Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Before I get started on this chapter, I want to introduce you to this website: http://teachersofconscience.wordpress.com/

Here is a part of their position paper:

As teachers, we hold critical thinking and critical literacies in highest regard. As professionals, we resolve to not be passive consumers of education marketing or unthinking implementers of unproven policy reforms. We believe critical thinking, artistry, and democracy to be among the cornerstones of public education. We want creative, “thinking” students who are equipped to be the problem solvers of today and tomorrow; equipped to tackle our most vexing public problems: racial and economic disparity, discrimination, homelessness, hunger, violence, environmental degradation, public health, and all other problems foreseen and unforeseen.

Look, our kids are living in a world where they are being exposed to a variety of problems like those mentioned in the above position paper and are being influenced by an ever expanding three-ring media circus.  Increased speed Internet, video games, cable/satellite television with multiple channels.  Oh, let’s add more pressure from schools to score high on standardized tests.  The traditional mode of instruction is from a single, separate discipline where teachers are responsible for transmitting official, district/state approved information.  Now, for students, teachers, administrators, and parents who are comfortable with the traditional process of isolated, single subject instruction, interdisciplinary team teaching is most certainly not an immediate option.  Nor should it be.  Why?

First of all, this model is outside the box and when you step away from your comfort zone there is risk involved.  Many educators are unwilling to take the risk because of a variety of factors.  They have no one with whom they can connect, it is different, assessment can be too time consuming, and it is hard.  It also verges on democracy.  How much of a say do you have in helping to develop curriculum, structure the school day, or participate in resolving building issues?  The system rewards those who are obedient and unquestioning and penalizes those who challenge the status quo.  The model that is being offered here is a threat to many teachers and administrators, to their power and to the institutional structure. 

In his book, On Miseducation, Noam Chomsky provides this interesting piece of advice: “It is a moral imperative to find out and tell the truth as best one can, about things that matter, to the right audience.  It is a waste of time to speak truth to power for the most part they already know these truths.”  I am not so sure that the superintendents and Boards of Educations of most districts know what a fair and just education is and, instead, prefer to preside over schools where children are subjected to gross inequities and a woeful lack of democratic participation.  This makes their district fertile ground for corporate invasion.

I am not offering a cure but rather suggesting that an integrative curriculum combined with a problem solving focus that serves the cognitive and social needs of our students as well as the needs of a potential employer.  Ultimate solutions require people who are skilled in using many kinds of knowledge in a problem-solving context.  It seems that an interdisciplinary problem-solving model of instruction better prepares students to not only look at knowledge and information from multiple perspectives but also fosters within our students an appreciation and understanding of how we associate with one another and to know ourselves.  The challenge in teaching is to provide the conditions that will foster the growth of those personal characteristics that are socially important and, at the same time, personally satisfying to the student.  The aim of education is not to train an army that marches to the same drummer, at the same pace, toward the same destination.  Such an aim may be appropriate for totalitarian societies, but it is incompatible with democratic ideals (Eisener, Kappan June 1995).

Taking this assumption as true, what we have been witnessing for the past several decades, and arguably for over the past hundred years, is a system where teachers are told what to teach and when to teach curriculum. In the words of a former social studies consultant for my district, “Decisions about what to teach and when to teach it no longer rests solely at the discretion of the teacher.”  This is an excellent example of how districts are being pressured to make sure teachers fall in line and teach what is necessary to pass local and state standardized tests.  Districts are externally controlled by state departments of education and local boards to the degree that the individual teacher becomes more of an obedient test technician.  This is totally inconsistent with the goals of an integrated problem-based curriculum where we want students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers yet our teachers are being manipulated by decision makers outside of school.  The two are incongruent.

Deborah Meier (here is her blog: http://deborahmeier.com/) points out that the present system of schooling and accountability is chock-full of mistakes, after all, not to mention disasters that are perpetuated year after year.  Of course we’re accustomed to them, so we barely notice. (Meier, Kappan 98, p.361)  Perhaps it is time to take notice because it is unfortunate that the ones doing the imposing from above know very little about teaching, learning, or assessing our children.  Accountability ought to be displayed by these power brokers in their pursuit of instructional and assessment alternatives that are documented as being more effective than the factory model over which they currently preside. Rather than being designed to prepare students for democratic life, most schools are more like benign dictatorships in which all decisions are made for them, albeit in what schools may perceive to be in “their best interests.”  It appears that schools seem to be more interested in maintaining control than they are of true academic reform.

The interdisciplinary problem-based model is a powerful alternative. Integrating teaching and problem solving allows students to work in meaningful situations as they examine a problem, gather data, research relevant information and resources, contact experts in the filed for current findings, work collaboratively to divide and share tasks, and test possible solutions. Students access knowledge and information from multiple disciplines as needed.  In this design, the curriculum is centered on issues/problems that have significant social importance.  Students work together in teams to integrate multi-dimensional knowledge.  From this integration, new knowledge is developed by students thus creating an environment of new experiences and new meanings.  Students present their learning and are assessed by criteria they have previously developed with the assistance of their instructors.  Essentially what has happened is a democratic practice of problem-solving.

Deborah Meier soundly endorses involving parents and families in the school’s democratic process as “simply shrewd common sense.”  The traditional system of patronizing our parents through condescending programs that give illusion of empowerment needs to be radically changed.  We need to start looking at our system from the perspective of the disempowered outsiders and to seriously look at what is fundamentally wrong.  The current system is the enemy of true diversity and has promulgated a deficit model of a culture of powerlessness.  As Meier’s Central Park East school project has demonstrated, traditionally schooling will be perpetuated unless there is a democratic involvement of parents, teachers, and students.

Certain changes in traditional school structures can spur democratic education.  These structured realignments may include:  democratic governance that includes teachers, parents, administrators, students, community members, and non-certified staff in setting school policy, school councils that includes teachers and students, smaller schools instead of the two thousand student factories may guard against dysfunctional bureaucratic structures; and a concerted effort to make obsolete, the fragmented conveyor belt school day, especially in secondary school, to more effective and educationally productive use of time in a learning community.  In learning communities, teachers, students, support staff, parents, administrators, and others who are involved in the school from time to time are viewed as members of a single community, whose common purpose, for everyone, is learning. As a side note, do not confuse this with a Professional Learning Community (PLC) which is nothing more than expensive scam (over $2 million spent in our district) designed Richard DuFour in order to indoctrinate teachers in conforming to district mandates under the guise of cooperation.

From the success of schools like Meier’s, the evidence suggests that parental and student involvement in education is associated with high levels of morale and achievement.  When schools are more involved with the community and when teachers, parents, and administrators see and talk more often with one another, they are more likely to know about one another’s needs and are better able to work together to promote the learning and welfare of students.  We can either prepare our young people for unrewarding jobs in an unequal and undemocratic society, or we can prepare them to understand their world and change it.  The first is education to meet the needs of the corporate global economy.  The second is education for democracy.