Thank you, Kevin. I can tell you what I do in my group interaction
skills classes, although it's still crude.
I don't really have to design an exercise for this. When I (doing
violence) assign them to groups in the first week of school and explain
the grading system that has both group and individual grades, I also point
out that in the real world groups discipline their members and therefore I
allow them the possibility of expelling members they find delinquent.
Hardly a group fails to come to the point of considering the possibility
of expulsion, and it scares the whatever out of them (I am glad to say).
A member, I stipulate, can only be expelled by consensus, worked out in my
presence. When they do decide to expel (I do have plan B's for expellees,
trying to contain the implications for people that spread beyond the
classroom), I remind them (and continue to remind them -- I hope subtly
but noticeably) that the consequences keep falling out after the decision
has been made and carried out; I take the consequences (in terms of
nurturing individuals in a groups class), and they do too, in terms of
what they may have lost, so they should evaluate THAT as well as their
annoyance. One group kicked out the only member who owned a VCR -- bad
for the movie analysis assignment! I don't know about authenticity, but
it offers places for things to be learned, and to their credit, some of
my young people truly do. (Some seem to find the whole school experience
inauthentic, I hardly know how to face them.)
> It also seems to me that learning to be apt at consensus-building would
> be co-implicated in other issues we often don't handle so well in
> education, such as moral education (of the Kohlberg, et al, variety, not
> religious right, thank you). Empathy, learned and nurtured in
> educational settings is a key construct, it seems to me, that could make
> consensus-building ultimately more viable as a process.
Oh yes indeed, Kevin! I am sure that is exactly so. <<More gleaning>>
Can you give me the reference for Kohlberg et al.? I'm gathering
resources for talking about kids' culture and moral learning in projects
around computers. (Ah -- I've distorted it with this description, but
it's close enough to justify my request.)
--Alena
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:08 PDT