RE: [xmca] Poetry is nice

[Colette Murphy <c.a.murphy@qub.ac.uk>]

Dear Eric
Great idea!
I use this poem (below) in sessions with prospective science teachers to illustrate that things are happening in the lives of each child in their classes...
Best wishes
Colette


Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Seamus Heaney




Dr Colette Murphy
Senior Lecturer
School of Education
Queen's University
Belfast BT7 1NN

tel: 02890975953
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org [ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org]
Sent: 02 October 2009 18:51
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [xmca] Poetry is nice

Mike:

Perhaps it was "Lenox Avenue Mural"?.  I teach that poem in three
different classes (social studies, careers, and yes I even teach it in my
math class).  Can't get enough of the message that poem portrays.

What are other poems that people use in their instruction?

eric




mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
10/01/2009 06:47 PM
Please respond to lchcmike; Please respond to "eXtended Mind, Culture,
Activity"


        To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
        cc:
        Subject:        Re: [xmca] Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?


PS-- One of the poems was by Langston Hughes. NONE of the students except
the student who brought in that poem because she had written a report on
Langston Hughes in middle school could identify anything about him.

Been a tough day, education-wise.
m

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 4:46 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not to discourage this line of discussion at all, but a couple of notes
> from several hours of teaching today.
>
> One class I am teaching is an "integrative senior seminar" to
communication
> majors who are graduating this year. One of the activities they engage
in is
> reading a text that they have, in principle, encountered in earlier
class,
> another is bringing in a poem and explaining why it is important to
them.
>
> Two issues. Reading the intro to berger and luckman on social
> constructivism they encountered the term "virtigo of relativity" in
> connection with issues of cross-national differences. One student of the
24
> could work up to saying what virtigo was.... and we linked it to the
movie
> by Hitchcock. For relativity, e=mc**2 and Einstein. NO ONE admitted to
every
> hearing the phrase, cultural relativity before. One remembered hearing
about
> cultural capital. None could interpret that part of the text.
>
> They have been educated in a university by a department that takes great
> pride in its educational achievements and commitment to diversity.
>
> Write that up in the NY Times?
> mike
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps a second, more serious response.
>>
>> Critical thinking, I believe, is a "habit of mind". That is, it's not
>> something one turns on and off, or something that we can stimulate in a
>> single class or around a single issue or text. It inhabits a longer
>> timescale, it is more of an acquired disposition, and once you acquire
it
>> it's there with you in relation to pretty much everything.
>>
>> How we acquire it is a big, important question. I think we know,
>> epidemiologically, that those who are marginalized in society are more
>> likely to acquire it spontaneously. I always found Freire a useful text
with
>> Brooklyn College pre-service and new teachers, initially to talk about
how
>> to stimulate critical thinking in others who were already living in
>> conditions that limited their human potential. But it always wound up
being
>> about how these students/teachers themselves were being limited by
>> institutions, biases, power inequalities, etc. (even those in our own
>> college classroom). They, too, were living in conditions that made them
>> ready to discover critical stances. It took a while, and I don't know
for
>> sure how long the active critical disposition lasted in the face of the
pain
>> of seeing the pain around us, and the ease of easing off from a
critical
>> stance in life.
>>
>> One critical breakthrough can catalyze a more generalized critical
>> disposition, but "transfer" is often as much a learned capacity in
regard to
>> critical thinking as in regard to any other higher intellectual
function.
>> But the deeper, the wider, and the longer it sinks its teeth into us,
the
>> more likely we will be looking and feeling critically for the rest of
our
>> lives.
>>
>> I know that you and your students will keep at it!
>>
>> JAY.
>>
>> Jay Lemke
>> Professor (Adjunct)
>> Educational Studies
>> University of Michigan
>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 30, 2009, at 7:23 PM, Beth Ferholt wrote:
>>
>>  An interesting twist as I used this paper in a class of student
teachers
>>> here at Brooklyn College:I was excited to bring in Bodrova from the
New
>>> York
>>> Times.  I thought I could encourage critical thinking about the
>>> troublesome
>>> 'frame' in which the article presented this exciting work with play. I
>>> overestimated my abilities to encourage critical thinking about the
piece
>>> ... but comments from the students after class made me think that
these
>>> teachers-to-be may included more dramatic play in their classrooms
>>> because
>>> they read these ideas in the Times.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> David and all,
>>>>
>>>> Briefly, the dynamic, in the sense of the mechanisms at work, may be
>>>> much
>>>> the same, but the degree of residual choice, or freedom-in-practice,
>>>> remains
>>>> considerably greater. Call is power-within-the-system as opposed to
>>>> power-over-the-system, which, I agree, individuals in general,
>>>> regardless of
>>>> social class lack. That's why collectives are more formidable in
>>>> resisting
>>>> or changing the system. A deep question I think is whether the
>>>> marginalized
>>>> or the middle class in fact play this role. The former, I think, find
it
>>>> harder to organize and participate in collective action over longer
time
>>>> spans, but if they do are more likely to initiate major changes. The
>>>> latter
>>>> aggregate in search of their interests more often and easily, but are
>>>> less
>>>> likely to do more than negotiate relative advantage within the
existing
>>>> system. Here too one sees, I think, the implied powers of burgher and
>>>> pauper. (Genuine princes are in a much more paradoxical position!)
>>>>
>>>> JAY.
>>>>
>>>> Jay Lemke
>>>> Professor (Adjunct)
>>>> Educational Studies
>>>> University of Michigan
>>>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>>>> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sep 27, 2009, at 10:36 PM, David H Kirshner wrote:
