Module 1, Week 1

CLO 1 - Describe the diversity of students and its impacts on schools.

CLO 2 - Examine various educational models and the role of schools in communities and with government. 

CLO 3 - Analyze teacher practice and decision-making. 

CLO 4 - Explore the professional and ethical complexities of teaching. 

CLO 5 - Synthesize foundational elements of education into a personal philosophy of education and teaching. 

CLO 6 - Evaluate professional learning of pre-service and in-service teachers and educators. 

• Reflect on past school experiences. 

• Share some academic goals with peers. 

• Identify some school experiences that had a lasting impact on you. 

• Draw some connections between your identity and your motivations for learning. 

• Develop an awareness of the role identity can play in learning. 

• Illustrate the diversity that exists in schools in American society and Hawaiʻi. 

• Identify Power and Institutional Structures that exist in Education in American Society. 

• Analyze the relationship between structure and context when considering individual experiences in education systems. 

Essential Questions Primer - In this class, you will see many questions. 

Teachers regularly pose questions to their students. Essential questions are a particular type that are important to every learner in every subject. Essential questions arise naturally and recur throughout one's life. Such questions are broad in scope and universal by nature. 

In this sense, essential questions reflect the critical inquiries within a person, place, or discipline. Such questions point to a subject's big ideas and the technical knowledge frontiers. Essential questions help students make sense of seemingly isolated facts and skills or important but abstract ideas and strategies—findings that experts may understand but not yet grasp or see as valuable by the learner. Essential questions help individual learners ground themselves in cognition and inquiry that doesn't really have any end. 

Essential questions promote student learning in several ways. 

• Essential questions let students know that questioning is an integral part of learning.  When students learn to become better questioners, their learning becomes more meaningful and intellectually more profound. 

• Students' metacognition, thinking about students' thinking, increases with the use of essential questions.  

• Teachers model this questioning life to students and show them the types of questions they should ask themselves.  

• Using essential questions promotes inquiry; students want to learn content to drive that inquisition and inquisitiveness. In my experience, students want to know the skills and content so that they can answer the essential questions for themselves. 

(*adapted from - Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding)

Essential Questions for Week 1 - Please consider where you are in regard to thinking about Education in Society. 

• Who are you, and what is important to you?

• What are your goals?

• How does your academic experience prepare you for your goals?

• What is your identity, and does it change?

• How has your identity impacted your educational experiences? 

• Was your educational experience overall positive or negative?

• Did your school(s) value you?

• Did your school make relevant connections to who you are?

• How has history impacted you today?

• Who will be your future coworkers?

• What will work-life in a school be like?

• What relationships can I make to benefit society?

• Is more school ALWAYS a good thing? 

History

We love listening to stories of the past and looking at pictures from the past, ESPECIALLY when we are connected to the context. Think about old photos of your family, weddings or family gatherings, birth certificates/announcements, passports and postcards, and anything with the picture or name of someone you know on it. Itʻs meaningful. 

What would we be without knowing about the challenges and courage of our ancestors? 

We would be floating through life without an anchor. We need an understanding of who we are today. We need to appreciate and understand the history of any subject or topic. This is ABSOLUTELY the case when thinking about becoming a teacher. 

Identity

We must consider who we are and our foundation as individuals. As a teacher, this can help us rely on ourselves as we begin to build out a classroom and curriculum. It can help us identify ourselves with our students. 

It can also help us see differences between ourselves and the communities in which we work. This can help us understand further the identities of our learners and which parts of their identities are important to the learning process. 

At the end of the day, motivation and engagement are key to the education and learning process, and they very much differ depending on where you come from and who you are. 

A teacher's identity can powerfully impact their teaching and learning environment. It's a dynamic, lifelong process shaped by a teacher's personal and professional experiences, values, beliefs, and teaching philosophy. Teachers can develop their identity by reflecting on these aspects and considering what motivates them and what kind of impact they want to have on their students. 

