When I think about what it means to learn, I can’t help but consider the environment. A few years ago I worked, for college credit, as a teacher assistant in a large kindergartner class. The school was located in a diverse community of mostly working class families. In the class, I helped with grading, setting up centers, leading story time and generally helping out where needed. I enjoyed working with all the kindergartners, but I particularly remember this one child named Francisco. He was a vivacious, bright and boisterous child who loved doing art and telling little stories. Francisco’s home life was a bit stressful and, at times, he could be somewhat disruptive in class. I never thought his behavior was problematic because hey, he’s a five year old boy! Anyway, I guess my unprofessional opinion didn’t hold much sway because this child was put on what seemed to be some powerful drugs that rendered him calmer and better behaved, but essential disinterested. As far as I could tell, he had a complete personality change. And I discovered that Francisco wasn’t the only child in the class on some type of behavior management drug. Call me naïve, but it seemed an extreme measure to drug this child. I have since learned that this practice, prescribing drugs for ADHD and other behavior problems are quite common in public schools. My point is that the environment is an important factor in creating a nurturing space for learning and an overcrowded kindergartner class where control trumps all is a missed opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, the teacher I worked with was dedicated and cared about her students, but learning can’t take place in a vacuum even if you use “backward design” to present some fabulous curriculum. To take this environmental concern a step further, public school systems and policy makers seem obsessed with the measurement fetish of standardize testing while states, according to Henry Giroux, an educator and commentator, “reduce public spheres designed to protect children to containment centers and warehouses that modeled themselves after prisons” (Giroux,2011,Para 1). If this sounds harsh, read about the fully privatized New Orleans school system, or Arne Duncan's previous place of employment, Chicago Public Schools.
I have to confess that I’m a complete novice when it comes to being familiar with particular learning strategies and, for example, theories like Gardener’s Multiple Intelligences (something taking this course should improve). Before this class, I vaguely knew about the different ways people learned, i.e. – spatial, logical-mathematical etc, but I’ve since read a few articles on MI and can posit that the egalitarian tenor of MI would be in direct conflict with the Neoliberal environment I describe in the above discussion. Guess I’ll stop now.
Giroux, H. (2011, February 8). Torturing democracy. Truthout. Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/torturing-democracy67570
This concept of teachers keeping control of the learning environment also crept up in Kathleen's blog post, though the use of drugs to do this certainly changes things!
ReplyDeleteUm, it might not be the same types of drugs you mention in your post, but my husband experiences something similar to this at the college level as well. :P Really, he sometimes has students who are so apathetic they seem impossible to teach, mostly because they never really respond. He asks himself all the time if he's actually getting through to these students. (Side Comment: He feels this way and he’s teaching face-to-face. I imagine this feeling is compounded in the virtual environment where you don’t have body language and facial cues to go off of.)
Certainly the external environment affects our ability to learn. Can we have an “internal environment” too? It almost sounds like an oxymoron. But certainly our inner state of being affects learning, just as our outer environment does. While ADHD drugs may make it easier on the teachers, as you pointed out, they can have negative consequences for the students taking them. Is this fair? To whom?
Goodness, that story about little Francisco being put on drugs for ADHD certainly makes this heart sink. I'd be curious to hear more about the circumstances--who made the decision to put him on meds? What evidence was used? That's probably asking too much, but I am curious.
ReplyDeleteThinking about your post, Kimberly's and my own keeps a conversation about control in education humming in my brain. Our industrialized model (school as factory) emphasizes learning over understanding and demands certain behaviors. Why? There are so many different factors, but one part of it has to do with numbers--I think it's really challenging for teachers to "see" students and teach accordingly when there are 30+ students in each class. How to do that with so many styles, needs, bodies?? I do think there's hope, and assignments like the one we are engaging in right now offer certain insights. Here we are writing to each other, not sitting in a lecture, and our teacher will not have to go through and individually grade/ respond to each of our posts. The students are working hard, the teacher is coaching. But, as Mary Ann has noted, the blogging assignment is only as rich as the individual contributors. (And I was being a bad one, but that's because of technical difficulties!!)
Finally, I can't help but think of the circle/ cycle--from young, chatty Francisco who loves his art projects and talks lots in class to the UC Berkeley undergrads who've (perhaps?) become schooled in passivity. Big sigh.
I think Kathleen's comment about being "schooled in passivity" is completely apropos. I doubt most people would say that's what they really wanted--to turn students into passive receptacles--yet that's what their actions suggest: that order is more important than learning and creativity. Certainly by prescribing drugs at the age of five, people are saying that maintaining order in society and the classroom is more important than the overall health of the child. (This is not to say that ADHD doesn't exist or that medication is never appropriate or helpful. But such wide-scale and seemingly reflexive prescriptions are problematic.) The physical state of the child is certainly an important factor affecting learning, as Kimberly points out.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit confused as to what is entailed by the phrase "Neoliberal." Could you please clarify?
Neoliberalism is a set of economic policies that espouses privatization, deregulation and the primacy of the market. In general, Neoliberalism subordinates the public sphere to the private. In so far as its application to my post, in some communities (mostly poor and minority), public education is being subjected to market forces euphemistically referred to as ‘reforms’. And in my opinion, some of these reforms are counterintuitive to the mission of public education. Like Marxism, Neoliberalism is a tool for analysis.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading about your experience with Francisco, I was reminded of some research I did last year for a professor. We were working on a paper about the success of booktalking and how it often encourages boys to read. I discovered that the problem of engaging boys in class is pretty common. I wonder what part gender might play in a teacher's frustration with someone like Francisco.
ReplyDeleteBoys tend to be more physical and rambunctious, and sometimes this mystifies teachers, who (more often then not) are female. I have definitely seen this in my own children. My son had a teacher who told me that he just hates reading, and there was nothing she could do about it. This kid was coming home and consuming Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and any manual about Wii games he could get his hands on. But that did not fit her idea of what was acceptable reading. Why not? Who says what "acceptable reading" is?
Here's a link to a School Library Journal article on this subject: http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA439816.html