Author: yinlin

My understanding about critical pedagogy

Critical pedagogy refers to a deliberate tendency to construct a special situation in which teachers and students can critically think about knowledge. Critical pedagogy was developed in Central and South America and North America. It was deeply influenced by the adult literacy education conducted by Paulo Freire in Brazil. Paulo Freire redefined the concept of literacy education and gave politicized meaning, treating education as a way of liberating humanity.

Freire’s educational thought is based on between radicalism and tradition. On the one hand, a language of critique reflects the characteristics of new educational sociology. On the other hand, a language of possibility which is originated from the tradition of liberating theology and further developed to the philosophy of hope and struggle.

Critical pedagogy emphasizes that human existence is a process of “becoming” people. Humanity should be full and complete, not distorted and one-sided. Its purpose is to let the oppressed to reflect on oppression and its roots. Through this reflection to guide them to fight for liberation. Therefore, critical pedagogy has never taken everything that exists in education as a matter of course, but constantly examines and criticizes the various realities in the educational process in order to establish a more rational educational process.

Critical pedagogy raises questions like

  • What is the purpose of the school?
  • Is the school the preparation for the future work profession, or the driving ground for democratic life?
  • Whose knowledge is taught to students?
  • What is the role of the teacher?

Critical pedagogy advocates that schools need to use a public philosophy to clarify how to establish the foundation of ideology and institutions so that students get “freedom restrictions” ( Emancipation) and “liberation” also help students “empowering” and redefine and construct the characteristics of school education.

In summary, Critical pedagogy aims to promote the needs of human existence, not only emphasizing the potential for action and creativity, but also ongoing dialogue and reflection on fairness, justice, freedom, and liberation. It also imagines the possibility of living in a democratic society. Through education to teach people to learn various forms of knowledge and understand the world, change the world, pursue a beautiful and happy life, and towards a better future.

My draft teaching philosophy

I taught courses and hosted a workshop in the past years. I didn’t find a time and think what my teaching philosophy is. This assignment is an opportunity for me to draft my teaching philosophy.   I believe that teaching someone else is the best way to learn. I want to teach students to learn new knowledge from me and also I can learn new knowledge from them. I want to create an environment that all of us will gain something new after the semester is ended. There is all kind of students and all have different thoughts and goals for the course they take. Thus, I won’t try to accommodate all students in the class, which is impossible. However, I will do my best to teach these self-motivated students who eager to learn and we can work together to create, build, and deliver innovation projects from the course. To become a successful professor, the most important thing is to do good research. With good research then would award funding proposals, reputation, etc. Research is a cooperative work, besides work with other professors and lab graduate students; if I can develop a teaching methodology that can apply to the course that students and I can both learn and produce good research from the class, that would be wonderful!! What do you think?

Assessment

I found the topic of this week – “Assessment” is interested. We have been assessed by lots of things. My application has been assessed so I am able to study at the Virginia Tech. My credit score has been assessed so I am able to get a credit card. This week readings indeed provided some different perspectives about assessment, grade, evaluating, and etc. However, I didn’t agree with much of these studies. From my point of view, assessment is important and we need to use the grading system to differentiate and evaluate the professionality of each person. Everyone is different and good at different things. Not everyone can be a doctor, developer, entrepreneur, professor, or etc. A perfect assessment is not developed to fit all people, on the contrary, we should develop various assessments to help us to find what we good at and create our own future.

Indeed, sometimes school assignment is boring and get a good grade from a class that has no interested is difficult. The truth is, you are so lucky that you can be just a student so you don’t need to get 100, you can get 95, 90, 80, 70, as long as you don’t fail the class, you still can earn the course credits. A lot of things in real life, either you get it or lose it. Will you get a grade on a job interview? No, you either get an offer or nothing. Will you get a grade from NSF or NIH after submitting your research proposal? Last year I attended a presentation gave by a VT CS alumnus about how to succeed in getting research funding. One key important thing from that presentation is that you need to research what the funding agency’s interests, not yours research interests and you need to show them how your research works can fulfill their interests and you will have a chance to receive their fund. I took so many courses and did hundreds of assignments. From my own experience, if I really like that knowledge and eager to learn and master of it, no matter the assignment is how hard, how bad, how unstructured or whatever, I will figure out a way and do my best to get a good score from that course. If not, in that case, I either drop that course or get an OK score because it is a required course. I don’t believe that better design assessment will change or make a person’s interesting different.  

Finally, I got the similar conclusion to what Dan Pink said in his TED talk. I conduct multiple research studies using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) during my Ph.D. study. MTurk is a web service that provides a human workforce to complete jobs for you. I spent a lot of time to design tasks and changes my tasks during each experiment and continue had a question in mind that why I raised the award money but didn’t get better results. I hope that I could saw his talked earlier!

Programming learning resources for Kids in 21st Century

Years ago, I start teaching my son how to programming. To him, use a computer is a normal thing and he is very happy to learn it. In the Montgomery County Public Schools, all students have a Chromebook and use it to learn math and reading in class.

I share the resource I used in this blog.

  1. Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/): A visual programming language for children developed by MIT. My son’s school teaches Scratch in the gifted program. This is a game developed by my son.

  2. Swift Playgrounds (https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/): It is an iPad app that for learning Swift. Swift is a programming language developed by Apple. You can create a mobile app using Swift. This app is very fun.

  3. Grasshopper (https://grasshopper.codes/): It is an iPhone/iPad app teaches learners to write JavaScript. JavaScript is a popular programming language during recent years.

  4. React (https://reactjs.org/): React is a JavaScript library for building the Web application. It is developed by Facebook. It is an advanced programming language, so for now, I only teach my son the basic like write HTML.

Bill Gates learned to code when he was in high school in 1969. In 2012, there was a 12 years old kid developed an app and presented it in the TED (A 12-year-old app developer | Thomas Suarez). Now is 2018, when will you start teaching your kid to code?

Networked Learning

Nowadays, the networked learning is everywhere. MOOC is an example, people can learn a new knowledge from Coursera, eDX, and Linux Academy or earn an online degree from Stanford or MIT. If people want to learn something, there are plenty of online resources for them to learn. As long as you eager to learn, learning materials always out there. Blogging and twittering is already part of our life and everyone can post anything using different tools. Twitter is not just a social tool, many researchers do research using Twitter data. For example, there is a research using Twitter mood predicts the stock market in 2011. There are researches used Twitter data to predict the presidential elections. Data scientist uses social data to build models and create many different applications in the various area every year. Everything you post online could already be indexed and analyzed by these data scientist. Moreover, there are many kinds of research related to Twitter conducted in VT CS for years. Regards to working openly on the Web, VT library hosted Open education and open access events every year. All these events aim to create and provide an open knowledge environment for everyone to receive information for free. With the rapid growth of the techniques nowadays, networked learning is already part of our daily life.