think he acknowledges as a given, but, in my experience, some teachers may not fully grasp: A belief in your students.

The cornerstone of Paulo Freire’s work is the belief that students (in all of their forms and age groups) will be able to construct the material necessary to progress in their goals and use it in a way that benefits their environment. He advocates the use of complex dialogue and exposure to a great many viewpoints and beliefs. I see too many teachers that strive to implement Freire’s advice, but miss this critical notion. Students must be trusted with their education in order to fully take responsibility for it and create a critical dialogue. This idea is in direct opposition to the banking education that we so covet, because it involves making an investment without a guarantee. In a banking conceptualization we want measured returns on our version of society, but this may or may not be a version that suits our students. This leads to an inherent conflict that forces teachers to view students as possible nodes of failure that teachers must prevent. This is wrong. We cannot assume that our students are incompetent waiting to be made competent if we really mean to trust them with the future. Students must be seen as journeyman; they must be seen as people beginning a expedition that they are well equipped to handle. Freire’s vision is difficult for some to accept for this reason. There can be no large scale standardized testing in Freire’s concept, because standardized testing is inherently mistrustful of the learner. It is given to assure that transfer of specific knowledge has taken place, not to assess the future needs of the individual and their environment. Note that standardized tests are given with the purpose of determining which learners fall below a line of attrition; which products are not up to code. No one ever looks at the test results from a standardized test and says, “Gee, these students did really well in vocabulary. I wonder how we can use their immense vocabulary skills to assist in their understanding of history. How do we connect what they know to what they need to know?” Of course not. That would be a theory of connectedness and our current system is based on a theory of sufficiency.

Teachers who struggle with these concepts are often the teachers that complain that their students are cheating on their tests by looking at past answer keys. If they are learning the information, who cares how they learn it? And, if you believe that they are not learning the information by studying past exams, then your exams may need a second look. A good test should force students to construct new knowledge using the tools that you equip them with in class. Any examination of a past test should simply serve as a review before facing the new challenges that will be set before them. These students that are “cheating” in this manner are simply informing the teacher that the learning environment has stalled and needs retooling.

We as teachers and educators need to begin believing in our students again. We need to believe that they can reach the goals that we set for them and that they can do it without being force fed our education of the past. Students should be tested and allowed to converse with the results of the test. They should be included in every step of the educational process. This is their education and it is high time that we let them take the reins. If we believe in our student’s ability to reach a goal, then our only task remaining is to assist in their ability to accomplish it. Students that have this kind of encouragement will create a world that we want to live in.

They led me to the well…

There is a quote from Albert Einstein which came to mind after doing some of this week’s readings. His quote is: “I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they learn.”

In my early education experiences, I was fortunate enough to have teachers who allowed me to learn at the rapid rate at which I needed to consume it and truly created the conditions for me to learn. In Kindergarten, I was the only one reading when starting school (chalk this up to sibling rivalry as I have an older sister who had been going to school and got all the neat school books…so I learned to read early to swipe her stuff!). My public, city school teachers, worked with me independently to help me learn and challenge me. This continued in first grade with another wonderful teacher who worked with me independently, pushing me gently to reading at higher and higher levels and giving me individual spelling lists.

Second grade was a different story and I got lost in some bureaucratic stuff I did not understand at the time. Fortunately, I was having part of my days with a third grade class across the hall (for reading and English) and that teacher then was my advocate and champion. Because of the individualized needs I had and the willingness of the teachers to create fertile conditions for my learning, I was able to get to a place where I was matched intellectually. That happened in my second/third grade year.

As I said, I was very fortunate to have such excellent advocates and champions at that stage of my learning. Thankfully a lot of my desire for learning was fostered during this time, so when I did come across teachers who were there to impart what they were required to the student masses I was able to learn what I could while still maintaining my desire to learn; regardless of the teacher’s outlook on how they were teaching.

Reading some of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he describes some education like the knowledge was “a gift bestowed by those by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” made me recall those kinds of teachers with sadness. Because of my early education experiences, I felt valued and that I had this knowledge deep inside myself, only I did not know it yet. My teachers were the ones helping me discover it. When I encountered the teachers who poured out information in class like water and we, the students, were the cups.

I am so thankful for all of those teachers I had over the (so very many) years of my education who did not simply pour out the water; rather they led me to the well and showed me how to draw the water. What really stands out in my mind, as I look into my near future, when I am at the front of the class, is that I want to be like the teachers who inspired me to learn. I want to be the one to create the environmental conditions for my students to learn. I hope to lead them to the well and show them how to draw the water themselves. For I hope that they, like me, will become life-long learners. Learning because they want to, have the need to, and the know how to learn in formal and informal ways. Even on their own.

So, from that little girl who felt that it was fun, exciting, and special to be learning, even when it meant being kind of separate from my peers, a heart felt thank you. Because of that desire for them to teach in non-oppressive and non-traditional ways, I had excellent role models all these many years later.


A Rant on Graduate School!

Many times in life, we go into classes not knowing what to expect. Sometimes, after the first class, we learn to expect to master a list of requirements for the course. Those classes either have an engaging professor who can grab our attention… or they don’t. That’s usually the story of most classes.

*Unless* you go into a class, and you find the professor explaining to you WHAT this can do for the REAL WORLD. Many of us expect to have some type of a positive impact on the real world. So, let me ask this, how many of you got really really passionate about something you learned in a course just because of all the amazing applications for it? How often did you ever have classes that you looked forward to? How often did you not have classes you dreaded going to in undergrad? I know this is a rare occurrence and all, but sometimes, there are those rare professors who can get their students to look forward to being there. I think a lot of these people follow Freirean ideology on education. These people encourage their students to relate what they’re learning to the world. These people guide students to leave an amazing foot print. These people scaffold their students into always being curious. Freire was a true believer of pursuing curiously. This video is a wonderful idea of how he encouraged great curiosity.

Many times, graduate students get impatient sometimes because they don’t get the results they want in research. In fact, sometimes, advisers advise in certain directions, and request that work is done a certain way. However, if we set our curiosity free, and share our curious ideas with our advisers, maybe we’ll make great victories.

If I’m interpreting my world in Freire’s view as was in the presentation, risking is the backbone to reading the world in our research and our living. If we risk, try hard, risk, try hard, risk… And Embrace EVERY failure…. We’ll be on to the next Noble Prize. At least that’s how I see it.  Just gotta be patient!  :)

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