Hey Everyone! Here I am posting my revised version of Part III. There is certainly more revision to be done, but I am hoping by sharing where I am at now, I can get some feedback and advice on where to go from here. The main struggle now is figuring out how to conclude this 1.5 year long project… Thank you following my blog!
Part III:
Strengthening the Core
A waterfall begins from only one drop of water.
Education is a time for wonder and reflection, a time for creativity responsibility, problem-solving, and self-motivation. However, due to generational poverty, certain students come into the classroom at an immediate disadvantage in comparison to their peers. Educational inequality has become an important political and social issue in the United States, and there have been numerous attempts at reforms. However, the problem of inequality is difficult to eradicate because the causes are deeply rooted in history, society, and culture. Nevertheless, I believe there is hope of a brighter future for these children. However, for there to be change, society must make a commitment to an “ethos;” those interested in social change must change attitudes.
We each adopt different roles in everyday situations, and these roles change with the situation. We can think of these roles as hats that we wear at appropriate times – mother, father, teacher, employee, etc. These roles have implied behavior, and it is this social behavior that creates deeper meaning and understanding. For the purpose of trying to achieve good quality education for all children, it becomes crucial to think about what the role of the teacher is. A child spends roughly one-third of his/her day with their teacher, so it is clear that a teacher becomes a model for her students. Students are easily affected by their teacher’s warmth, competence, and moral commitment.
Now, the question to be asked is, how does a teacher give her students a rich, insightful, and enticing education? It is my belief that a proper public education begins with the realization that “language is undoubtedly at the heart of learning”; “language has now replaced IQ as an explanation for social and education disadvantage.”[1] Every child, with few exceptions, learns how to talk. However, the social and linguistic environments surrounding children as they begin to acquire language competence greatly differ cross-culturally. Therefore, educators need to recognize students come into the classroom with different needs, and therefore require different instructional learning. Educators cannot hold all students to the same standards. This is why there needs to be a commitment to school reform, which includes: changes in teaching methods and curriculum, the role of leadership, and increasing involvement of parents with the schooling of their children.
This movement towards making the classroom more culturally inclusive begins with educators taking an active role in redefining their educational philosophy. Once educators stop looking at their students as empty cups and as resources necessary for establishing a greater sense of community, learning can begin.
John Locke said, the human mind is a blank slate, and therefore educators furnish it with ideas to think on.[2] Humans are not born with full-fledged ideas in their heads, but rather slowly form them through the sensory input of the material world. However, I do not believe Locke accurately captured the whole learning picture. It is true that in thinking about language, educators fill the minds of their students with the skills necessary to understand the structures of a text, assess the logic of an argument, and develop and awareness of how language is consciously deployed to achieve meaning and input.[3] However, the teacher too is a learner in the classroom. Each child walks into the classroom on the first day of school carrying on his/her back his/her own language, culture, and load of personal experiences. To be a good educator requires shedding oneself of assumptions and prejudices in order to “reorient consciousness” and “help us move from a kind of confinement to something wider” (Cook-Sather, p.35). A good educator must embrace a broader understanding of each child’s individual needs, and facilitate the translations of her students (Cook-Sather, p.37). “The teacher creates a context in which she can facilitate, support, and encourage the students’ translation of themselves” (Cook-Sather, p.37). This metaphorical way of thinking demonstrates how learning becomes not only a process of acquiring necessary skills to compete in today’s complex world, but becomes a process of finding oneself.
Metaphors help shape behavior. “Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.”[4] When a metaphor is stated, it is important to then unfold what is being implied, because if the wrong metaphor is used, perceptions can be directed in a way that then leads to unwanted behavioral responses.
There are various metaphors often used when discussing education. A common metaphor that comes up is “education is growth.” Thinkers such as Rousseau and Herbart, argue that students need to be nurtured and given the opportunity to learn in their own ways at their own pace, and if given the proper sustenance, they will act morally according to their own free will.[5] This metaphor identifies how an educator can either help or hinder a child’s learning experience. The children coming into the classroom at a disadvantage are the children growing up in less economically advantaged homes, and therefore are exposed to a smaller vocabulary and have fewer interactions with people in comparison to more economically advantaged children. The way a gardener feeds her soil nutrients, it is crucial for a teacher to provide an environment where children from all family backgrounds are exposed to rich language and exposed to the uses and functions of various prints. Children reared in poverty are exposed to fewer opportunities for experiences of many kinds, language just being one of them, and it takes this realization to understand why the education system needs to make an effort to help improve the language and cognitive performance of these less advantaged children.
