I think that I now have a context in which I can see the need for Technology in the classroom. [Yes, my own learning style has a very high need to form a big picture within which I can then organize knowledge and goals.] Hopefully by the end of this post I will be able to articulate this context, and call out why I, as an educator, need to be alert to getting ‘stuck in time’
It’s Monday afternoon, and I am trying to write with 3 sick people in the house. Sunday’s experience with Technology revolved around being thankful for the ‘invention’ of acetaminophen (or paracetamol, as I know it from my childhood) . There are flu-like symptoms floating around, and modern pharmaceuticals have saved the day, again.
My first reaction when I reached for the Tylenol was “Dang! We are just weeks away from a H1N1 vaccine being available.” Which then made we wonder if there were any families who might opt out of the vaccine*. That led down a whole diversion on the ‘controversy’ regarding the potential link between autism-spectrum disorders and infant vaccinations.
[Update: 10/13/09 - On Tuesday, an NY Times Op-Ed Nothing to Fear but the Flu Itself cited this Harvard School of Public Health finding that 41% of adults said they would not get the H1N1 Vaccine.]
In grad school I was in a Dept. of Bioengineering. It really bugged me at the time that my classmates, by and large, were not inclined to discuss the societal impacts/implications of the type of careers we were going to enter into. (This is a distinct failure of higher education in science and engineering, if you ask me.)
I believe that we, as citizens, will be confronted with more and more debates that involve the intersection of science/technology and society. This is not going to be just with regard to Bioengineering, but that is the area I am sensitive to. Here, for example, are some of the types of public debates I am thinking of.
- GMO foods
- Radiation of perishable foods
- Terri Schiavo
- Stem-cell research
- Universal health care
- Autism and vaccination
This meandering stream of consciousness then ran into the growing seedling planted by John Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed.
Dewey’s piece is really fascinating, and will take me a long, long time to digest and internalize. But right now the thing that has me most in awe is how Dewey has managed to distill the essence of education to its truly time-less themes. If one did not know when it was written, one would be hard-pressed to guess.
Dewey’s opening sentence in answer to the question What is Education? is
I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.
In the second section What is School? he opens with
I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
and a few lines later
I believe that the school must represent present life” [Emphasis mine]
Technology, therefore, belongs in the classroom as it exists in present life.
Okay, so I now have my context, and I should leave well enough alone. But of course it’s Sunday, and my family won’t leave me alone with the NY Times, so what else can I do but let me mind wander while I lose at table football to a 9 year-old.
First, here’s more Dewey, just to give you a taste of how 21st century he is.
I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect; an aspect of art and culture and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.
It is not hard to imagine where Dewey would have stood on Web 2.0
Now I am an émigré (isn’t it so snooty to use that instead of emigrant?); you’ll see why I chose that word over immigrant in a moment.
The first thing that stands out to me as an emigrant is that I have a new appreciation of my past. It seems to me that if you can give yourself some distance from your situation, then you begin to appreciate many aspects of it that you can’t see in the present. (It’s for this reason that I am a strong proponent of the concept of a sabbatical.)
Another thing that really stands out to me about emigrants is that their past/culture/values that they work so hard to preserve in their new world ends up becoming a static snapshot of that which they left behind. They get stuck in time. A person who returns to the parent culture 30 or more years later can barely recognize it because it so different than from what they saw being preserved at ‘home.’
What is the point of all this?
Well, in a sense, when we begin to teach we leave the real world and begin to live in an imitation of the real world - one that is necessarily constrained and simplified to match the developmental age of the children we are working with. The longer we live in this imitation world, the greater the risk that we get stuck in time. This is something that we as educators need to be alert to.
I think the model of medical education is really apt, because future doctors are trained by current, practicing doctors. Not ex-doctors. This is true for many professions, but not so much in fields of ‘scholarship.’
So if we define the general profession that we are training children for as ‘participants in the social consciousness of humanity’ then, by definition, we, as their teachers, need to be current practicing professionals of the same. Teaching does not give you a free pass from civic involvement, rather it requires it.
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