Re: class, culture, and education

Katherine Goff (Katherine_Goff who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu)
Sun, 22 Nov 1998 09:29:43 -0700

Jay writes:
(and i have snipped)
> Some responses to the focus
>article take issue with its recommendation that we ought to simply teach
>the valuable/valued practices outright, because these other authors worry
>that contestation will be lost or weakened if educational institutions do
>not critique and oppose the arbitrariness of the hegemonic practices. And
>support some contrary practices.
>
while i agree with what Jay says here, i feel like the individual gets
discounted in this institutional perspective.
institutions do constrain individual behavior, but individuals always,
potentially are active agents in their own lives.
curriculum is not implemented without teachers.
how an individual teacher implements a curriculum is greatly influenced by
who that teacher is and how she understands the meaning of the curriculum.
and there are millions of teachers out there with millions of different
understandings.
while i am alarmed by the force of the national educational standards
politicking, i see hope in the politics of selves; of individual,
ambiguous, fluid, contradictory identity that cannot help but resist
static, universal standards.
>
>
>
>But just as arbitrariness/effectiveness is a matter of local degree, so
>should our reasonable educational response to it be. All matters of degree
>are both/and rather than either/or. It is not a question of Do we promote
>nonstandard dialects or the dominant/standard one only? it is a matter of
>to what extent do we promote both. It is not a question of Do we teach the
>traditional abstract-masculinist view of science or do we promote radical
>alternatives? but of the degree to which we do both (given the timescale
>of
>possible change which we envision relative to the lifetimes of our
>students).

i have studied teachers who manage to support and nurture the identities
of most of their students (inner-city, heterogeneous classrooms of fourth
graders) and encourage their construction of literate identities (full
members of a reading/writing community of learners) while bringing up most
of the standardized test scores of these children.

one intuition i have about how they do this is that the person of the
student comes first for these teachers, and they see academic success as
beneficial to the growth of each of the people who are students in their
classrooms.

another intuition is that no one teacher will ever be able to assist each
and every child that randomly walks into her classroom to achieve any
benchmark of minimum success or standard. even in the exceptional
classrooms i observe, some children never feel empowered/invited/welcomed
into the community. learning is so bound up with identity and relationship
that no one person can be the self or create the relationship that will
support learning in 25-30 different selves.
>
>
>Computer-based technology
this cuts close to my interests right now . . .
>
> How much of the
>difficulty that such people experience with learning standard forms of
>science and technology comes from simply not having developed the required
>cognitive /semiotic dispositions, and how much of it comes from not
>wanting
>to do so because the standard forms conflict systematically with their
>culturally positioned identities? (that being no accident, but itself a
>systematic effect of social macrostructuring processes).
i would like to add:
how much of the standard forms are actually practiced by how many of those
identified as mainstream/successful/powerful/valued/dominant/perfect?
if more studies looked at what people really do on a daily basis without
filtering it through the lens of what "we" all know they are supposed to
be doing, i think a great deal of variation, creation, and resistance
would be "discovered." i think this is one way to loosen the grip of
"normal behavior" and open up possibilities for the acceptance, perhaps
even valuing, of diversity.
>

i could go on, but this is more than enough for now.
i need to take a breath.

kathie

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
life's backwards,
life's backwards,
people, turn around.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^sinead o'connor and john reynolds
fire on babylon: universal mother^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Katherine_Goff who-is-at ceo.cudenver.edu
http://ceo.cudenver.edu/~katherine_goff/index.html