In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley conducted a study on “ordinary families” and how they talk to their young children. The study focused specifically on how social interactions affect developmental growth. Evidence indicates that despite the strong efforts from preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from less economically advantaged families fall behind their peers later in school. This is due to stunted vocabulary growth due to limited social interaction amongst parents and children in welfare families versus the amount of communication that takes place between parents and children of professional families.
A vocabulary, the stack of words (or signs) available to a person or a language community, comprises all the words a person knows, both those a person can understand and use appropriately. [6] Words are added to the vocabulary through experiences. These experiences also allow for the refinement or elaboration of meanings of known words. A person’s vocabulary is something that continues to grow throughout life as an individual has new experiences and gains understanding. “The more often a child hears different words, the more varied are the associated experiences and the more the meanings of the words for the child come to match the range and nuances of the meanings of the words for the speaker and the culture” (Hart and Risley, 98). The vocabulary terms parents use when they interact with their children set the foundations for the complex concepts and relationships the children will be asked to understand later on. “Children’s experiences with language cannot be separated from their experiences with interaction because parent-child talk is saturated with affect” (Hart and Risley, 101). Characteristics of language, such as tone and sound patterns, are captured by children even before they begin using words. As children develop, the exposure they have had to language shapes their motivation to learn and use words.
Hart and Riley recognized that the vocabulary an individual has reflects their intellectual resources, and for this reason rather than using an IQ test as a measurement tool, they used vocabulary growth. The measurement of vocabulary growth versus the measure of intelligence with an IQ test is culturally unbiased, allows for the obtainment of repeated measures without the child memorizing test questions, and allows for testers to infer from the child’s use of a word in context what the child took to be the meaning of the word (Hart and Risley, 6).
Hart and Riley began their study by recording each month – for 2 ½ years – one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families. These families had been categorized as professional working class or welfare families. Following the recording stage came years of coding and analyzing every utterance in the 1,318 transcripts. The data from successive observations were displayed for each child as a developmental trajectory, or a cumulative vocabulary growth curve (Hart and Risley, 7).
Findings showed that by age three, the spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in welfare families. For all 42 parents, the average number of utterances to the child per hour was 341 utterances. “The parents in the professional families addressed an average of 487 utterances to the child per hour in contrast to the average of 178 utterances addressed to the child by the parents in families on welfare, and the average of 301 utterances addressed to the child in the 23 working-class families” (Hart and Risley, 66). This is a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour between professional and welfare parents. If this number is transferred into the number of words a child would hear per year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words; a child in a welfare family would only hear 3 million words.
Follow-up studies done at age nine, show that children’s language experience is tightly linked with large differences in child outcomes. Vocabulary growth rates were strongly associated with rates of cognitive growth. This seemed to predict that in high school many children from impoverished families lack the necessary vocabulary to understand more advanced textbooks (Hart and Risley, 11). Hart and Risley realized the goal of their intervention needed to be changing the developmental trajectory; the rate at which welfare children added words to their dictionaries in daily use needed to be accelerated. Slow vocabulary growth rates are not due merely to the lack of extensive and varied experiences, but due to a lack of adult mediation.
For this reason, “the clear message here is that the welfare of poor children can only be served by enhancing the experiences they receive at home – by making the vocabulary and language they will need for expression and interpretation, in the wider contexts of their lives, available to them from those who are for them and also care about them” (Hart and Risley, xiii).
Hart and Risley calculated that in order for welfare children to receive language experience equal to that of working-class children, the welfare children would need to receive 63,000 words per week of additional language experience (Hart and Risley, 201). “Just to provide an average welfare child with an amount of weekly language experience equal to that of an average working-class child would require 41 hours per week of out-of-home experience as rich in words addressed to the child as that in an average professional home” (Hart and Risley, 201).
What needs to be done to make this happen? A national commitment needs to be made to support and provide a voice to those who are left at a disadvantage. With the proper nutrients, students have the ability to grow into well-rounded, mature, and unique individuals. The “education is growth” metaphor is a good representation of how we should perceive the expected role of students. Nurturing and fostering life are at the heart of this metaphor. It recognizes how students require the proper support and care in order to become enriched with knowledge and develop.
