Why Relavent Pedagogy?

According to our readings, our educational structure in the current climate is set up to create winners and losers. The winners become economically successful with sometimes fulfilling jobs and live in economically prosperous neighborhoods with well-funded schools. The losers end up with typically labor intensive jobs in economically deprived neighborhoods with under-funded schools. Our public school structures promote these social and economic inequities through generalized standards across the board independent of the opportunity students have to be successful in this system. It's set up to create winners and losers and Duncan points out that the system does exactly what it is designed to do.

Relevant pedagogy escapes the suffocating nature of an educational system based on standards and tests. It redesigns curriculum to shift the focus towards issues relevant to students lives and communities. Duncan states that factoring communities and students lives into education can prevent the student from having to choose between their community and an education. When there is that pull between choosing home or education I believe that diminishes the experience of learning. Education is good and I believe education can be freeing for everyone because it helps you learn how to expand on your beliefs, thoughts and interests. When there is a separation between what is relevant to you and an expectation of what should be important(curriculum) there is a loss of self which is unfortunate because it hurts the reality of the experience. Shifting the focus from standardized curriculum and making it relevant creates opportunities for learning that are otherwise lost. I believe creating opportunities to involve students in praxis is a good way to achieve real education.

Public Work in Urban Schools First Day of Class

Hello classmates, my summer was good but it felt very short. I decided to take summer semester for the second year in a row, this year I decided two classes was plenty for the crammed eight week session, I took my last math classs I plan to ever take and psychology. It went pretty smoothly and kept me busy for the first half of summer since my year of service working for Minnesota Reading Corps ended early in July.

Some highlights from the second half; I went camping once at Sibley State Park with my Anna and my dog Wally for a long weekend. I ran the fastest 5k I've ever run, I moved to Saint Paul to the Mac-Groveland area, I saw one of my best friends get married at the Guthrie and best of all I got a new job working in education!

I'm at Ramsey Middle School as a Special Education Assistant working with autistic children. My first day is next Friday. I'm nervous and a little anxious about getting started but I think that is probably a sign that I'm doing something I care about. I also think it will be a useful experience in helping me determine what age group I want to focus on as a further my teacher education.

Well thats a little bit about me and my summer, I look forward to seeing those of you I know all ready and meeting everyone else.

April 26th

April 26th was one f the best days our group has had in PA. Since it was such a beautiful day I decided the group should get outside and play some basketball. We had talked about ways to avoid pressures of smoking, one of them was to stay active. Before going outside we had a brief meeting to look at what smoking does to your lung capacity. Then we went outside and just played.

For the second half of our day we had the opportunity to join Katie's and Frankie's  groups for an interview with a police officer. The conversation was more focused towards drugs, but the students were able to ask some questions about our project. It was a nice opportunity and I appreciate the officer but unfortunately I thought he had too much of an authoritarian voice for students who were simply asking questions. We talked about how the interview went afterwards and I could tell that Jyree felt uncomfortable with the encounter. Overall it was a fun exciting day where the MCTC Young Achievers had a a lot of success.

Action Research

I am using a couple of different techniques to collect data for action research. I use my own observations of group dynamics while we work on our project. This in combination with video of PA and blog reflections gives me a variety of ways to evaluate my research question.. Last week I gave my group a survey on the importance of roles during our PA project. The results are posted on my blog under Action research questions for the MCTC young achievers group.

I have adjusted my initial action research question slightly to better understand the importance of the chosen roles in our group.

My original question was: Will the weekly delegation of roles help our group work as a cohesive unit or does it limit the chance for a synergetic group effort?
My revised question is: How have our roles affected our public achievement project, and have these roles helped our group function as a cohesive unit?

We have continued to use the same chosen roles in our group, we have the documentarian, task master data keeper and reader. I have experimented with how roles are chosen in our group. Initially we would rotate. This worked okay but there were certain personalities in the group that gravitated towards certain roles. We then adjusted the process from delegation to discussion. This seemed like an improvement from the previous model. The role of the documentarian was most often picked by Jyree. Patrick and Michael would switch off choosing the role of data-keeper and task-master. This again worked pretty well however I noticed that now that the roles were developed we could move away from the distinction of titles. Roles seem to have strong importance in our PA process but now that they have been established and we understand which each can offer they contribute differently. I think my initial question was too focused on the distinction of each individual role and not on what they offer to group work. We have molded our roles and taken the necessary pieces of them for our group to help our group function better as a cohesive.

Action research questions answered by our group

Action Research Questions for MCTC Young Achievers

1.      Is the role of the “documentarian” an important role for our group? 1 being a bad role and 5 being an excellent role.

    

           1          2          3          4          5

 

2.      Is the role of “the reader” an important role in our group?

            1          2          3          4          5

3.      Is the role of “task master” an important role for our group?

      1          2          3          4          5

4.      Is the role of “data keeper” an important role for our group?

            1          2          3          4          5

5.      On a scale of 1-5, 1 being unfair, 5 being very fair, how fair do you think our group roles were?

      1          2          3          4          5

 

6.      On a scale of 1-5, 1 being not-helpful, 5 being very helpful, did roles help us get work done in our group?

            1          2          3          4          5

7.      Did you have a favorite role in our group, 1 being “NO”3 being “didn’t care”  5 being “Yes”

            1                      3                      5

8.      Would you like to use roles in a future project? 1 never again 5 yes please!

            1          2          3          4          5       

9.      Do you we should continue using roles in our group? 1no 3 don’t care 5 yes

            1          2          3          4          5

10.  Was there a best role in our group?
Task Master received 3 votes and Documentarian received 1 vote

We have an athlete! Almost...

So there is good news on the interview front, we found a connection through Dennis Donovan to the U of M football program. I spoke with him last Friday during our PA session and connected with him via email this week. Donovan is forwarding our email and interview questions to a couple of athletes and hopefully we will hear a response soon. It would be great to connect through Skype or to get a video response to the questions.

We shot some solid video of each other asking interview questions and practicing "takes" last week, this will be fun to look at this week and while we begin editing and adding a message to the video. Editing typically takes a lot of time and that is something we don't have that much of in PA. I still worry a little to what we will actually have for a final video project. We have a lot of pieces to a project but we still need to connect them in some way. However, I think the PA process and skills they are learning as a group have a lot of value.

Friday Friday Friday

One difference that I have noticed between school work and working in a school is the amount of feedback you receive for doing your assignment. What I mean is ... if I put in hours of work creating a power point and give a presentation, classmates are typically aware of the amount of work that I have put in. Even if they aren't that interested they will usually pretend to be and respect the process... I don't think I should assume that younger students will act in the same way and that something I'm trying to get used to.

 This week went well. Our group has decided that they would like to contact an athlete and interview them about smoking. We created a list of questions that we edited this week. I was impressed by their ability to weed out the dead-end questions on our list. For instance Patrick pointed out that one of our questions would elicit a "yes or no" answer and we wanted to get better quality answers.

 We ended up composing an email as a group and I will send it out to the different organizations that we picked. I'm kind of skeptical about getting a response but I think it's worth a try. We've decided to contact the Timberwolves and the Vikings. I think of the two we are more likely to get a response from the T-Wolves. I think what we are asking for is reasonable... we have a list of seven questions that we would like answered. We would like to receive a video response from one of the athletes via email. I think I may attach a short video of the students composing the email.

 I'm hoping we hear something; it would generate some momentum towards completing our PA goals. Our end goal is to create a smoking awareness video and air it on the TV screens throughout the school we will also post it on YouTube.