Interesting, I grew up with a slightly different version. “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Give a Man a Fishing Rod, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime”.
I like your’s better, because it involves more active participation and communication between teacher and student. The emphasis is on acquired knowledge rather than material possessions. My version runs the risk of ignoring the identities of your students, and resulting in the age old joke: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a fishing rod, and he’ll break it up for firewood… or swap it for a fish”.

I enjoyed the post, the illustrations went very well with what you’re trying to deliver. I particularly liked the last one (balancing lives) since, as a student, I’ve seen students excel and reach higher potential through the opportunities they were given as ‘smarter’ students. Yet ‘less proficient’ students seemed to develop on a much smaller scale (if they did at all)- the focus of educators is not necessarily a balanced one.

LikeLike

I completely agree with you, humans simply overthink everything and don’t necessarily decide to do the right thing for personal purposes. I believe humans, by nature, are more selfish, and think of everything as a benefit or a loss to themselves. Taking the dog lying on the highway as an example, for most humans driving past the dog, they have a limited amount of time to think of the cons and the pros for saving the dog, and the cons heavily out-weight the pros in this scenario. Most humans value their lives higher than others, especially lives of animals. On the other hand, when a child is lying on the ground, others don’t try to save her life either, sort of for similar reasons – they don’t necessarily see any benefits of helping her. I agree, humans think a lot, especially about the consequences, however from my perspective, this is what makes us human. In addition, often humans think that since other people will help the baby, then why should they do it themselves. This essentially results in everyone not taking action since everyone thinks someone else would do it.

Complexity never crossed my mind as a notion for critical pedagogy. How do you think this is applied when teaching, (since a single concept often presents a set of different complexity levels to different students)?

YES to decentralization and cooperation. This reminds me a lot of how a cooperative business entity works- especially worker owned cooperatives. The whole management structure is flipped on its head. Instead of a couple of executives making all the decisions, the whole team including all of the employees has to come to a consensus. While this is beautiful in theory, it can often be very frustrating in implementation- especially if you need 100% consensus before making any moves. The solution is a balance between decentralized learning and the authority to make educational decisions efficiently. Decentralization is definitely going to be a theme in my Teaching Philosophy. Thanks for this post and the video link. More to come!

I love the idea of Praxis as a solution to the monotony of engineering education. Once students are thrown into the real world boring chalk board lectures become an impossibility. Theories and equations could be learned in the field so as to really drive home the essence of engineering and communication WHY we learn these fundamentals in the first place. This would involve a return to a more Dewey like conception of apprenticeship education but I think it would be invaluable in demonstrating the dynamic, exciting qualities of engineering to students.

The teaching as cooking analogy is great. Building upon skills and applying them to new challenges is so important. In the field of Artificial Intelligence a high school student just broke ground in teaching an artificial neural network to apply lessons from one training to another skill. In this case it was taught how to apply different limb movements to actions like crawling and walking and then used that information on its own to better navigate mazes. See link here: https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-high-schooler-shaking-up-artificial-intelligence/

The key here is that there is always more than one way to do something. A tool can be designed to be used a certain way, but there very well may be better, different ways to utilized in different scenarios.

LikeLike

I appreciated the article, engagement with the authors, and the elegant flowchart. Yet I wonder if one useful concluding addition would be: “what are the implications of the perspective on offer?” While this question of wider implications is absolutely essential for any social science research (I don’t know about in the hard sciences, but I assume it’s similar), it should apply to all disciplines and fields. I claim this, because this question goes beyond intentions to focus on the tangible impact of the research or perspective.

I like the idea of getting students to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable in the classroom” and allowing students to recognize biases, but I disagree that they need to set those aside. Rather, I think we should encourage students to embrace bias through argumentation. By introducing them to different perspectives, they develop the tools to analyze bias or the limits in those perspectives. These skills shine through in argumentation in writing and debate, and if the students follow this thread to their logic end, then students are afforded the skills to confront their own voice and way of seeing their surroundings. In short, they have greater capacity to confront their own bias. While there is a risk that they may shut down, we as instructors should explore ways to facilitate engagement. Otherwise, I wholly agree with most of the points in the elegant chart.

I always grapple with the notion that we “must impress upon students that education is an ongoing pursuit for democracy, freedom, equity, deep critical thinking, and diversity.” These terms are broad, and may potentially have the inverse effect we intend, given some populations of our student body are a bit resistant to these terms or have narrower interpretations (i.e., their own notion of freedom relates to freedom of “choice” rather than freedom of everyone around them). Thus, the task on us to think through what those terms mean to us, as teachers, then reflect on the process we went through to arrive at those definitions, then seek to foster such a process for our students. It may be completely different than our own, but we should explore activities that facilitate student investment and reflection. This will help them to think more clearly about what the screwdriver is, and how they can use it for their own purposes, whatever they may be.

LikeLike