Last Blog!

Can you believe it?  Didn’t this go super fast?
For your final connection to the course, I want to leave you with questions, not answers.  I want you to think through all that you have read and experienced this semester.  Generate a list of at least three questions that you will continue to hold with you as you move forward in your path to teaching.  Share why these questions are important to you.

It went super fast. I'm surprised that I am done at MCTC. I enjoyed getting to know my fellow classmates but I wonder if we used our time productively this semester. I think we spent a lot of time getting to know each other but I also feel like we wasted a lot of time. My first question is how could we have used our time more productively?

It was nice having a small class, I was disappointed that so many people dropped out, it was noticeable because we had such a small class size. I'm concerned about the people that did. I hope everyone is okay. This is a concern I typically wouldn't have in a larger class. I feel like we were very invested in each other's education... is that good or is that bad?

I think we had important conversations, but I think we got side tracked a lot. We cared more about the real-life situations that were going on. I'm not a fan of the blended format and the impacts of technology seemed to get in the way of learning. I feel like a lot of people were frustrated at the amount of technology that was involved in the class. My question is: is technology necessary for educator's? I believe it is, I like the idea of a technology class for future educator's because it will be prevalent in their future experience
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True Learning is Uncomfortable

When I think of our discussion on Wednesday it made me think of an article I read last semester by Kevin Kumashiro it's called Preparing Teacher's for Crisis: a Sample Lesson. To quickly summarize Kumashiro believes that true learning happens when people are uncomfortable. When people are comfortable learners, they gain knowledge but there view of the world remains the same. When people are uncomfortable learners they gain knowledge and their perspective of the world shifts. Here is an illustration that demonstrates this belief:

What happened at MCTC this past week makes me believe that MCTC is unsupportive of letting students learn in uncomfortable ways. Through uncomfortable learning comes profoundly more important understanding of each other's worlds. I think that especially in college it is important to challenge each other's view and perspectives and I expect my school to provide an environment that promotes difficult conversation. By reprimanding Professors and taking legal action reinforces that MCTC is not supportive of learning uncomfortably.

What can happen when people learn in discomforting ways? If you look at the picture above in figure 1 the student is smiling, after learning in an institution that learns in comforting ways the student leaves smiling with more knowledge. In figure 2 the student enters an institution that encourages challenging students to learn in uncomfortable ways, the student leaves with more knowledge but more importantly their previous knowledge have been reshaped. I encourage MCTC to challenge my beliefs and perspective.

Classroom Connections Essay

My Outline:

My Philosophy:

                I have to think that the banking model of education is inefficient. We could become more efficient by inheriting Freire’s philosophies and implementing a praxis model in education.

 Paulo Friere states that: The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.

How does the current structure support and negate critical consciousness?

·         Does it differ between schools?

o   Yes.

§  Anyon

My structure

                Student vs. Teacher-centered environment.

The kids need to be involved in their education. Relevant pedagogy.

·         Are we different?

o   I think cultural communication is necessary

§  How is cultural communication used in the current model?

§  How is it avoided?

·         Yes we are different.

·         Delpit

My praxis

How do I make my philosophy congruent with my praxis?

·               How can I translate theory into practice?

o   What do I see? Compared to what I’m learning

• Movie project, thats praxis? Is it respected/ aknowelged?

 

 

·            How can I integrate my theory with actuality?

o   Children are in class for 55 minutes? Is that right I don’t think so.

Friere and Delpit

Describe the major tensions between Freire and Delpit.  How are their approaches different?  Use text to support your thoughts.  How does Delpit shift your understanding of Freire?

While Delpit and Friere both discuss how the oppressed can become free of oppresion their methodologies for doing so differ greatly. Delpit believes for the oppressed to escape they must learn the language of their oppressor or "the silenced dialogue". Where as Friere believes that there needs to be structural change, the oppressed must fight to emancipate themselves and become revolutionaries. This difference is best seen in the conciousness of the oppressed and the oppressor in Delpit and Friere two visions of oppression. Friere believes the role of the oppressor is very clear and intentional while Delpit describes a more ambivalent  unaware description. For Friere the dichotomy of the oppressed and oppressor is very evident. To have an oppressor there must be the oppressed, the process is dehumanizing for both however, the oppressor benefits through material wealth and political power. Friere believes the oppressor exploits the oppressed to strenghten and develop there power. For friere, the first step is for the oppressed to become aware or concious of their oppression. For Friere, the oppressed are least concious of their situation while the oppressor is well aware.. Oppositely Delpit describes the oppressor as unaware... " Those with power are typically least aware of- or least willing to aknowledge- of it existence. Those with less power are typically most aware of it. Delpit's picture of the oppressor is ambivalent rather than aggresive.

Opportunity Cost

"Opportunity cost" is always present when implementing different pedagogical models in curriculum or education. One thing we began talking about in class was that a lot of times the educator holds the majority power choosing what pedagogical models are used in a classroom or learning environment. It is for this reason that I believe as a future educator in my teacher education that educators should experience as many pedagogical models as possible even if they philosophically differ with the approach. By living in the model you are able to figure out where the deficits occur, and where and how the "opportunity costs" change between a banking model opposed to a praxis model or a student-centered environment compared to a teacher-centered environment.

Grandpa T.R.

My artifact has a lot of meaning to me personally, I also think there is a lot of context, code and mythicism and symbolism involved in the picture which hangs in my apartment. My artifact is a framed picture of my Grandpa T.R. He was 17 at the time when this picture was taken by the Saint Paul paper in 1932. He was a record-setting hurdler and a top propect in Saint Paul football and was headed to the University of Notre Dame. This picture was taken just before my grandfather suffered a minor cut on his leg, the cut became infected so badly that  he was hospitalized almost lost his leg.

This was just before the end of his football career(and legacy) and his chance to go to the University Notre Dame and then who knows?

 

I think the story above would be "the coded situation" this photograph and my grandfathers stories of the glory days and his skills have been mythicized overtime to take on a new identity and shape a different history. To decode and split apart the elements of this photograph I think I need to look at the past, present and future in regards to the context and themes of the world at those times.............

Chapter three

Friere paints a beautiful picture of what it means to be a part of true dialogue. There are certain 'musts' for dialogue to occur, first of all, no one can dialogue alone. There must be humility in dialogue, there must be an intense faith in humankind, faith in people and dialogue cannot exist without hope.

Friere points out in chapter three that dialogue is similar to education in the form of praxis. To have real dialogue, like education the praxis of dialogue must involve respect and reflection and re-presentation of information through conversation. Like education dialogue is work towards the truth shared by open-minded parties. It can not be a deposit of information from one person to be consumed by another.

Like is typical with Friere we see a polar opposite of dialogue which is unauthentic word. Unauthentic word involves the speaker speaking to serve a purpose, the object of unauthentic dialogue typically seems to be meaningless. The purpose is to maintain staus-quo or to achieve dominance or hold power over an object, person or world.

I think it is all too often that we experience unauthentic word rather than dialogue in our society. This is exemplified for me by the current state of our governments politics and the manipulative nature of bipartisanism. Unfortunately for our society the sound bites created by politicians that spin through the media monster come off for many people in our society as true. This constant redundantness of our governments politics has created a limit-situation for me in my own life. Maybe it is through true dialogue that we can begin to work on the unauthentic word which is spoken so often in todays society.