Month: December 2017

Weekly Pessimism vs Seth Godin, and “Famous Colleges” will outlive us all

I used to adore TED talks. I thought they’re the modern world’s answer to the old Lyceum movement. Bringing the wisdom of the our best and brightest to the curious masses, but in short and sweet format to accommodate our digital ADHD.

But the more of them I watched in my own field, the more I saw speakers butcher their subjects. Turns out they are rarely experts. Occasionally you’ll get someone on the cutting edge, but TED seems to select more for performance and theatrics than knowledge. Half of these talks are given by journalists who have only a modicum of experience in the subject, and most are wildly idealistic. The greatest sin of all is the scripted TED-brand performance. I feel like they should trademark it, with its dramatic pauses and hand gestures, a heartfelt anecdote to start it all off, a bit of pacing, some nice graphics; it’s like they’re given a formula. They have a TED hour on NPR now, and even without video, you can feel the sensationalism seeping through the speakers. Check this out:

Seth Godin is the perfect example of this phenomenon. He’s got the body language and formula down perfectly. He doesn’t seem to be any sort of expert in pedagogy, but he’s rich, personable, theatrical, and can carry a crowd. Most importantly, he’s idealistic, and wants to tell you about why the system is broken, but could be fixed if we just changed everything!

Let’s ignore the conspiracy theory level talk about how public education came about for the sole purpose of creating mindless factory drones. Maybe it had that effect, but to suggest the entire thing was orchestrated as a vast hidden scheme makes me wonder when we’re going to talk about the Illuminati or Lizard People. Instead let’s consider his eight-steps for fixing everything:

  1. Inverted classroom – One brilliant professor serving millions via online video, while the rest of the teachers of the world serve as glorified assistants at in-person recitation sessions? Sounds good for the guy at the top, but you’re killing diversity of thought. If literally two or three professors in the world teach each class, they control the entire curriculum, they emphasis what they consider is important, they ignore what they don’t, and they homogenize the learning of an entire generation. The recitation teachers could fill in some blanks, but at the end of the day you end up with an entire generation of intellectual clones. Also, I hate video lectures, if you miss one thing and you’re lost for the rest of the lecture. If you can’t interrupt to ask questions, or get the benefit of others doing so, you’ll have an inferior experience no matter how great the professor is.
  2. End Memorization – He seems to be going overboard, but yeah, that’s OK in moderation. We’ve spent time in our class talking about how unproductive rote memorization is. You don’t need your physician to remember all 185,000 drug interactions, but they should at least remember where the gallbladder is without having to look it up. The idea of never memorizing anything is a bit simplistic.
  3. End Prerequisites – Who could possibly think this is a good idea? We use spiral curricula in modern pedagogy for a reason: you need to have a basis in the fundamentals before you can dive into advanced stuff. That isn’t unjust or unfair, it’s just reality. You can’t go sit in the electrical engineering department’s graduate signal processing class if you have no math or physics knowledge beyond high school, you won’t get anything out of it.
  4. End specific degrees – we’re already moving towards interdisciplinary education, and again this is fine in moderation, but unless we live in a Star Trek like post-scarcity society without any obligation to work, you’ll need some defined skills to get a job. You cannot take nothing but poetry and art classes and then be a civil engineer.
  5. Measure experience instead of test scores – Nice in practice, easier said than done. In this part he also claims that resumes as a measure of compliance will become useless, but as with #4, as long as there are employers, those resumes will be useful.
  6. Teachers should be coaches – Huh, I actually like this.
  7. Incorporate work into schooling – I wish he said more on this.
  8. Death of the Famous College – LMFAO.

Those colleges were relevant when Byzantines controlled the Bosporus, and before the Aztecs even started building their empires. Think of all the incredible social changes the last 1000 years has brought; those colleges survived them all. The rise and fall of feudalism, the first limits on the monarchy’s power, the modern republic, the rise and fall of communism, the rise of modern capitalism, the renaissance, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the rise and fall of colonialism, the space age. Through it all, those colleges survived and flourished. I think they’ll outlive capitalism too.

No, seriously, I can envision a time when robotic manual labor and AI mental labor are so cheap that literally everyone has everything they could possibly want, and even then, those colleges will be around. Humans are social animals, and outside of the insects, all social animals are concerned with status. So long as those colleges grant status, they’ll have relevance in any society. And don’t tell me there isn’t a real difference in quality either.

