>I think teachers need to justify why learning anything they teach is
>critical to students' real lives. This task requires a certain type of
>discourse that I suspect is rarely used in classrooms.
What we tend to forget is that school is a major part of young people's
"real lives". In principle, there is no reason why projects undertaken
during the hours at school cannot be both meaningful and educative. I'm
thinking, for example, of some of the projects collaboratively carried out
in classes where TERC researchers have been working; drama created,
scripted and performed by students; creating multi-modal representations
of local history, based on interviews with local people, etc.
I agree that the discourse that occurs in carrying out these projects is
very different from the recitation script that is the staple in so many
classrooms. But in my experience, the change in discourse style occurs as
a corollary of a changing relationship between the participants in the
situation and the goals to which they orient, rather than vice versa.
I believe that many teachers intuitively understand that working in this
way is more worthwhile and more satisfying than delivering and testing a
predetermined package of basic skills and information. The problem, in my
view, is not so much the teachers' lack of vision as the constraints
imposed on them by the wider social context, in which the dominant values
are efficiency, productivity and profit and in which many of the reforms
prescribed for public education are based on a totally inappropriate
application of the business principles of late 20th century capitalism.
This is certainly the case in Ontario, where it seems that the electorate
is about to give a second term to a conservative government that
explicitly espouses and imposes these principles on our school system.
Gordon Wells
OISE/University of Toronto