>>>>
>>>> But there is a world of political difference among controlling
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>  yourself, carrying out commands, and controlling others.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jay,
>>>>> Not to dispute the critical stance of your concerns re
self-regulation,
>>>>> I wonder to what extent the politicization of the issue obscures its
>>>>> dynamics. Even the wealthy scion inheriting position and power has
to
>>>>> learn to navigate in an existing system "he" (most likely, he)
hasn't
>>>>> created. The rewards for self-control undoubtedly are much greater
and
>>>>> much more readily forthcoming for the prince than the pauper. But
isn't
>>>>> the dynamic the same?
>>>>> David
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
[mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
>>>>> On Behalf Of Jay Lemke
>>>>> Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2009 11:26 PM
>>>>> To: lchcmike@gmail.com; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> As a footnote to my worries about the politics of teaching "self-
>>>>> control", and in response to Mike's note about re-framing in
cognitive
>>>>> psych discourse, a thought or two about "executive function".
>>>>>
>>>>> There is a value connotation in this term, from "executive" in its
>>>>> sense of high-status individual in a managerial role (cf. "Executive
>>>>> MBA program" or "Executive Summary" not to mention "Executive
>>>>> Washroom"!).
>>>>>
>>>>> And it's not so semantically distant from the putative denotative
>>>>> meaning of the term: the function of executing decisions. The
history
>>>>> comes, I believe, from computer programming and computer processor
>>>>> design, where the executive function carries out the commands of the
>>>>> program.
>>>>>
>>>>> So there is a sort of root cultural meaning-message here: "it's good
>>>>> to be in charge" conflated with "self-control is good". But there is
a
>>>>> world of political difference among controlling yourself, carrying
out
>>>>> commands, and controlling others. Or as I argued in my other post,
>>>>> learning how to control yourself to act your part in someone else's
>>>>> drama.
>>>>>
>>>>> It may be obvious but perhaps still worth noting that there's also a
>>>>> difference between the meaning of "self-control" or
"self-regulation"
>>>>> as the basic and necessary ability to focus your own attention and
>>>>> action in order to get something done beyond the single instant vs.
>>>>> their meaning as conforming to the norms of behavior set by others.
In
>>>>> free cooperative or collaborative activity, where group norms are
>>>>> agreed and remain subject to challenge by all and to revision, this
>>>>> latter difference fades. But how often does that happen in schools?
or
>>>>> any late capitalist institution?
>>>>>
>>>>> JAY.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Jay Lemke
>>>>> Professor (Adjunct)
>>>>> Educational Studies
>>>>> University of Michigan
>>>>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>>>>> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke <http://www.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sep 27, 2009, at 9:22 AM, mike cole wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I am pushed to get ready for classes monday, Ageliki.
>>>>>
>>>>>> I would be glad to discuss the issue I referred to as re-framing
>>>>>> within the
>>>>>> context of the discussion of learning sciences and vygotsky just to
>>>>>> keep it
>>>>>> in the bounds of time constraints-- have you read that discussion?
>>>>>> Otherwise
>>>>>> my comments will make no sense.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Within that context, I might start with executive functioning as a
>>>>>> "neuroscience term," the discourse on 0-3 and ways to make babies
>>>>>> brains
>>>>>> develop more quickly (see xmca discussion of brain and
>>>>>> education),and the
>>>>>> linkages to no-child-left behind. Seems a long way from Kharkov in
>>>>>> the late
>>>>>> 1930's, or 1990's, or the recent (to the NYTimes) discovery of
>>>>>> Vygotsky.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> mike
>>>>>> Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 9:15 AM, Ageliki Nicolopoulou
<agn3@lehigh.edu>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi Mike,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Can you explain a bit what you mean by re-framing and why you see
>>>>>>> it as an
>>>>>>> issue of re-framing?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>> Ageliki
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> **********************************************
>>>>>>> Ageliki Nicolopoulou
>>>>>>> Professor
>>>>>>> Department of Psychology, Lehigh University
>>>>>>> 17 Memorial Drive East
>>>>>>> Bethlehem, PA  18015-3068
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Personal Webpage:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>  http://www.lehigh.edu/~agn3/index.htm<http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Eagn3/index.htm>
>>>>>> <http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Eagn3/inde
>>>>>>
>>>>> x.htm
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>  Departmental Webpage:  http://www.lehigh.edu/~inpsy/<http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Einpsy/>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> nicolopoulou.html<http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Einpsy/nicolopoulou.html>
>>>>>>> **********************************************
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> mike cole wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Thanks Peter-- I was just about to forward this story. Apart from
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> its
>>>>>>>> considerable intrinsic interest to members of this group, it
seems
>>>>>>>> relevant
>>>>>>>> to the prior discussion the origins of learning sciences and the
>>>>>>>> ways in
>>>>>>>> which re-framing can operate to change the terms of discourse.
>>>>>>>> mike
>>>>>>>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 7:36 AM, Peter Smagorinsky
<smago@uga.edu>
>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> September 27, 2009 The NY Times Magazine Section
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> The School Issue: Preschool
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> By PAUL TOUGH
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>  _______________________________________________
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>>>>>
>>>>>
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