The claim that attending such a college has “no relevance to success or happiness” is also bullocks. Don’t tell me that attending Oxford isn’t significantly associated with higher success rates than attending State. Of course there is a variance in outcomes, but overall there is a huge association between attending an elite college and success. Happiness is another story, but I would imagine there is at least some correlation between it and general success, money, status, and comfort in life.

He concludes by saying that we need to kill two false ideas:

  1. Great performance in school leads to happiness and success.
  2. Great parents leads to great performance in school.

Which is odd, because I think both of those are some of the most self-evident truths in education. Yes, Dave Thomas didn’t finish high school, founded Wendy’s, and ended up being extremely rich. But variance aside, in general someone who finishes high school will be more successful than someone who doesn’t, and someone with an MBA from Harvard will probably do even better. Is there really a debate here?

As for the parents, isn’t parental involvement strongly associated with success? Same goes for stability at home. If you find a kid who goes hungry every other night, or suffers from abuse or neglect, the last thing they want is to play around with an Arduino to make art. Helping these kids out is incredibly difficult, but let’s not pretend that we live in some fairy-tale world where having great education-minded parents isn’t an advantage. If anything, we should devote resources to helping the kids who don’t have such parents, instead of telling them it doesn’t matter.

Asking the question “what school is for” is invaluable, and Mr. Godin does have some good ideas. He really does. If he simply gets people thinking about the issue, he has done a great service. But, man… does this smell like the naïve idealism of a layman. Does Mr. Godin have any pedagogical credentials at all? His biography suggests he is a marketing executive that made a lot of money during the dotcom era, and now writes business self-help books. Perhaps we should take all of his advice with a grain of salt.

Empathy is the new black

Current education practices face a challenge when it comes to teach college students in the 21st century. Education is becoming more about excelling in a job rather than forming contributing agents of this world.  In fact, the evolution of social sustainability and responsibility in college students—empathy—does not change during students’ four years of college experience. Students often show a decrement on the social responsibility area by a decrease in the volunteering and community engagement activities in which students participate during college (Bielefeldt & Canney, 2016). Furthermore, when measuring levels of empathy among college students as measured by the four subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index—perspective taking, fantasy, empathic distress, and empathic concern—engineering students show lower levels of empathy than other college students from other majors such as health care, social sciences, or humanities (Rasoal, Danielsson, & Jungert, 2012).

Different pedagogic approaches can help to teach students about empathy and community thinking. For example, role-playing community members during a mock city meeting, or asking students to interview those stakeholders that may be impacted by our work and write a reflection. When students shared their reflections with classmates can help them recognize multiple stakeholders needs (both direct and indirect) and empathize with stakeholder groups as part of their daily tasks. The 21st century brings many challenges, and moving towards collectivistic values, empathizing with others, will give strong resources to face them.

 

References

  • Bielefeldt, A. R., & Canney, N. E. (2016). Changes in the Social Responsibility Attitudes of Engineering Students Over Time. Science and Engineering Ethics, 22(5), 1535–1551.
  • Rasoal, C., Danielsson, H., & Jungert, T. (2012). Empathy among students in engineering programmes. European Journal of Engineering Education, 37(5), 427–435.

 

Personal vs Professional

Merging our personal lives with our professional one, in my opinion, is a struggle. Although the two definitely do impact each other and play a role in both the minor and major decisions we make in each of them, they do so in a very unconscious manner. But our constant urge to divide the two results in contradictory feelings and thoughts on how our profession may be a big factor in making us achieve a much more valuable goal- growing to become better human beings. This is particularly relevant to fields that are based on facts, on close-ended solutions making little room for what we truly value.

To tackle this, in an educational setting, it is essential that classes are designed in a manner that allow curiosity, critical thinking and creativity. In addition, by connecting the influence that the field has on society, to encourage students to find ways that could potentially solve the troubles associated with current ones and make them more efficient by introducing them to associated aspects in a pertinent manner. Another important aspect of being able to allow students to be identify with their fields in a more personal approach relates to Parker Palmer’s suggestion to allow students “to see how, when we fail and fall down, as we always do, we manage to get up again.” As educators, having the ‘chance’ to become a role model (even if to a few students) should push us to be who we are, to show what our personal aspirations, the struggles associated with them and the respectable ways in which we become vulnerable as we grow out of them. Thus, being an evidence to the inevitability of resistances they will come to face throughout their lives and anticipation to overcoming them.

