Kevin wrote,
> Hi Eugene,
>
> yes--I agree--and that's why I admire work by Norris Minick and others who
> try to get at the kinds of learning occurring in schools--what is really
> being learned by kids interaction with schooling, rather than beginning
> with the assumption that schools are totalizing institutions, so therefore
> students entirely resist them and learn nothing, or with the even worse
> assumption that what is learned in schools is directly linked to teacher
> intention. As you said, you certainly can't get away from the social
> history of learners (and distributed agency.) The formal/informal
> dichotomy bothers me more as time goes along--I think partly
> because of how
> it falls apart in practice, and partly because of the (formal and
> informal!) meanings that a word like formal has.
>
> Something behind this I'd like to see problematized more is the
> relation of
> after school clubs to schooling. I think after school clubs are often
> constructed through a set of "anti-school" premises and ideologies, but in
> practice, look quite a bit like schools, or like
> clubs-on-the-way-to-becoming-schools.
>
> cheers,
Good point. I think in designing formal settings we can learn a lot form
some informal settings.
It is interesting how struggle for getting money for afterschool clubs
pushes educational designs to be more like traditional schools. I think
this is a very interesting observation that suggests that school practices
may be more shaped by the negotiation of resources rather than by
educational ideologies. What do you think?
Eugene