Now, we can look at a different metaphor, and look at how this one compares to “education is growth.” The metaphor, “education is production” became a conceptual framework during the industrial revolution in the United States. It provides reference to the roles, lexicon, and the actions and interactions of the nineteenth century business of production: the manager, the factory worker, the sorting machine. By the 1850s public discussion about educational policy illustrated the complete acceptance of the industrial model by educators.[7] Within this model, curriculum is “an assembly line down which students go,” and students themselves are “products to be molded, tested against common standards, and inspected carefully before being passed on to the next workbench for further processing.”[8] This concept of school led to “reductionistic, ‘parts-catalog’ approaches to teaching and learning.”[9] Both educators and the general public became obsessed with efficiency and scientific management, and embraced as well as idealized production as the model for education (Cook-Sather, p.44). Within the conceptual framework of education is production, teachers are considerably degraded. The structure for control aimed at efficiency is too intense. Teachers are given packaged curricula, readers, and textbooks, organized into tightly sequenced units and accompanied by teachers’ guides – forms of highly structured, step-by-step instructions. This type of system discourages creativity, critical thinking, or any kind of deviation from standardized manuals for learning (Cook-Sather, p.44). The teacher is also placed outside the system of learning, rather than inside; rather than being in charge of regulating the content and activities of the learner, the teacher is just a “manager” or “technician” in charge of implementing material that has already been established for the children to learn. “The school has been converted into the most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child being treated as if he possessed a memory and the faculty of speech, but no individuality, no sensibilities, no soul.”[10]
While there are modifications to this model, some being less drastic, overall, the meaningfulness of learning is lost when education is viewed as a means for production. There are certainly benefits to good organization in the school environment, specifically in regards to social organization which takes into consideration five key aspects: 1) school and classroom size, 2) different approaches to age grouping and, in particular, how young adolescents should be grouped, 3) tracing, or the grouping of students in classes according to their academic abilities, 4) the ethnic composition of schools, and 5) public versus private schools (Steinberg, 2008, p.204). However, there are certain climates that are the best for enhancing student learning. Good schools have five characteristics: 1) They emphasize intellectual activities, 2) they have committed teachers who are given autonomy, 3) they monitor their own progress, 4) they are well integrated into their community, and 5) they have a high proportion of classrooms in which students are active participants in their education (Steinberg, 2008, p.229).
What is really at the heart of this is the establishment of community. At the heart of educational equity is the establishment of community – community within and outside the walls of the classroom. It is important to consider what the “outcomes” will be. A good educator is one who is concerned with the future. This is why once educators have defined what their educational philosophy is, it is important for them to think about what strategies they will use for implementing their philosophies in the classroom.
Within the walls of the classroom, educators must think of strategies for bringing all of their students together – a way of establishing mutual understanding across various cultural backgrounds. These innovative strategies, when effective, should get all students to dive into their work, and increase concentration, which leads to an increase in success. Three things that are substantially important skills for children to obtain over the course of their educational years include the ability to develop their imagination, the ability to learn effective communication skills, and the ability to obtain problem solving skills. It is my theory that these skills can all be obtained through good language education.
Language education allows for students to recognize what is “personal, distinctive, and even unique about themselves and their work” (Eisner, 44). Language education looks beyond what standardized tests articulate about an individual, and instead is about the creation of a “personal vision” (Eisner, 44). The classroom is demonstrated to provide a context in which students interact and in which mobility is possible (Eisner, 62). Through the use of metaphors, students are given the opportunity and the means to grow. Metaphors nourish the mind, and through achievement, students develop new attitudes and dispositions that will allow for them to continue learning throughout life (Eisner, 240).
It helps to look at Psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s social learning theory to better understand how educators can help children’s learning and cognitive development. According to Vygotsky, infants are born with the basic skills necessary for intellectual development, and through interactions within the child’s socio-cultural environment, these skills develop into more sophisticated and effective mental processes, which he calls “higher mental functions”.[11] The most important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful mentor. The mentor may model behaviors and/or provide verbal instructions for the child. The child seeks to understand the actions or instructions given, and then internalizes the information, using it to guide or regulate his/her own performance. Vygotsky suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with help from more skillful peers within the zone of proximal development. He believed when a student is at the zone of proximal development for a certain task, providing the appropriate amount of assistance, scaffolding, will give the student the necessary “boost” to achieve the task. The scaffolding can be removed once the student masters the task and can complete the task again on his/her own.[12]
Again, we see the importance of community for cognitive development. We also see how there is great emphasis placed on the role of language in helping children in the process of making meaning out of unfamiliar concepts. While no one single principle can account for development, we do know development cannot be understood without reference to the social and cultural context within which it is embedded.
