Michael, I wholeheartedly support project-based learning & changing formal
education to make it more practice-based. I agree that diverse competencies
make for better problem-solving -- I'd go farther & say that we do violence
to individuals when we use a single standard to judge their competence
("one law for the lion and the ox is oppression" sd Blake). Your assertion:
>
>We know that if students engage in activity without the opportunity
>of learning culturally specific ways of using tools or perceiving and
>talking about the material world, students learn all sorts of things,
>but there is only a small likelihood that these things will map onto
>existing ontologies.
is very well said.
& I'm an advocate of multi-modal literacy -- in fact, allowing for
multiple modalities of expression can allow kids otherwise marginalized in
traditional school-based literacy a chance to make legitimate knowledge
like their peers. Hep! hep!
These are the kids that I focus on. And, often discussed on this list in
the past, these are kids who are most likely to lose out in progressive
pedagogies that do not provide access to the narrow range of skills that
are still, woefully, but still, privileged by gatekeepers. But this was not
my point -- it's that "choosing" is still a function of the context as well
as the child in that context -- something easier to see micro-analytically
than in real-time. Also something more likely to be problematic in
culturally/ linguistically diverse classrooms.
What do others think?
Judy
>activities and representations among the kids that resemble those
>that we also documented in the community and among activists, but
>which differed considerably from what you might find in a regular
>classroom. In the context of science, you get film, interviews,
>historical studies, correlation, naturalistic studies...
>
>Well, I have been almost 10 hours here in front of the machine--got
>to take a break on my bike...
>
>Michael
>--
>
>----------------------------------------------------
>Wolff-Michael Roth
>Lansdowne Professor
>Applied Cognitive Science
>MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885
>University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616
>Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca
>http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/
>----------------------------------------------------
>
>
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