Seventeen years of reducing pressure for students in China

*This is the last post for the Contemporary Pedagogy class. I appreciate the skills learned in this class. Some of the methods discussed in this class are mind changing and give us the impression that learning is fun and easy. I myself had this thought that if I feel hard when I learn, then there must be something wrong with the instructor. Well, learning can be fun and easy, but not always. I write this post to remind myself and some of you who may have the same idea as mine that the easiness is not and should not be the goal of education.
When I was in middle school, a group of Japanese students visited our school and had some conversations with us. One of the students read a question from her manual, “I heard that Chinese students study very hard. How do you spend your day?” Since she asked that way, I tried my best to show how hard life is for a Chinese student. However, she looked disappointed. My life was somehow more comfortable than hers. Years later, I started to know that I was a part of a movement to reduce students’ academic pressure. The movement originated before I was born, and became an emergent order from the administration of education in the year 2000. The main idea was less course, less homework, and less exam. That movement started dramatically. I remember that in spring 2000, I did not have any homework. Then parents and schools realized that the more they followed the policy, the weaker they are in the standard graduation exam. Most schools started to act in the gray area as gray as possible to save their average score. It did not take long for the government to realize the schools’ counteract. More strict regulations and enforcement were released. There were limited innovations can be done on the school side, especially the public schools. The parents turned to private school or privately owned education institutions (companies). The household education costs kept increasing over the years although the tuition was low and still regulated by the governments.
The movement to reduce students’ academic pressure in China did not achieve its purpose. The students are still under great pressure. The reason is obvious. The life after school stays the same, if not harder. The regulations on schools hurt the middle-class families. Their kids still need to compete for the seats in colleges classrooms if they did not spend the costs on the private education institutes. The path to college for students from rural areas who could not afford the private education becomes narrower. The call for more ways for students to enter colleges was answered. Some students can bypass the Gaokao (the College Entrance Exam in China) by showing their talents in certain areas. However, those paths were taken as advantages more by students from wealthy families than by the financially poor students. Those results somehow violated most Chinese’ value of equal and fair education.
Learning, just like losing weight, is not always a pleasant experience.
The competitions are there. The learning loads do not seem to be decreasing as the society evolves. Reducing the quantity of learning is beyond the capability of most educators. I think the role of educators would be like fitness trainers, to ease the experience by showing them more scientific ways of doing it. When they do it right, they are stronger and more confident to do more. I guess that’s the value of pedagogy studies. As education researchers, we should not ignore the reasons for hard work. We should have the confidence to tell people what is need to be done instead of saying what they want to hear.

Higher Ed for Human Development?

Current literature has vastly recognized that the lack of accessibility to education exclude population and promote the deterioration of their human capabilities. However, one may wonder if current educational trends, specially in the higher education context, are actually emphasizing the elements that contribute to student’s empowerment and therefore human development.

Traditionally, development is a concept that has been measured in terms of the metric of income or access to material goods as with the economic growth approach (Fraser & Naples, 2004; Sen, 1985). Human development, however, “is a process of expanding the real freedom of persons to lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value” (Keleher, 2007; Sen, 1997). The capabilities approach assess human development as an alternative to the traditional economic growth-centered development theory (Nussbaum, 2011). It also recognizes that individuals are free to employ their own agency as they chose to achieve certain functionings/capabilities (Keleher, 2007) Sen/Nussbaum describe, such as education, employment, among others.

It follows from this understanding that human development is assessed within the capabilities approach in terms of what capabilities a person is free to achieve (Keleher, 2007). I operationalize capability as the several alternate functionings combinations a person is free to achieve to live a valued lifestyle (Keleher, 2014). With this context, it is important to recognize if current educational systems are actually promoting the expansion of capabilities and freedom of their students. Is it within our educational curriculums that we learn about the injustices in the world, and the available tools to overcome them? If it is not the case, one may question current education to human development.

School Inception

Nobody likes to receive a half-baked explanation from people higher up, particularly if it is to explain why something cannot be done. What’s more, the specific level of annoyance that’s felt can vary with the style and wording of the excuse. Up there for sheer gall are ‘Because I told you so’ and ‘God works in mysterious ways’. There is another however, that infuriates me even more than these two staples of parents and priests respectively. The worst excuse a person in authority can utter is ‘we cannot afford it’. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. This is the United States we are talking about. A country that increases its military spending by $50 billion does not come across as a penny pinching nation. There are people who literally have more money than they know what to do with. So why, more often than not, do we accept this explanation so willingly and unquestioningly?