Language is a significant part of childhood development for numerous reasons, specifically figurative language. Figurative language provides one with intuitive knowledge, the kind of knowledge that is not obtained by standard logical reasoning. This form of “artistry consists in having an idea worth expressing, the imaginative ability needed to conceive of how, the technical skills needed to work effectively with some material, and the sensibilities needed to make the delicate adjustments that will give the forms the moving qualities that the best of them possess.”[13] This form of knowledge is important to each individual, and children should be exposed to this experience in the educational setting. First, figurative language, specifically metaphor, helps to stimulate the imagination; secondly, one’s ability to construct metaphors enhances strong communication skills; and lastly, learning to develop this craft teaches important life skills, especially critical thinking and problem solving.
Thinking about metaphor in terms of it serving as an aesthetic/ornamental device, one can think about the implications metaphor can have on a child’s imagination. Through the imagination children can stretch and explore; children can “learn to reach beyond one’s capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan, and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes and accidents.” [14] By using one’s imagination to then create metaphor is credited with having positive psychological effects. Kant, a well recognized philosopher articulates that a “productive” imagination brings sensation and understanding together, therein creating a “second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.[15] To better understand these implications it is helpful to turn to Freud’s psychoanalytic studies. Freud claimed one who has creative insight has the ability to “objectify and universalize his fantasies in his artworks.”[16] This form of artistic expression surpasses anything that is seen or heard. The process is an attempt for the speaker to fulfill a desire, and works like this: While making art the artist knows he is in a fantasy world, but through art one is able to return to reality. The artist does this by first making the fantasy into a work of art by stripping the original fantasy of all its personal and egocentric qualities. Then, through elaboration, the artist’s fantasies are transformed into a new kind of reality. Finally, the last step in breaking down the barrier between the artist’s ego and those of others is an act of bribery. This pleasure yielding offer allows for release (Freud, p. 5-7). Art allows for the conveying of ideas, feelings, or personal meanings (Hetland, p.6). Developmental Psychologist Paul Harris has conducted studies that prove the development of one’s imagination is necessary for cognitive development and normal adult functioning.[17] It is necessary for young children to be given the opportunity, not only to think about pure fantasy, but to contemplate reality. Educational settings should strive to foster growth and learning, and the artistic experience has successfully demonstrated its achievement in providing growth and learning in the sensory, perceptual, and imaginative sense.
Secondly, figurative language, specifically the use of metaphors, allows one to learn how to better communicate with others. One person’s argument in support of this claim is Tolstoy. Tolstoy makes the argument that art is aesthetically valuable not because of the production of beauty, but because the emotional importance pivots on the value of communication-as-infection. Good metaphors cause the hearer to enter into a kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is communicating, the metaphor, and with all those who receive the same metaphoric idea.[18] Through this communication, metaphor fosters feelings of universality. When one communicates with others, one has the opportunity to learn from others as well as the chance to reflect internally. Humans as distinct individuals have personal preferences for things. Often these preferences can lead to criticism and judgment, but when strong communication skills are developed, individuals are able to reflect on their opinions in a constructive fashion, and from this, further their understanding of the world; By learning how to communicate effectively with others, one can learn to embrace problems of relevance within the world, and/or personal importance (Hetland, 6). Communication involves clarity, effectiveness, and poise that will only come with practice and for this reason it is important such skills be instilled in educational institutes. Communication transforms consciousness into a public form, which is what representation is designed to do, and is necessary for individual growth (Eisner, 6-7). When children learn the importance and effectiveness of tone, body language, facial expressions, and other features of non-verbal language, children will gain an understanding of how to effectively develop into well-functioning human beings beyond the classroom. The relationship that forms through this social contribution and educational process allows for individuals to develop symbiotic relationships with others (Eisner, 7). Such various forms of communication allow for children to see the world in different ways. Such tropes are relevant to every aspect of the human condition; humanity depends on social harmony and understanding to function and live well, and metaphor has the ability to unite people with one another.
