Perspectives on Learning in a Diverse Society - EDU 2360

This course covered a lot of ground over the course of the semester. We began by sharing brief recollections of our own learning, as well as charts we'd each put together over the summer before class. These charts showed three types of knowledge that we each have: Intuitive, Scholastic, and Disciplinary. We read about these three types of knowledge in Howard Gardner's book, The Unschooled Mind. Gardner explains that intuitive knowledge is the thinking that we develop as young children before attending school. Scholastic knowledge is the knowledge that we can gain from being in a school setting. It is information given to us but not necessarily absorbed by us. We quite likely cannot reproduce this knowledge outside of the context in which we've been taught. Disciplinary knowledge is a higher level of understanding, which only arrives through a process of deep exploration and testing out ideas. This is the chart I brought to the first class. Click the image to see a larger version.

We discussed various educational philosophies and models we'd heard about and put together student groups for our research presentation. I chose to study the unschooling philosophy and developed slides for a presentation later in the semester. I've added the presentation below. To watch the video on slide 7, first pause the slide show and then press play on the video.

On our second Saturday of class, we discussed the role of the body in learning and looked at brain function and what the different parts of the brain are responsible for. We agreed that children are perceptive and often notice small things in the world that adults overlook.

Some of the reading I did following this session had a big impact on me and helped shape further my own teaching philosophies. One reading, in particular, that stands out as especially inspirational to me is Chapter 1 of Reuben's Fall by Sheri L. Leafgren. Leafgren, who was also a teacher, describes a scene at school in which she witnessed a kindergarten boy from another class be punished for helping a student up off the ground after a fall. Because the young boy had left his class line in order to help his fellow classmate, the classroom teacher told him he'd broken the rules and would have to spend his time at recess standing against a wall. Leafgren said about the event that it was a "critical moment for her". She began questioning obedience and its necessity. She wondered if teaching compliance to young students teaches them, over time, to be numb to their innate moral intuition.

She says,

• I wonder about the opportunities children have in the context of school to make real moral decisions regarding their own choices for good action, how they act on those and how their spiritual nature is represented in those decisions.

Throughout the course, we read the book Educating Hearts and Minds, which details a study of Japanese preschools and compares them to US preschools. Often the class discussion led to thinking about classroom management and student independence. I found the book to be fascinating, and I'll keep it around to use as I continue to develop my own teaching style and philosophy. I do hope to use some of their ideas in my own classroom one day. In particular, I want to establish a strong feeling of community and class ownership in my students. One way to do this is to have students take turns leading class discussion like they did in the Japanese preschools. 

The book I read for our choice book project was A Room for Learning by Tal Birdsey.

Tal Birdsey founded a middle school in Ripton, VT called North Branch School. This book is an account of his first year teaching there. He began his school with only ten students, but before he even had students to fill his school, Tal was thinking about what he hoped the school would do. He dreamed that North Branch School would be a place of respite for his students, a place that would allow them to be individuals and would inspire them. On page 21, he quotes Yeats and Keats.

• Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." Simple enough, I thought: Ignite whatever was combustible, innate, and natural within each of my students. I also considered John Keats's statement, "Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and  make it a soul?" Keats's question reminded me of the difficulty of the teaching of middle-school kids, yet I loved its insistence that true learning was born from lived experience. School did not have to be antiseptic or pretty.

The emphasis on that phrase is mine, because it seems to fall right in line with Howard Gardner's writings on disciplinary knowledge in The Unschooled Mind. Gardner writes that we begin our early years with intuitive knowledge. Then we go to school and develop a scholastic knowledge of the world around us. Typically this knowledge is not something we've sought out, entirely. It's often due to a set curriculum that we've learned certain sets of facts. When taken out of context and put into an environment that doesn't resemble a scholastic one, this type of knowledge is usually hard to reproduce. Disciplinary knowledge is the knowledge we gain through extensive research and experience. We basically need to live that topic in order to have disciplinary knowledge of it.

We also spent a great deal of time discussing how one  might educate students who come from all different population groups. As educators, we will have students of all sorts, including students with autism and/or giftedness and students who come from different cultural backgrounds, and it will be our job to teach to each child's strengths. All children deserve and are legally entitled to a free public education that meets their needs.