Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  pp. 1-32, 43-54.

An Alternative Vision

• Education planned for relations people might establish
• Community’s interests should be attended but are varying
  • There is no “we” – only You and I
  • “… parental interests take on different priorities at different times, and reasonable people differ on what they mean by growth and acceptability” (Bruner, 1960, p.46)
• Center around interests
  • “If tests are used at all, they should be given at the request of children (or their parents) who want to learn more about their own talents. By and large, interests – not tested capacities – should determine placement.” (Bruner, 1960, p.46)
• Educate about human activities
  • “… things that are done by the complete man or woman” (Bobbitt, 1915)
  • “We need a scheme that speaks to the existential heart of life – one that draws attention to our passions, attitudes, connections, concerns, and experienced responsibilities.” (Bruner, 1960, p.47)
• Care about self
  • “Central to caring for the physical self is understanding and accepting its potential and limitations.” (Bruner, 1960, p.48)
  • “If we regard our relations with intimate others as central in moral life, we must provide all our children with practice in caring.” (Bruner, 1960, p.52)
  • Dialogue is also essential in learning how to create and maintain caring relations with intimate others. Unfortunately, there is little real dialogue in classrooms.” (Bruner, 1960, p.53)
• Against ideology of control – For shared living and responsibility
  • Develop in children the capacity for shared cares and concerns
  • Attend to multiple intelligences (Gardner)
  • Culturally filtered and grounded

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. pp. 71-86.

Chapter 2

• “Education is suffering from narration sickness.” (Freire, 2005, p.71)
• Banking concept of education
  • “This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.” (Freire, 2005, p.72)
• Teacher-student contradiction and oppression
  • “Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology) of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry.” (Freire, 2005, p.72)
• Education as a form of control
  • “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.“ (Freire, 2005, p.73)
  • “Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them’ for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.” (Freire, 2005, p.74)
• Conscientização
  • “Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientização” (Freire, 2005, p.74)
  • “Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.” (Freire, 2005, p.79)
  • “Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.” (Freire, 2005, p.79)
• Learn by teaching
  • “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.” (Freire, 2005, p.80)

Meek, A. (March 1991). On Thinking about Teaching: A Conversation with Eleanor Duckworth. Educational Leadership, pp. 30-34.

• Owning the ideas (knowledge)
  • “You have to put them in a situation where they develop that understanding – it’s not going to happen from your telling them” (Meek, 1991, p.30)
• Cognitive Pluralism
  • Read poem – discuss what you noticed – everyone notices ‘something’ – I never noticed that!
• Provide a safe space for sharing and pushing back
• Teacher PD
  • Have them experience learning again to affect their practice
    • “I want them to have the phenomena of teaching and learning to live through and think about, just as the kids live through and think about flashlights, batteries, and bulbs.” (Meek, 1991, p.32)
  • Meek’s PD
    • Model behavior
    • Practice teaching themselves
    • Become learners in the class with Meek
  • Communities of practice
    • Value of sharing
    • Learning to take their knowledge seriously
    • Be metacognitive about their work – teach how to do research
• Investigate vs. find out about
  • “It’s between them and the moon with a little help from each other.” (Meek, 1991, p.33)
  • Document your work, your process, and reflect upon it
• Curriculum for finding
  • “When they’re really into it. asking their own next questions and figuring out how to answer their own next questions, how does that go? That seems to me what curriculum development has to be” (Meek, 1991, p.33)

Gardner, H. (1999). The Disciplined Mind. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 15-40.

• The ultimate goal of education
  • Truth, beauty and good
  • “We need an education that is deeply rooted in two apparently contrasting but actually conplementary considerations: what is know about the human condition, in its times aspects; the contemporary (and the coming ) scene.” (Gardner, 1999, p.20)
• Educate to ensure roles are going to be filled by the next generation
• Educate to ensure cultural values and heritage is transmitted
• Formal education
  • “For while education all over the world has long featured the transmission of roles and values in appropriate setting, ‘decontextualized schools’ have been devised primarily for show more specify goals: the acquisition of literacy with notations and the mastery of disciplines.” (Gardner, 1999, p.29)
• What should be taught? Many want culture and religion not to be taught in schools.
  • Breadth vs depth of content
  • Accumulation vs. construction of knowledge
  • Utilitarian vs. intellectual growth’s sake goals
  • Uniform vs. individualized education
  • Private vs public education
  • Multidisciplinary vs mastery of one
  • Assessments – all in or none at all
  • Relative or universal standards
  • Technocentric vs Homocentric
  • Student-centric vs teacher-centric approach