Grammar of Schooling

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Three Key Questions

June 9, 2009 in Education | 3 comments

I’ve been a bit frantic all day, the kind of frantic that comes from having lots of semi-formed ideas swarming around in my head like wasps.  I just came from a meeting with our science methods faculty member, who helped me crystallize some of those ideas.  My core concept is still the grammar of schooling, but I wanted to develop that concept in a way that could serve as the basis for an entire course.  What I came up with were three key questions for my social foundations courses to focus on:

1.  What are schools for?

This question lets me talk about the various purposes of schooling, such as preparation for work, citizenship, moral education, etc.  If I want, I can introduce some concepts from sociology here.  I have used a nice text that introduces Functionalism and Marxism for teachers.  We can also look at some history of education.  I have my 110 students read excerpts from Horace Mann that aptly illustrate our initial high expectations of public schooling for dealing with larger social issues like poverty.

This would also be the section to talk about school choice and other structural features of schooling, like age grading.

2.  What is a teacher (what does a teacher do)?

In this section of the course, we can discuss the various metaphors for teaching including teaching as a profession, teaching as a vocation, teaching as a calling, etc.  We’ll also discuss the peculiar nature of teacher authority and the tension between democratic authority and professional authority and why all of this matters to the daily lives of teachers.  In classes that aren’t for practicing teachers, this would also be the section where we talk about working conditions, the division of educational decision making, etc, but I figure practicing teachers know all this stuff already.

3.  What does it mean to know something?

This is the epistemological question, of course.  It’s also the most “purely” philosophical and, therefore, the one that’s likely to engender the most resistance.  Never fear, because standardized testing is the issue that can get everyone talking about this topic.  We will also discuss construcitivism and other epistemological concepts like understanding.  This is also the logical place to talk about content area standards (and who decides them).

Given that my first course that uses these three questions will be an M.Ed. course for math teachers, I’ll also include something like “what does it mean to be mathmatically literate?” to give the course more of a focus that they can grab on to.

Readings will consist of a bunch of articles that I am still compiling and Tyack and Cuban’s Tinkering Toward Utopia.

Thoughts?

The Grammar of Schooling as an Organizing Principle

May 22, 2009 in Education | No comments

(for a social foundations course)

Today, I took the 110 maymester students to a local elementary school. We were given a nice tour and the principal spoke with the class for about 20 minutes. She touched on the makeup of the school (60% free and reduced lunch, rapidly increasing ELL population), some of the schools major strengths (it is a small, neighborhood school) and challenges (funding, vagaries of NCLB). Although we haven’t covered all of those issues in class yet, it was great to see my students hear about these things in the field rather than just from a professor.

The field trip (we walked from Winthrop) also reinforced my decision to organize my foundations courses around the concept of the grammar of schooling. This idea, made popular by Tyack and Cuban in Tinkering Toward Utopia holds that we all have a mental picture and organizing concepts of what a “real school” is. This is the grammar of schooling and its been socialized into us by 13 years of school experiences as students. T&C contend that school reform is most successful when it poses the least challenge to the grammar; thus, their use of the word “tinkering” as a model for reform.

I think we can conceive of a social foundations that uses this concept as it’s guiding idea as having two main objectives:

  1. Acquaint students with the various elements of the grammar of schooling, especially those elements that aren’t so obvious and that exist outside of the classroom (policy, economics, governance). History matters a lot here, as it shows how we arrived at our current grammar, often for non-educational reasons.
  2. Give students the concepts and tools to challenge that grammar, to question their own assumptions about what it means to be educated and what school has to be like. Philosophy is instructive here, as it not only gives critical tools to students, but it unpacks ideological assumptions about the purpose of education. Comparative education is also very helpful, as it provides a way for students to contrast approaches; it shows that our grammar isn’t the grammar. I hope arrange a visit to the lab school here on campus, so that my students can see that things can be done differently.

This approach fits nicely with the “Teacher Retention” justification of social foundations put forth by Butin, as well as containing a healthy dose of the “Liberal Arts” answer.

I’m going to continue to refine the course to make this the central concept.

Beginning Maymester

May 18, 2009 in Education | 3 comments

Today was my first class of the 110 course in Maymester.  I’ve never taught 110 in the summer before, nor have  I ever taught Maymester.  It will be challenging to keep everything focused for 2.75 hours per day, 5 days per week, for three solid weeks.  I’m trying to create some fun activities for the students that will break up individual days and weeks.  Today, for instance, I did the “biographical scavenger hunt” activity I usually do on the first day of class; that’s a nice way to break up the “here’s what’s in the syllabus” talk, as well as get the students talking with each other.  I also introduced the first and most important concept of the course — The Grammar of Schooling. We had a 15-20 minute discussion of the concept, then I sent them out of the class for 15 minutes armed with digital cameras.  Their task was to take a few photos that illustrated the concept.  The activity worked well, other than the simple logistics of displaying photos from 12 cameras on the classroom PC.  That started to drag, so everyone didn’t get to show and tell about their photos;  I need to try and resolve that before I try the activity again.  Any ideas?

The other thing Maymester affords me is the ability to work closely with a school.  We’re partnering with a local elementary school to help them with field day and are spending all class Friday at the school, getting a tour and talking with the principal.  I hope that will ground my student’s experiences a little more and give them some additional exposure to schools in a role other than student or teacher.

Here’s hoping it all works.