One
of my major frustrations with modern teaching practices and the continuing trend
our schools are following towards “teacher-proofed” curriculum, is the emphasis placed on the
incompleteness of students and their need to develop skills for the future. I do not disagree with
the notion that students are in our classrooms to grow as readers and writers in
hopes of engaging them with important literacy practices that they may use throughout
the rest of their lives, however I do push back against the present disconnect
between schooling and our students’ immediate
lives. We–as an education system–tend to consistently over-drill our students
about the importance of school as a mechanism to prepare and/or benefit the
students in their later adult lives, yet too often we fail to anchor the
relevance of their learning within the constructs of their daily lives, as we
focus our attention on their futures instead of their presents. With this
attitude–I fear–we position this concept of an adult life as a MORE IMPORTANT state of existence, which in turn de-values
the adolescent lives our students are currently living. In doing so, we confiscate
what I believe to be a necessary sense of
urgency from the classroom experience and posture ourselves as the more
important person in the room because of our “adult” status. When we remove
their sense of present agency and replace it with the more passive role of the “developing
adult,” we risk denying our students the ability to see the importance of their
current lives and the choices that they make daily. In so doing, we eliminate any
sense of present ownership from our students, because even if they want to feel ownership over
their own education, the rewards and benefits of their hard work are positioned
as something received by their future self,
not their present self. As Ladson-Billings states so gracefully,
“the classroom has got to be the kind of place that helps them deal with their
lives now so they can have some
options, some choices, later.” Allowing the classroom to become an immediately
relevant space is a great challenge, and unfortunately a large portion of our
national classrooms fail to meet this challenge.
The now seems to be super important to emphasize. Young people (a lot of people at any age) only think about the now anyway. At least that's the impression I get from psychologists and the like about human development.
ReplyDeleteWhen I disagreed with you in class, I don't think that I was disagreeing with anything that this blog says. Just that, sometimes, what students are concerned with is perhaps of less concern than the sentence that is being interrupted at that moment. Not even all the time. And yes, what is going on in their lives should relate to what is going on now. We're not preparing them for the future as much as we are, hopefully, facilitating their navigation of this crazy world as is, and opening up some more options for them, as Ladson-Billings says, in the future.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I'm tripping over the part about their adolescent experiences being more or less or equally important as an adult's experiences. I don't even know why this is tripping me up, because I'm a huge advocate for memoir, and I will tell every middle schooler that their story about eating grapefruit in the morning but they were out of sugar so it was sour or dreaming about meeting the Biebs and falling in dream-love is worthy of recognition and writing about if that's something that they value.
However, what I think is more important than putting those experiences on par with my experiences, or anyone else's (because geeze, some kids have some seriously heavy stuff to share) rather than even accepting the premise that some experiences are "more important" or "less important" is legitimizing all experiences that an individual values and teaching them how to express and value those moments of their lives for themselves through something like memoir or discussion or whatever.
From the West Wing: Refuse to accept the premise of that statement, and you won't even have to build the argument.