When teachers understand how their identities impact their teaching, they can take more intentional steps to create inclusive and equitable learning environments. For example, self-reflection can help teachers know how they view their students and how their students perceive them. This can help teachers better understand power dynamics in the classroom and how they impact learning. Teachers can also use their identities to connect with their students and help them connect with the subject matter. 

Identity is multifaceted and bound to many internal and external factors. It's socially constructed, subject to power dynamics, and can be influenced by groups, social relationships, and self-descriptions. Teachers can expand their identity and confidence by seeking opportunities for learning and growth.

Motivation & Learning - Stand and Deliver

If learning requires motivation and your motivations often begin with your identity, how does that play out in teaching and learning? 

Consider the film Stand and Deliver (clip linked) (Review from Roger Ebert) - “Stand and Deliver” tells the story of a high school mathematics teacher who takes a class of academically challenged Angelinos, Latinos, and immigrants from Latin America in the course of one school year, transforms them into kids who love to learn math. Eighteen students in his class were able to pass a challenging AP college credit calculus exam. This was very new to these students, the school, and the community as the exam, at the time, was difficult, and only 2 percent of students nationwide took and passed it. 

The story is based on the life of Jaime Escalante. He was a man in East Los Angeles who left a higher-paying job in business to return to education and prove something to himself and his students. He confirmed that motivation and hard work can rewrite kids' destinies that society hasnʻt honored or recognized. 

In the film, Edward James Olmos plays Escalante, who faces a disheartening challenge on the first day of school. His class is undisciplined, unmotivated, and rebellious. He doesn't confront them; he engages them.

He teaches using examples from his students' everyday lives, making them think things out for themselves. He announces that the “punishment” for not working hard in class is to be banished from the class—a class most of the kids would rather be out of, anyway. The kids themselves are amazed that this strategy works, and they stick it out. 

The question is...How does Jaime Escalante do it? 

You can watch this clip from the film's beginning to think about how this Hollywood teacher portrait handles motivation and engagement.

• Consider the things that Mr. Escalante did to motivate his students. 

• Consider the moral of this clip/story/film.

• Consider why identity matters - why does who you are matter in preparing to learn and engaging in learning? 

In addition to history and identity, we are going to think about structure and context. 

• Structure is the building blocks of society. 

• Context is the lives that exist in and around those blocks. 

History of Education - The Committee of Ten

In the late 1800's the question of the purpose of the American high school was divided between two main philosophies. Essentially...

1. Standardized College Prep 

2. Workforce Training

The National Education Association addressed this issue by appointing a Committee of Ten in 1892 to establish a standard curriculum. 

This committee was primarily composed of educators (all older white men) and was chaired by Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University. Eliot and the Traditionalists had a vision for high school as a college preparatory institution. Other educators believed the high school should serve more as a people's school, offering a range of practical courses for trades and jobs. This debate divided students into academic versus terminal students, often based on economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds. 

Eliot led the committee to one significant recommendation: teaching the same subjects for all students, and the system would decide who would be college-bound or work-terminal.

Under the leadership of Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University, the committee undertook a broad exploration of the role of the high school in American life. It concluded that all public high school students should follow a college preparatory curriculum, regardless of their backgrounds, their intention to stay in school through graduation, or their plans to pursue higher education. As Eliot, author of the final report, put it, “Every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease.…”

From Eliot’s perspective, high schools fulfilled the promise of equal opportunity for education by insisting that all students take the same rigorous academic courses. While the Committee of Ten did suggest different programs of study for high schools (for example, programs specializing in classical languages, science, mathematics, or modern languages) and introduced the concept of electives to American high schools, its guiding principle was that all students should receive the same high-quality liberal arts education. Courses that are now considered essential, like foreign languages, mathematics, science, English, and history, were included in each curriculum.

Hence, STANDARDIZATION and College for All became common "ideals" for students in schools (even though it was another 70 years before a diverse group of students began to attend college). 

