Question:
How many of you are aware of Coalition for Essential Schools?
Molly
Cunningham, Donald wrote:
> How does change happen? I mean we can let out a good scream, but what good
> does that do? If we think the current system is messed up, what do we do? My
> impression is that folks creating and "inspecting" these standards believe
> in what they are doing. Schools should help people learn things. It ought to
> be possible to specify what those things are and measure whether they have
> been learned. Is the problem that we haven't done a good job of specifying
> those learnings or measuring their attainment? Then we need to fix that. If
> the problem is that our whole conception of schooling is wrong, then we need
> to show compelling examples of where we got it right. Most folks, myself
> included, are going to keep doing things the way they always have unless
> they can be shown compelling examples of something better. So if WE (XMCA)
> ruled the world, what would those examples look like? And how would we know
> they were better?
>
> djc
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Geoff Hayward
> [mailto:geoff.hayward@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 2:40 AM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: Education reform, was Re(3): job
>
> Ah Jay but Martin has not told you the half of it. We also get inspected,
> line by line, against those 'standards' even when everybody involved
> recognises it is a meaningless process and have to deal with inane questions
> of when exactly do we do X when X is embedded throughout a programme of
> teacher education. You spend your life ticking lists rather than thinking
> much harder with colleagues in schools how to educate beginning science
> teachers (in my case).
>
> Geoff Hayward
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jay Lemke" <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
> To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 3:05 AM
> Subject: Education reform, was Re(3): job
>
> > AAAAAAARGGH !
> >
> > Is that a good approximation to a scream of exasperation? ... more likely
> > just a generic scream of release ...
> >
> > I suppose I should thank Martin for the link below to the UK's version of
> > teacher education standards. I scream in part because I actually looked at
> > two of the documents ... mainly out of morbid fascination born of my own
> > two years overseeing the compliance of my former teacher education program
> > with the similar standardization enterprise of New York State.
> >
> > I read the voluminous NYS standards several times in their entirety, never
> > once finding I could make entirely consistent sense of them, or even parse
> > the text in many places. My eyes tended to glaze over, my being rebelled
> > against the language, the genre, the register, the meanings, the very fact
> > that such documents would exist in a world of serious educated people, the
> > implications of their existence for the terminal deadend of modernism's
> > strategy for solving real human and social problems.
> >
> > Have a look, and realize that THAT is what governments today throughout
> the
> > English-speaking world (at least) consider to be the appropriate response
> > to the need for better teachers. Did I say before that modernism has a
> > machine-logic in its technologies of social organization? Read some of
> this
> > stuff and you will get a sense of just how literal I was being. This might
> > be how you would program a computer to simulate the most obvious surface
> > phenomena of teacher education, without any underlying reality ... as you
> > can program a computer to talk back to you like a simulation of a Rogerian
> > therapist.
> >
> > Regulation. Standardization. But only in form ... there cannot of course
> be
> > any such actual standardization in real institutions that continue to
> > function ... the indexed features are so trivial that the best and the
> > worst programs could have exactly the same description in these terms.
> >
> > The language ... the forms of language ... are not ones in which it is
> > POSSIBLE to say anything useful or significant about education. They are
> > the forms of language in which you can provide specifications for
> plumbing,
> > though they would be equally irrelevant to any useful account of how
> > plumbing actually gets done or how to tell good plumbing from bad. They
> > derive of course from legal discourse, but they have no grasp on the
> > phenomena they are about ... education is only trivially about what people
> > know, it is mainly about how we recognize what needs to be known and about
> > how we decide how to help people learn. It is about the quality of How,
> not
> > the quantity or specification of What.
> >
> > And everyone in the whole history of western civilization who has ever
> > written anything taken seriously by experienced educators has known this
> > and said so. So this application of modernism is not even modernism at its
> > best. It is modernsm at its most mindless, its most frightened, grasping
> > for control when it knows things are out of control and that to admit it
> is
> > to lose at the next election.
> >
> > Conversely, of course, all these efforts at regulation cannot have much
> > real effect. But they deflect effort and attention from any real efforts
> to
> > improve education.
> >
> > Resign, Minister! You are either a fool or a knave.
> >
> > How do we say this not to a man, but to a social technology whose era of
> > usefulness is now so clearly past?
> >
> > JAY.
> >
> >
> > At 02:18 PM 8/6/2001 +0100, you wrote:
> >
> >
> > >We in the UK have been under a number of waves of teacher education
> reform
> > >in the UK since 1977. The current iteration (with competence based
> > >curriculum) is up for renegotiation. The current picture is on
> > >http://www.canteach.gov.uk/info/itt/requirements/index.htm
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------
> > JAY L. LEMKE
> > PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> > CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> > JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> > <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> > ---------------------------
> >
> >
> >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:01 PDT