Thirdly, educators should focus on is strengthening their students’ critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. Then, there is critical literacy, which is understood as learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations. It raises the questions of, ‘How have I been shaped by the words I use and encounter?’ Essentially, critical literacy is language use that questions the social construction of the self. Each approach is useful because they: raise vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely; gather and assess relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards; allow one to think open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, their assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and allow one to communicate effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems.
Metaphor ultimately communicates feelings and experiences in a way which cannot be expressed in literal terms. Through this communication, metaphor fosters feelings of universality. Metaphor is relevant to every aspect of the human condition, and therefore should be regarded as valuable in society. Humanity depends on social harmony and understanding to function and live well, and metaphor has the ability to unite people with one another.
All humans are fundamentally social. They are shaped and formed though social interactions, social patterns, and socialization. As French Sociologist David Durkheim states, society gets within us; the individual becomes socialized, and therefore without society, we would not exist as full human beings.[19] Within society, as Sociologists Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead emphasize, human beings learn human nature through interactions.[20] Agents of socialization (parents, siblings, peers, teachers, and media) teach children certain values and norms, and from these a child forms her own identity.
George Herbert Mead argues “the basic shape of our personalities is derived from the social groupings in which we live.”[21] Different class systems expose children to different norms and values. A child raised in a middle-class family will grow up in a different environment than a child raised in a working-class or poor family. Take for example a child raised in a middle-class family: Chances are, the parents of this child received a higher education, and therefore the family does not have the same economic constraints as working class and poor families. This advantage gives a child the privilege of becoming involved in enriching organized activities, which allow him/her to grow as a person. “Selves can only exist in definite relationships to other selves” and from the process of socialization comes the development of the self (Reader 15, pg. 70). As a child, rather than riding the bus home from school each day and spending her afternoons playing outdoors with the neighborhood kids, she is driven to various activities ranging from soccer practice to chorus rehearsal. Middle-class parents tend to be most concerned that their child has opportunities to advance myself in the rest of the world.[22]
From these organized activities a sense of self evolves. A child begins to take over the “institutions” of these “communit[ies] into [her] own conduct” (Reader 15, pg. 70). The community provides “what we term… principles, the acknowledged attitudes of all members of the community toward what are the values of that community” (Reader 15, pg. 70). Because the child participates in activities with children similar to her, in terms of class, she begins to see herself as they see her, for example, a white female girl coming from a “good” family background. “Good” family backgrounds are typically defined as those where children are raised by two parents who hold well-paying occupations and install good morals into their children.
Parents who are not constrained by socioeconomic pressures shape their children’s cultural practices. Such parents give their children the ability to plan, observe, and guide their own behavior. Non-constrained parents tend to be strict, and expect their children to respect authority figures and maintain good morals. They teach their children to be polite and considerate of others. Unlike children of the poor and working-class, middle and upper-class parents do not show “a lack of consideration for other people and have a rather superficial sense of family and community;” these parents are not “unable to cope with the physical and emotional demands of parenthood” (Reading 30, pg. 159).
Children tend to see themselves in relation to others and adjust their behavior in accordance to expectations. This can be seen in educational institutions. Take for example how the average public high school is structured: Children of the middle-class and upper-class are often exposed to people from the working and poor class, but they rarely associate with them. This is because of the tracking system that is usually in place. There is a correlation between economic status and grades, and typically middle-class and upper-class students find themselves on a more academically rigorous tract (Honors and Advanced Placement courses). In contrast, working and poor-class students tend to be placed lower than their other peers. Also, working and poor-class students rarely participate in the organized activities their peers take part in. This shapes a child’s perspective growing up. Because working class and poor students are not typically involved in a school’s student organizations and do not make up the large percentage of the honor roll, children are shaped to believe to be successful one has to think like the people who hold the positions of power, privilege and prestige. There are roles attached to status positions, and these roles are how children believe they are meant to act in relation to others. Middle-class and upper-class children frequently feel the pressure growing up to get high grades so one can attend a rigorous college and obtain a degree which opens a window of opportunity when it comes time to find one’s own role in society. In contrast, children of lower economic status develop learned helplessness, and believe they are incapable of achieving these same goals; they often believe they are not good enough, or believe an education is not important, especially if their parents are not encouraging good academic performance.