Parker Palmer discusses the reasons more eloquently than I ever could in his essay: The Aims of Education Revisited. Institutions hoodwink us into believing that any ill feelings we have towards society, or the way things are done, are purely a manifest of our own inadequacies. So effective are they at this deception, we often resign ourselves to inaction. In Palmer’s words, we know but we do not recognize. Why does this happen? One reason and one reason alone. Our education system still places obedience to authority above all else. As long as this remains the case, the man in charge will be able to get away with murder. Time and time again, institutionalized cruelty is given a pass. Although this was not news to me, it was comforting to know that someone else gets as mad about it as I do.

As I mused over Parker’s words, I began to rack my brain for the grandest, most heinous embodiment of this phenomenon. That is how I came to ‘we cannot afford it’. We all know about the massive inequalities in wealth within and amongst societies, but still we do not recognize the fact. We know if we redistributed the wealth, we could fix pretty much all of the world’s problems. But we do not. Instead, we tell each other we can’t afford it, whatever ‘it’ may be; ‘we can’t afford to provide free healthcare, we can’t afford to send aid to 3rd world countries, we can’t afford to provide housing for the homeless’. That’s bollocks. We have the money to do all of those things.

So, Parker writes, the solution is in education reform. Unfortunately, progress is hampered by the hierarchical structure of our educational institutions. An Inception-esque dreamscape exists; classrooms within departments, departments within colleges, colleges within universities, there’s no way out! At each scale we can clearly see the authoritarian rule and the subjected masses. Even if some emboldened teacher or even whole department raises the courage to teach disobedience as Parker advocates, the next level in the hierarchy will resist, either consciously or unconsciously, and the system as a whole will likely remain relatively unchanged. I don’t think the situation is hopeless mind; I’m just concerned that much like the movie inception, it will take far longer than it should.

Reflection & Refraction

Does the Education humanize us? As the question show in Parker Palmer’s article, I also asked the same questions. Before answer this question, we need to identify what education is in 21 century. Transfer knowledge is the essential task for educator and institutions. Especially in the digital era, the various methods to transmit information and knowledge. It is a significant challenge to highlight the critical structure and promote the face-to-face communication skills. Moreover, self-learning is another aspect for students to practices. Study on campus is a short time, while learning is a whole-life project. So, in the high educational environment, it would affect the personality and habits. But hardly to modify all the students in the same.

It is general for art students drawing the same style in the facsimile task. In the primary level of drawing class, facsimile task is necessary and essential works to improve the technical ability. But, the familiar styles will not stay for a long time, after the several weeks or months (it depends personally), the diversity in styles and technicals will show in the works. For example. Lin Fengmian, a Chinese painter and is considered a pioneer of modern Chinese painting for blending Chinese and Western styles. His works below, show all the process of changes in different periods: studied in France, president of CAA, and rear lifetime.

 

The experience of study abroad is important for Lin Fengmian. During the 1920s, impressionism and Cubusion is the mainstream in the scholarly cycle. His artworks in that period show the familiar technical as what he learned from professors. After graduated, he perfect blend all technical he learned with his culture, which is the works he painted in the rear life.

Education is access for the learner to broaden the horizon. Diversity is the key word in 21 century. Hence, the humanize would affect the students in short period. After the working time, students will combine the background knowledge with what they learned together; then the new styles will be constructed.

 

I’m not a professional

I’m not a professional in the current sense of the word. I’m not terribly interested in advancing my “professional skills”, i.e., giving presentations, computer skills, project management skills, etc. I know, I know, I know – these are all important things to work on as a professional person in a professional world. I’m likely just being stubborn – maybe even lazy? But I get frustrated with people and offices that only push this kind of professionalism. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot this semester, and wondering if I’m in the right field. A significant portion of my work and schooling has revolved around professional development this year. But I don’t feel it’s truly adding to my skills as an educator. Attend this conference for planning flawless events, attend that workshop for learning about eportfolios, listen to this speaker for interview skills. All of these things are helpful to a degree. But they’re helping me climb a professional ladder that I don’t necessarily care to reach the top of in my career. As a professional, I want to be kind, honest, open, patient, and groundbreaking, all while remembering the passion for learning that brought me here in the first place.

