back to teaching
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

22::October::2006 20:54 → permalink

reading Stephen Brookfield’s two recent books on teaching — The Skillful Teacher, On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom and The Power of Critical Theory, Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching along with Parker Palmer’s essays on education as a spiritual journey, To Know As We Are Known. might as well be girding for the rest of a career in education while job hunting. weak areas include the feedback process, especially the short-term-feedback processes to gauge how students are coping with the course at different levels. this doesn’t apply to the 2-week intensive workshops which have a constant level of dynamic feedback running the entire time. but the idea of having two online forum log-in ID’s for each student — one an assigned user ID (or self-selected user name) and the second being anonymously assigned (pull the user/password slip out of a hat at the beginning of the course) and used for posting reactions to the class situation. this can include both posed questions from myself as well as ad hoc discussions on subject material, procedures, processes, expectations, and outcomes.

part of me likes this idea, while part of me sees it as just another way of artificially coping with the chasm that has evolved over the years where the teacher and student start off their relationship not from a position of mutual trust, but of adversarial suspicion and imbalance. this largely because of the (de)formative pressures of the social system that sees education as a key element in the hegemonic production of consumables. nothing more. many now see ‘higher’ education as a mechanistic successor of primary education — where primary education was the social mechanism needed to produce people literate enough to perform as a worker in the industrial ‘revolution;’ higher education merely fills the role of producing ‘line’ workers for the information ‘revolution.’ uff!

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness. — bell hooks

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