Could you help her?
Regards, Victoria
At 05:01 PM 22/09/99 -0700, you wrote:
>
>We still have a clever little gremlin or two running around deleting
>names and adding names to xcma on an as-yet-to-be-figured-out-basis.
>Robert's address was eaten by a gremlin, or his "send" ability, so
>he sent me this message which I pass along to you-all. Local gremlin
>exterminator, bjones, has fixed robert's account.
>
>thanks bj
>mike
>----
>To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: Alternative definitions of educational success
>
>I was excited to read today's postings by Bill Penuel and Genevieve
>Patthey-Chavez.
>Bill wrote:
> I believe we have a responsibility to contribute to the debate
>constructively by explaining to parents and community folks at every
>opportunity to get that there are other places to get answers to their
>question--other sources of evidence that their own children are learning
>something significant, and then to provide some examples of that in our
>communities.
>And Genevieve wrote:
> I want to go beyond lamentations &
>hand-wringing about educational policy. The problem
>for me has been how to work with, well, other
>bureaucrats as well as teachers, students, and all the
>good people that affect the actual delivery of
>education in one specific place (my version of think
>globally, act locally).
>
>These concerns mesh well with my thinking about the potential of
>sociocultural theories of human development to contribute to the reform or
>enhancement of public education in Africa. The following abstract
>summarizes my argument in a forthcoming chapter:
>
>The narrowing staircase model of schooling, which increasingly receives
>legitimation from an international prototype of Institutionalised Public
>Basic Schooling (IPBS), rests on the concept of an age-graded curriculum.
>This curricular concept arose from a particular set of socio-historical
>conditions that included both cultural and economic constraints. I argue
>that it is flawed as a strategy of pedagogical support for personal
>development, and I suggest an alternative, more gradual, multidimensional,
>and expansive conception of individual development. Secondly, I argue that
>the narrowing staircase model is applied in many third world countries in
>an extractive manner that works against the principle of local
>accountability in both the economic and the cultural sphere.
> In place of this culturally alienating and economically
>disempowering strategy, I suggest that public schooling in Africa could
>learn from several other types of educational endeavor, in which the
>organisation of opportunities for learning is better attuned to a set of
>principles that conform with the conception of personal development as a
>socioculturally situated process. These principles include individualising
>instruction within the student's zone of proximal development, maximising
>the ecological validity of the curriculum, parent-professional
>collaboration, use of authentic tasks, connecting technical skills with
>social and moral responsibility, acknowledging the socially distributed
>nature of cognition, use of appropriate technology, integration of
>learning with economic productivity, and incorporation of the learner as a
>legitimate peripheral participant within a social system that displays the
>full range of desirable outcomes of the learning process. Three types of
>educational provision that can be found in several contemporary African
>societies incorporate several of these principles. Each of them defines
>success in a less economically and culturally extractive way than IPBS:
>home-based learning programs for children with disabilities; health
>education for mothers of young children; and apprenticeship in
>economically productive activities.
> Although most of the public basic schools in rural areas of Africa
>define their principal mandate in terms of the narrowing staircase model,
>many of them also perform additional local service functions as a
>community library, as a community forum for discussion of public affairs,
>and as a base for continuing education. I suggest that educational
>planners could profitably borrow from these existing practices the notion
>of schools as nodes in their planning models, in order to build local
>accountability into the public legitimation accorded by central
>administrative authorities to the activities of rural schools.
>
>Robert
>
>Robert Serpell tel: ( 410 ) 455 2417
>Psychology Department 455 2567
>University of Maryland Baltimore County
>1000 Hilltop Circle
>Baltimore MD 21250 fax: ( 410 ) 455 1055
>
>PLEASE NOTE: this message originates from my NEW EMAIL ACCOUNT:
> SERPELL who-is-at research.umbc.edu
>
>
>
>
>
Victoria Yew
Doctoral Candidate
School of Educational Psychology, Literacies & Learning
Faculty of Education (A35)
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
AUSTRALIA
Telephone : (02) 9351 6326/ International +61 2 9351 6326
Fax : (02) 9351 2606 / International +61 2 9351 2606
E-mail : v.yew who-is-at edfac.usyd.edu.au