Jay,
Your frustration reminds me of the following from Paulo Friere:
If education could only have a conversation with biology, for example, and say,
I have to understand how limited I am obliged to be because of the political
limits I am not allowed to go beyond, then the living game of social limits
would be easier to see! Liberatory education is fundamentally a situation where
the teacher and the students both have to be learners, both have to be
cognitive subjects, in spite of being different. The students and teachers will
be undertaking a transformation that includes a context outside the classroom,
if the process is a liberating one.(Shor & Freire, 1987, p.32-33)
and from Braudel:
The rhythms of history range from extremely slow ones, perceptible, if at all,
only over centuries, to those that are almost instantaneous, according to
Braudel, at any given time diverse rhythms operate in different spheres.
‘Science, technology, political institutions, conceptual changes,
civilizations...all have their own rhythms of life and growth, and the new
history of conjunctures will be complete only when it has made up a whole
orchestra of them all.’ (Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin Creation of a
Prosaics, 1992, p.49)
Molly Freeman
Jay Lemke wrote:
> AAAAAAARGGH !
>
> Is that a good approximation to a scream of exasperation? ... more likely
> just a generic scream of release ...
>
> I suppose I should thank Martin for the link below to the UK's version of
> teacher education standards. I scream in part because I actually looked at
> two of the documents ... mainly out of morbid fascination born of my own
> two years overseeing the compliance of my former teacher education program
> with the similar standardization enterprise of New York State.
>
> I read the voluminous NYS standards several times in their entirety, never
> once finding I could make entirely consistent sense of them, or even parse
> the text in many places. My eyes tended to glaze over, my being rebelled
> against the language, the genre, the register, the meanings, the very fact
> that such documents would exist in a world of serious educated people, the
> implications of their existence for the terminal deadend of modernism's
> strategy for solving real human and social problems.
>
> Have a look, and realize that THAT is what governments today throughout the
> English-speaking world (at least) consider to be the appropriate response
> to the need for better teachers. Did I say before that modernism has a
> machine-logic in its technologies of social organization? Read some of this
> stuff and you will get a sense of just how literal I was being. This might
> be how you would program a computer to simulate the most obvious surface
> phenomena of teacher education, without any underlying reality ... as you
> can program a computer to talk back to you like a simulation of a Rogerian
> therapist.
>
> Regulation. Standardization. But only in form ... there cannot of course be
> any such actual standardization in real institutions that continue to
> function ... the indexed features are so trivial that the best and the
> worst programs could have exactly the same description in these terms.
>
> The language ... the forms of language ... are not ones in which it is
> POSSIBLE to say anything useful or significant about education. They are
> the forms of language in which you can provide specifications for plumbing,
> though they would be equally irrelevant to any useful account of how
> plumbing actually gets done or how to tell good plumbing from bad. They
> derive of course from legal discourse, but they have no grasp on the
> phenomena they are about ... education is only trivially about what people
> know, it is mainly about how we recognize what needs to be known and about
> how we decide how to help people learn. It is about the quality of How, not
> the quantity or specification of What.
>
> And everyone in the whole history of western civilization who has ever
> written anything taken seriously by experienced educators has known this
> and said so. So this application of modernism is not even modernism at its
> best. It is modernsm at its most mindless, its most frightened, grasping
> for control when it knows things are out of control and that to admit it is
> to lose at the next election.
>
> Conversely, of course, all these efforts at regulation cannot have much
> real effect. But they deflect effort and attention from any real efforts to
> improve education.
>
> Resign, Minister! You are either a fool or a knave.
>
> How do we say this not to a man, but to a social technology whose era of
> usefulness is now so clearly past?
>
> JAY.
>
> At 02:18 PM 8/6/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>
> >We in the UK have been under a number of waves of teacher education reform
> >in the UK since 1977. The current iteration (with competence based
> >curriculum) is up for renegotiation. The current picture is on
> >http://www.canteach.gov.uk/info/itt/requirements/index.htm
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:01 PDT