Socialization gets within us; it is in the air we breathe and becomes internalized. Individuals regulate themselves, and social order results. When one becomes a member of a social organization several types of loyalty form. There is a sense of we-ness, which is a combination of emotional attachments and commitments that ties one to the organization. There can be a sense of how one can benefit; how the social organization is giving something back to oneself. There can be boundaries between insiders and outsiders; how one knows who oneself is at all can be predicated on boundaries. Conformity is encouraged because of our social nature. Positive sanctions are one way to encourage conformity.
However, one thing to remember includes the recognition of what may appear deviant from one perspective is not necessarily social disorder from another. Educators need to understand their students’ behavior and why no two students are exactly alike. Educators should “continue to acknowledge the diversity of children’s experiences, it is also important to learn from these experiences. The individual expressions of diversity reflect a larger social order.”[23] While humans often try to resist difficult and inevitable change, there are ways in which society can learn through experience. Kuhn states that “awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory.”[24] In order to keep up in society, we must change our mental perspectives and allow our consciousness to transform and transcend. We must become awakened as our consciousness grows more aware of inevitable change. The human mind is not something that is entirely restricted; it too can change as things in society change.
It only takes one passionate advocate for education reform to instigate change. Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, has demonstrated how the cycle of poverty for poor children in the United States can be broken. He has literally turned around Central Harlem, block by block, creating safe zones through schools and community centers for kids to learn and play. The Zone provides free and comprehensive educational, social and medical services for the 10,000 kids who live in the 96 blocks of central Harlem.[25] Canada states, “What we wanted to see in Harlem was our community to look like middle class communities, where kids had healthcare, where kids got their teeth fixed from the dentist, where kids were not obese and they were eating nutritional meals, where young people didn’t have to worry about gangs and being shot and being killed” (Canada). The main goal is to provide these kids with a bright future. The door to opportunity is through an education, and Canada makes a promise to these kids and to their parents that they will make it.
This is a fairly new educational development, so it is not entirely clear why Canada has been so successful in helping these children develop their personal identities, and how he has successfully bridged the gap between class and race. However, we can make inferences about what may be most successful in achieving this. It is important to recognize that every interaction within a classroom both reflects and constructs a social order. Teachers can create through language the worlds that children inhabit in the classroom. The individual and the sociohistorical come together in every language interaction” (González, p.186). “Through language, children of diverse ethnicities, social classes, ages, abilities and genders orchestrate their social organization and socialize one another across a range of activities… children’s lives are shaped by their encounters with family, peers, adults and others expressing various language ideologies, in neighborhoods, schools and after school, [and] children change developmentally over time” (González,191).
Geoffrey Canada’s approach shows how it takes a kind of risk-taking behavior to keep organizations moving forward. A lot of organizations try not to leave a comfortable place where rewards are easily measurable, but Canada claims these organizations are not going to get a lot of innovation under these circumstances.[26] Canada makes it clear that educators and policy makers need to act in order to educate children and strengthen community. Currently in our nation, President Obama has made a call to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America”.[27] The president’s plan also calls for expanding Early Head Start, the federal program designed to prepare children from low-income families for school, which provides quality childcare for infants and toddlers. These children do not have the advantages of nightly bedtime stories and music lessons, and so this advantage would help to prepare these children for kindergarten and beyond.
His plan has been met with some resistance. Critics argue that federal money would be “squandered on ineffective programs” (Obama’s Call). In thinking about outcomes, I think we can easily predict what will happen if this nation does not take action: Looking beyond logical differences, there is also a significant correlation between literacy and economic status. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, adults in the lower literacy levels were far more likely than those in the higher levels to be in poverty and were far more likely to be on food stamps than to report receiving interest from savings. Individuals in the higher levels of literacy were more likely to be employed, earn higher wages, work more weeks per year, and be in professional, technical, or managerial occupations than respondents who displayed lower levels of skill. Those in the lower literacy levels were less likely than those in the higher levels to say they also get some or a lot of information from print media. In addition, adults with limited literacy proficiencies were far less likely to have voted in a recent state or national election than were those with more advanced competencies.
