Archive for the 'Teaching' Category
Via Jajuna.
The video seems to be a testament to the notion that if you just put a few sappy piano chords behind images of sad faced children you can pretty much rally people to any cause no matter the content. Here we have the now standard cliche that children must be prepared to become “global 21st century learners”. This goal is somewhat nebulous. However, the overarching meaning circulates around a variety of other cliches that almost all have their basis in workforce discipline. Why must students become global 21st century learners? The answer, no matter how it is dressed up in nice sounding jargon about connectivity or creativity, always seems to come back to economic competition. Education is thus reduced to a chess piece in a global labor war between American kids and India and China. Who are the internal villains in this war? The teachers. How do we win? Through technology, of course. Our educational dilemmas can be solved if we just get those anachronistic teachers and their professional knowledge and stupid books out of the way and “empower” kids to push around text and video on their Ipods. Then we can then give them a test and if they get most of the answers “right” then we will know that they have done something that we can call learning.
Via The Googlization of Everything: Siva Vaidhyanathan makes some great points about the drive toward digitisation in post-secondary education in his lecture “The Classroom is Sacred” at the CUNY Graduate Center.
The point about the heterogeneity of the university is really great. The needs and ways of operating among and between different areas, especially in large universities, are not always served by a one-size-fits-all digitisation strategy. Indeed, as he points out, there is an incredible amount of value in the ambiguities that are present in the classroom. Here, his point about “teachers are liars” is one that I have thought about quite a bit. Coming from a performance background, I have always endeavored to acknowledge the performative aspects of teaching. Teaching (and writing for that matter) can be about provocation; it can be about eliciting responses in dialogue; it doesn’t have to be about simply passing information gleaned from one source, through the larynx or the computer scree, to a willing (or not so willing) receptacle). The point made here about education not being simply a matter of information transfer speaks directly to the issue of the necessary presence of living, contradictory, ambiguous bodies in the process of educating.
A great watch!
In this great TruthOut essay by Henry Giroux, a quote from Edward Said:
Therefore, for me, my antagonist is the person who passively watches CNN all day long and says that’s the world. My ideal is the person who looks at CNN and says, no, that’s not the world, that’s a version of the world and my duty as a mind in society is to understand what alternative versions there are in order for me to make my choice and to go out and to change the world.
And this equally nice one from Giroux himself:
Unfortunately, the discourse of clarity appears to rest on a universal standard of literacy that presumably need not be questioned as well as a self-righteous and deeply anti-democratic suggestion that most people are just too dumb or indifferent to struggle with language and meaning. This approach to language suppresses questions of context – who reads what under what conditions? More importantly, it presumes that language is a transparent medium for the seamless transmission of existing facts that need only be laid out in an agreed-upon fashion. Such a position runs the risk of fleeing the politics of culture by situating language outside of history, power and struggle.
For students of the ICS MA Research Methods seminar “Critical Approaches to Internet Research,” April 22 & 24, 2009
The Seminar Notes include links to the Google and Wikipedia documentaries.
2009 Seminar Notes 1
2009 Seminar Notes 2
PowerPoint Slides
Murali, et al. on the impact of FUTON bias
My thanks to all who attended, I hope it was as beneficial for you as it was for me!
@paaitken