Thursday, April 13, 2006

The cure-all for life or Public School Utopia

When we were talking in class tonight, I kept thinking about something I'd read in the last couple of weeks. However, as I mentioned here previously, all of the reading I'm doing seems to be running together and I can't ever remember where I read something, or which brilliant person said it (all of the authors of these works would cringe knowing grad students are getting them all confused... surely it's not the fame they wished for...). Anyway, I decided that it was from Pinar's What is Curriculum Theory? book, and found what I was thinking about.

I had listened to the first part of the Oprah show Tiffany mentioned in class on my way to class Tuesday afternoon. I too, was glad that education was being mentioned, and at least the show did talk to and use the work of Jonathan Kozol, citing his new book Shame of the Nation. Otherwise, I felt like it was another strike by business and the media on public education.

So, in his book, Pinar has an affinity for the historian Christopher Lasch, and quotes his work quite a bit throughout the chapters. In the final chapter, titled "Education of the American Public," Pinar writes about how we as educators, must begin to work to turn the tide, claim our positions as intellectuals in society, and initiate true reform based on social equity rather than flawed business approaches. In this chapter, he uses some quotes from Lasch on page 255:

"Schooling is not a cure-all for everything that ails us."

"If there is one lesson that we might have been expected to learn in the 150 years since Horace Mann took charge of the schools in Massachusetts, it is that schools can't save society."

What is the role of the school and what is the role of the teacher? Are teachers caretakers, instructors, guides, social workers, stand-in parents, or professional intellectuals? Can they really be all of these at once? Can schools survive increasing requirements and regulations to manage both children and phenomenon which are often beyond their reach and outside their control? And why do politicians, the business world, the media, and popular opinion in the public realm continue to believe that schools can fix everything? Why do they think that schooling can save society? Why is such a powerful and critical burden placed in the hands of people who are paid and respected so little?

Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Sholle & Denski with Stuart Hall

Like Abdullah mentioned in class tonight, I also was interested by the comments about how students have to realize how to "position themselves" when reading media. From the article:

"such a pedagogy must allow students to speak from their own experience at the same time that it encourages them to identify and unravel the codes of popular culture that may work to construct subject relations that serve to silence and disempower them. Popular culture must be viewed as a complex and contradictory sphere in which dominant culture attempts to structure experience through the porduction of meaning, and which at the same time may provide possibilities for more open democratic formations." - p. 307-308

"If we are to educate students to become media literate, we must attend to the multiple references and codes that position them." - p.309

I've been reading an amazing book over the last couple of weeks - Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life edited by Greg Dimitriadis and Dennis Carlson. It is full of great chapters, mostly from that cultural studies perspective. In a chapter by Norman Denzin called "Screening Race", he makes some interesting statements around a quote by Stuart Hall:

"Popular culture, Stuart Hall reminds us is mythic, a theater of desires, a space of popular fantasies. 'It is where we go to discover who we are'(1996, p.474). And in answering this extistential question, we find that our gendered conceptions of self and Other are grounded always in misplaced notions of racial difference, of whiteness and privilege. We must always be on guard concerning what we learn about ourselves."

This is exactly what the positioning seems to be - students asking themselves - what do I know about myself, about others, and how has the media shaped that knowing? Do I see myself reflected or created by media? Do I challenge the presentation or representation or re/presentation?

I did like this article quite a bit. I reminded me of the reading from Dr. Schwarz' media literacy class. I am interested in theories that allow for us to question the dichotomy of the manipulative producers vs. the mindless masses, and the notion that a revolution in the sense of reversing these roles is the answer. Did I agree with everything - no. But overall, very enjoyable. Here's the citation for that book:

Dimitriadis, G., & Carlson, D. (2003). Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.