These statistics are frightening. We tend to think illiteracy is only prevalent in third world countries in Africa and Asia, but this is not the case. While yes, illiteracy rates are significantly more drastic in these places, problems with literacy is something that also hits close to home, and action needs to be taken. Educators specifically need to think about the role they play in helping to bring illiteracy rates down. Children are growing up in a complex world, and within childhood development, different problems can arise for each individual. Parts of life’s complexities are inscribed in schooling. Many of these problems are due to the socialized ideas of power, privilege and prestige. Educators should be aware of how these ideas can contribute to the issues of language and identity formation many children are faced with. There are a few things educators can and should do in order to help foster educational development. Such teaching strategies include acknowledging the diversity of children’s experiences and the constitutive nature of language. By recognizing how an effective use of language can shape a child’s learning environment, children of all socioeconomic backgrounds can grow as individuals. These teaching techniques incorporate the link between language and identity, therein allowing children to find themselves in a world where they are exposed to multiple pressures and identities.
On January 17th, 2013, Cornel West spoke at Tavis Smiley’s forum titled, “Vision or a New America: A Future without Poverty.” The focus of this forum was on poverty in the United States, and much of what was discussed was the importance of education. West strongly expressed his views on why we are failing to see a lot of progress in establishing good quality education for all children. His belief is that the problem lies in society, a society where our priorities are “warped” due to our culture that is filled with “self-interest, aberrance, and greed.”[28] Another insightful speaker at this forum was Jonathan Kozol. He spoke on the low-level dialogue of social reform. This dialogue is nothing “transcendental” nor “courageous,” but rather is only “tinkering around the edges” of the issue of educational equity (insert citation). Kozol mentions how politicians often say they are working to fix the problem. Kozol does not like this mechanistic metaphor that views schools as if they are cars in an automobile shop.
I agree with both West and Kozol when they express how the law has failed to transform schools into safe and enriching environments for all children. In the past election both Mitt Romney and President Obama largely ducked the issue, remaining fixed on the status quo. However, the president is not the only one who can create change. It takes a village to raise a child, and it is going to take the collaboration and cooperation of communities across the country to equalize educational opportunity for this nation’s children. However, I believe it can all start with one teacher in one classroom with one goal: to do one’s best to take course material outside the context of the classroom and remember that we study in order to better the world.
[1] Romaine, 167
[2] Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II Ch1
[3] CCSS
[4] Lakoff and Johnson
[5] Cook-Sather, pp. 49-50
[6] Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore: P.H. Brookes, 1995. Print. Further reference to this source in parentheses (Hart and Risley, p#).
[7] Cook-Sather,Education is Translation, p.43
[8] Schlechty, Schools, 42, 21.
[9] Stanley J. Zehm, “Deciding to Teach: Implications of a Self-Development Perspective,” in The Role of Self in Teacher Development, ed. Richard P. Lipka and Thomas M. Brinthaupt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 43.
[10] Joseph Mayer Rice, The Public School System of the United States (New York: Century Company, 1893), 31.
[13] Eisner, Elliot W. The Arts and the Creation of Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 200? Print. Further reference to this text in parentheses (Eisner, p.#).
[14] Hetland, Louis, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly Sheridan. Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2007. Further reference to this text in parentheses (Hetland, p.#).
[15] Price, Harry Edward. Music Education Research: an Anthology from the Journal of Research in Music Education. Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference, 1998. Print. Further reference to this text in parentheses (Price, p.#).
[16] Ulman and Levy, eds. Art Therapy: Viewpoints. New York: Schocken Books. 1980. Further reference to this text in parentheses (Freud, p.#).
[17] Harris, Paul L. “Hard Work for the Imagination.” Play and development: Evolutionary, sociocultural, and functional perspectives. 205-225. Mahwah, NJ US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2006.PsycINFO. EBSCO. Web. 22 Apr. 2011. Further reference to this text in parentheses (Harris, p.#).
[18] Tolstoy, L. What is Art. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Further reference to this text in parentheses (Tolstoy, p. #).
[19] Durkheim – find source
[20] Cooley and Mead – find source
[21] Cite (Reader 15, pg. 64).
[22] Lareau
[23] I Am My Language by Norma González
[24] Kuhn, Thomas, S., “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Second Edition, Enlarged, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970(1962) Further reference to this source in parentheses (Kuhn, p#).
[25] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/harlem-childrens-zones-geoffrey-canada-revolutionizes-education-creating/story?id=11719995#.UKL064dfD90
[26] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/business/geoffrey-canada-of-harlem-childrens-zone-on-remembering-basics.html?ref=geoffreycanada&_r=0
[27] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/education/details-emerge-on-obamas-call-to-extend-preschool.html
[28] Insert Forum citation
Metaphor: Making the Abstract Concrete and Visual 