But, new battle lines were drawn, especially as a wave of new immigrants was bringing tens of thousands of foreign adolescents to the cities and counties in the USA. G. Stanley Hall, a prominent psychologist and president of Clark University, denounced the Committee of Ten’s curriculum recommendations because, he said, most high-school students were part of a “great army of incapables … who should be in schools for the dullards or subnormal children.” Numerous critics joined Hall in attacking the Committee’s report as an elitist view of reality that everyone could or should go to college. 

However, the reality was that soon, the number of students aged 14–17 attending high school soared from 359,949 (6%) in 1890 to 4,804,255 (50%), between 1890 and 1930!

It is worth looking at the Report from the Committee of 10. By and large, the report of the Committee of Ten established college domination over the high school curriculum. You will note that influential people (THE STRUCTURE) are making policy decisions that will impact the education trajectory for the next 100+ years.  These impacts are felt very differently depending on the CONTEXT of the school students. 

So, if the school was to be the GREAT EQUALIZER of "men," did it have that impact? Is society more equal? Who did it impact, and how did it affect them? Who benefited? Who struggled? What does this have to do with us? 

History of Education - AN EGREGIOUS EXAMPLE of How identity Impacts Learning and Education 

Native American Boarding Schools - To provide some additional CONTEXT about education in American history, it is essential to consider the experiences of the "OTHER." In this case, Native Americans in Native American in Boarding Schools. 

Exploring this context can provide a counterpoint to the idea that while school is designed for the BEST INTEREST of the student, it is not always the case.  

We need to consider schools in the indigenous context, especially in Hawaiʻi. We are living in an indigenous CONTEXT, meaning that people were living in Hawaiʻi before the modern STRUCTURES that we placed on society here and primarily by "outsiders" both in the missionary times around the development of Lahaina Luna School in 1820s & 1830s, the start of Oahu High School, or Punahou, after an illegal overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and the development of Kamehameha Schools. 

On the one side of the coin, Administrators and Teachers of Native American boarding schools, it was said that they started the schools to "educate" the Indians out of savagery and into modernity. They wanted Indians to participate in society, and have families, farms, and futures. Educators wanted to "help" and "save" the Indian from their traditional ways of life and replace them with mainstream American culture. The mid-nineteenth century led the government or Christian missionaries to collect children from communities and "move them out" to boarding schools. 

But, a more nuanced and inclusive view of the STRUCTURE of school in Native communities was that the school "stole" the identity of the Indians while taking their land and changing their culture. For example, 

"We always have to remember that the goal of the schools was assimilation, but it was also about Native people. To me, the great genocide of the boarding school era is the land loss and dispossession that accompanies the boarding school policy. People at the time thought Native people could abandon their homes and reservations and tribal ways and wouldn’t need a homeland anymore." 

At boarding schools, Indian children were separated from their families and cultural ways for years at a time. The children were forced to cut their hair and give up their traditional clothing. They had to give up their meaningful Native names and take English ones. They were not only taught to speak English but were punished for speaking their languages. Their traditional religious practices were forcibly replaced with Christianity. They were taught that their cultures were inferior. Some teachers ridiculed and made fun of the students’ traditions. These lessons humiliated the students and led them to be ashamed of being American Indian. The boarding schools hurt the self-esteem of Indian students and the well-being of Native languages and cultures.

(*adapted from https://time.com/6177069/american-indian-boarding-schools-history/) 

How can schools have such disparate and different purposes?  Is it for good, or is it for evil?  This video will be used in our assessment, but we are focusing on one thing at this point. How can STRUCTURE and CONTEXT impact student IDENTITY? 

• The Committee of Ten (MacKenzie; 1894); 

• Death and Life of the Great American School System (Review) 

• Native American Boarding 

  • • 1. 1. • Time Magazine; 

            • Library UW; 

            • American Indian Institute;

            • NPR - Boarding Schools Today

            • Unspoken: America's Native American Boarding Schools (Youtube)

    • Hawaiʻi (Timeline of Hawaii Education)

Assessment 1.1 - Me & the History of Education (EDEF 310)

Survey Questions for you to consider

Module 1, Week 2 - Sociology of Education and Learning