Re: reading the Times

Dewey Dykstra, Jr. (dykstrad who-is-at bsumail.idbsu.edu)
Mon, 27 Oct 1997 11:19:04 -0600

>Before diving back into work, a story.
...
>(These stories appeared on monday and saturday of this week, I believe).
>1. Professors of Education and Teachers/Parents out of synch. Parents
>want focus on basics and discipline (drill and kill) while profs
>want active learner and constructivism.
...
>So I talk to my students about profs and students (its easy, because
>that anyway) but focus on why profs and teachers/parents might be
>out of sync and who might be "right." We talk about the real problems
>of discipline in classrooms (ours included)
...
And we talk about
>what it would mean for active learners and discipline to co-exist
>as a normal condition of development. (Blueskying, it is referred
>to in one local dialect).
...
>We have agency too.
>mike

Mike:

This mis-match reminds me of what I see when I read Wm. Perry's work on
intellectual and ethical development and the mis-match between the students
and profs which influenced he and his colleagues to look for the source.
Strikes me that their work still has loads to 'say' to us, as does the more
recent, similar work of Belenky, et. al. in Women's Ways of Knowing.
Unfortuanately, since as a whole there is no scholarship in university
teaching, most of our colleagues are blissfully unaware of Perry's work and
if they are aware of some mis-match, they blame their victims for the
problem.

Dewey

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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad who-is-at bsumail.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938
"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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