After you read the IMPORTANT, and yes a bit long article "Gangstas, Wankstas, and Ridas" please respond to the following prompt, or contribute a free response or discussion prompt of your own.
1. "They said that they teach because they believe their students, specifically low-income children of color, are the group most likely to change the world. They explained this belief by saying that the children most disenfranchised from society are the ones with the least to lose, and thus are the most likely to be willing to take risks necessary to change a society. This belief that they are teaching young people destined to change the world is vital to the level of seriousness with which they approach their jobs."
Do you believe this to be an accurate concept with powerful implications? Why or why not? What do you think the opposite of this approach would look like in a classroom, and what would the relationship between teachers and students look like?
Please feel free to respond to any other part of the article as you see fit. Please provide a prompt or question to the group!
1. "They said that they teach because they believe their students, specifically low-income children of color, are the group most likely to change the world. They explained this belief by saying that the children most disenfranchised from society are the ones with the least to lose, and thus are the most likely to be willing to take risks necessary to change a society. This belief that they are teaching young people destined to change the world is vital to the level of seriousness with which they approach their jobs."
Do you believe this to be an accurate concept with powerful implications? Why or why not? What do you think the opposite of this approach would look like in a classroom, and what would the relationship between teachers and students look like?
Please feel free to respond to any other part of the article as you see fit. Please provide a prompt or question to the group!
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ReplyDeleteI learned a LOT from this article, and it is an appropriate one to read following Ayers's piece which provides some important ideals for teachers to pursue but does not flesh out how to realize those ideals in the classroom (which a few of you commented on in earlier posts). For me, the most striking part of Duncan-Andrade's observations is that good teachers help their students to think like citizens, in essence building a 'democratic classroom.' Duncan-Andrade does not explicitly use this terminology, but it is exactly what he means when he talks about teachers persuading students to use school as "a way to return to their communities, rather than as a strategy for escaping them" and building "a culture of responsibility whereby students [are] prepared to understand that their education [is] training them to respond to injustice."
ReplyDeleteWhile I have had excellent teachers and an excellent education, I myself did not have much exposure to this kind of teaching in MS/HS, and that lack was detrimental once I entered college and found that I didn't have a purpose behind my education (unlike HS when getting good grades was a reward in itself, or getting into college). My classmates who saw their education as a means of tackling issues of poverty or environmental degradation in their home countries or hometowns were more successful students, precisely b/c being 'successful' was not what they were after (and therefore, failures weren't as likely to deter them from continuing to work hard).
It is even more detrimental when low-income students do not have access to the kind of teaching described by Duncan-Andrade as having a "critically conscious purpose," not least because for many of these students, simply getting good grades isn't (and shouldn't be) a motivating factor. Furthermore, I do think there is compelling intuitive logic behind the assertion that "the children most disenfranchised from society are the ones with the least to lose, and thus are the most likely to be willing to take risks necessary to change a society." The problems plaguing American's urban communities--poverty, crime, disease, unemployment, and so on--are some of the most difficult that our generation is tasked with fixing, yet the people who live in those communities must be at the center of the reform and the young people need to be empowered through education to see their abilities and responsibilities.
I hope to keep this in mind during SB as I plan my lessons, thinking about how to engage my students as citizens and reformers in their communities and listening to them talk about the issues that they see. This will be hard (esp. b/c many of us have not had extensive teaching experience), but I know we can do it as a team.
My question for the group is (revised from my initial post)--what part of the Duncan-Andrade article surprised you, or what personal experience have you had that confirmed or negated his conclusions?
-Li (that's my first name, btw) :)
I found this article to be particularly inspiring for future educators. However, I do not completely agree with all of the author's conclusions, at least the way I interpret them. The assertion that the "disenfranchised students are the most likely to change the world" makes complete sense. However, the claim that they will do so because they have the least to lose rubs me the wrong way. To me, the idea of having little to lose does not translate into a sense of desire, purpose, and advocacy.
ReplyDeleteRather, I think the greater force is the amount that these students have to gain compared to the rest of the population and the desire to do something that will strengthen their communities. Summerbridge provides us with the opportunity as teachers and mentors to show these students exactly how much they can benefit from a good education.
To me, this raises a "chicken or the egg" type of argument. Are the disenfranchised youth intrinsically motivated to change the world for the better, or is education the machine for shaping these students into the world's most powerful agents of change? I am on the fence with this one and would love to hear what everybody has to say. I suppose there is even a third possibility that combines the two: The disenfranchised youth have the most potential for change, but that potential can only be unlocked through an education that allows them to realize this potential.
"The children most disenfranchised from society are the ones with the least to lose, and thus are the most likely to be willing to take risks necessary to change a society."
ReplyDeleteThe quote above is a very strong concept for several reasons. Not only is it a driving force for genuine teaching, but it is also a very real concept for the future of the world. By seriously and genuinely teaching these disenfranchised youth, they can learn how to best serve and improve their communities. It is teachers with the mindset that they are preparing students to improve their communities and the world that would most likely succeed.
The opposite approach would be similar to what Andrade calls a "gangsta". A teacher who is not teaching for the sake of improving anyone's life but their own would be in opposition to what is possible a teacher can do for their students. In this sense, the relationship between teacher and student would most likely be in ill-communication, apprehension, or both.
On what Li said, I feel that the small sample of teachers he observed was the most surprising. I was taught often to be skeptical of a small sample of subjects while trying to extract information from a source. However, this is not so much an experiment as it is a case study. Even though specific case studies may not be able to be universally generalized, the real-life applications shown by the observed teachers is too valuable to be deemed statistically insignificant.