A line from Parker J. Palmer’s “A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisted” encompasses everything I’ve been thinking in regards to professionalism over the last few months. Palmer writes, “We will not teach future professionals emotional distancing as a strategy for personal survival. We will teach them instead how to stay close to emotions that can generate energy for institutional change, which might help everyone survive.” Reading this put a big smile on my face. I’m not crazy; at least one other person out there feels the way I feel. To me, professionalism has become such a cold term. It’s routine, controlled, and adding to a boring, systemic way of carrying out work. I nearly cheered out loud reading Palmer’s line that reveals the original meaning of the word professional, “. . . someone who makes a ‘profession of faith’ in the midst of a disheartening world.” Now I have the perfect excuse any time I don’t want to participate in a “professional” development activity ?

In all seriousness, I’ve felt disheartened lately in my own profession of higher education. So much of it is focused on my personal growth as a professional, working on largely administrative skills that will make me appear organized, well-spoken, and accomplished. I got into higher education because I could walk around a college campus all day and not get bored. I could sit in a class for hours and be intrigued for every second of it. I could listen to students talking about their interests and goals for days, and never wish to be doing something else. Education isn’t my key to professional stardom, it’s a feeling and a way of life that I value above all else.

In but Not Of the (Academic) World

While Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach was an assigned reading for another class of mine, I still find it to be a good reminder of why we’re all doing what we’re doing. Especially towards the end of the semester, experiencing some burnout, I really needed the reminder. This is the time where the undergraduate students have sent about a million emails about their grades and how everything will be determined. And although it makes me want to scream, I’m sympathetic towards them (in some ways) as I don’t think I’ve received a single grade in any of my graduate courses. Parker Palmer always gives us a good reminder that we’re all human and that feelings matter. Why we try to tuck them away in academia is still puzzling and yet we’re so conditioned to do it. I love the description in Parker Palmer’s A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisited – “in but not of” the academic world (or world in general). Personally, I’ve always heard this phrase used from a religious standpoint but feel that it is very fitting in this context as well.

 

I met with the professor I co-teach with this past week and this week’s readings/videos, along with the course in general, helped to guide some of the conversation that took place. Since I’ll be teaching 50% of the course next semester, I feel that I have a lot more say-so this time around. I offered my opinion that I thought the students needed to be encouraged to engage themselves more rather than answering multiple choice questions that come straight from the textbook – cue the lecture by night, homework by day comment from “What is School For?”. We both agreed that grading 120 short answer questions on a regular basis just wasn’t feasible so we took some time to brainstorm other options.

Our class conversations and this week’s readings/videos have helped me to shift my thinking about the purpose of my class. As an entry-level course, what do we want them to know? What do we want them to be able to do? This is a question I’ve held close to me the entire semester. I think it is most important for students to realize by way of this class that most things in the food world are not black and white. It is essential that students are able to see both sides of an argument and to be able to acknowledge (and be sympathetic to) opinions that to not align with their own. This could mean incorporating debates, small group discussions, opinion papers, etc. into the course. I also want this class to serve as a means of general interest in Food Science. There are numerous topics related to food that are equally controversial as interesting (GMOs, plant based meat products, organic versus conventional farming). Plus, food is part of everyone’s daily life so each person has to make food choices on a regular basis. This may mean changing some of the current course curriculum. Right now a textbook defines which topics we will be focusing on each week. The textbook isn’t bad, but it does leave out more current topics that are probably more relatable to this generation of students. Lastly, I want this course to serve as a means of connection. While we did have a few graduates students come in to talk about their research this semester, I would like students to be introduced to more opportunities outside of the classroom. I’m thinking this could be attendance to defenses or research seminars within the Food Science department. Attendance at Food Science Club meetings could also fill this void. Most importantly, I want the students in the classroom to get to know one another better. Right now there is little interaction between them all. I’m realizing more and more that learning communities are beneficial for all; that getting to know peers both inside and outside of your own major is invaluable on both a personal and academic level.

 

 

Photos

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f9/12/db/f912dbc089c9043bb076e37dbcbbfa6b–god-jesus-jesus-christ. jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8d/60/6e/8d606ef03c318866e833a940dbda10ba–my-school-life-my-life. jpg

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