WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

As readers are no doubt aware through previous posts, I’m currently half way through my Ed.D. Policy Studies assignment which I’m doing on the impact of ‘marketization’ on education. As a consequence, I’m filtering pretty much everything through the lens of state vs. market control of education. The majority of what I’ll be looking at centres around the purpose of education and alternative methods of teaching.

Here’s the posts I’ll be looking at this week:

• Chris Sessums - [3] Stop making sense: Paradox as a teaching tool
• Joyce Valenza - [4] Meme: “You’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, For the times they are a changin’â€Â? (edited version [5] here)
• Ulises Mejias - [6] Confinement, Education and the Control Society
• Wes Fryer - [7] What should kids learn in school that teachers didn’t learn?

I’ll start with Wes Fryer’s interesting post on [7] What should kids learn in school that teachers didn’t learn?, inspired by the legendary Guy Kawasaki’s post [9] Ten Things To Learn This School Year. It actually contains twelve things:

1. How to talk to your boss.
2. How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run.
3. How to run a meeting.
4. How to figure out anything on your own.
5. How to negotiate.
6. How to have a conversation.
7. How to explain something in thirty seconds.
8. How to write a one-page report.
9. How to write a five-sentence email.
10. How to get along with co-workers.
11. How to use PowerPoint.
12. How to leave a voicemail.

Wes says that his favourite of these is number 4 - ‘How to figure out anything on your own’, which I agree is extremely important, but the most important of the things on this list, for me, is a combination of the skills behind numbers 6 (’How to have a conversation’) and 10 (’How to get along with co-workers’). I’ll quote both of them in full:

6. How to have a conversation. Generally, “Whassup?� doesn’t work in the real world. Generally, “What do you do?� unleashes a response that leads to a good conversation (hence the recommendation below). Generally, if you listen more than you talk, you will (ironically) be considered not only a good conversationalist but also smart. Yes, life is mysterious sometimes.

10. How to get along with co-workers. Success in school is mostly determined by individual accomplishments: grades, test scores, projects, whatever. Few activities are group efforts. Then you go out in the real world the higher you rise in an organization, the less important your individual accomplishments are. What becomes more and more important is the ability to work with/through/besides and sometimes around others. The most important lesson to learn: Share the credit with others because a rising tide floats all boats.

What about freeloaders? (Those scum of the earth that don’t do anything for the group.) In school you can let them know how you truly feel. You can’t in the real world because bozos have a way of rising to the top of many organizations, and bozos seek revenge. The best solution is to bite your tongue, tolerate them, and try to never have them on the team again, but there’s little upside in criticizing them.

Guy probably thinks that the majority of things on his list are work-related skills. But they’re not. Behind most of them are the life skills we should equipping our young people with in order to go out into the big, wide, scary world. It’s a bit like the difference between teaching students to use a specific software program to accomplish a task versus teaching them how to use that type of software. ‘Meta-skills’ you could call them, I suppose. The majority of problems I’ve seen in schools are not really educational, per se, they’re social. We all know the stereotype of teenagers lacking social skills, but mainly that’s due to a lack of confidence and a crisis of self-identity during their passage to adulthood. This can result in anti-social behaviour such as bullying and insubordination towards teachers. We need to equip youngsters with the skills needed to express themselves and develop the social skills necessary to construct the confidence to ‘be themselves’. I believe that much of this can be achieved through the critical self-reflection process that one goes through when introduced to philosophy for the first time - but that’s a whole other post…

Some of what I’m getting at, however, can be seen through Chris Sessums post, [3] Stop making sense: Paradox as a teaching tool. In it, Chris looks at what makes paradox an effective teaching and learning tool:

Recognizing ambiguities, equivocations, and unstated assumptions that are the basis of most paradoxes has led to considerable advances in the areas of science, philosophy, mathematics, and social consciousness.

I loved studying [11] Parmenides, [12] Zeno (he of the famous tortoise vs. hare paradox) and other pre-Socractic philosophers when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in philosophy; they really got you thinking and challenged your assumptions. Parmenides, although we only have fragments of his work, wrote an epic poem in which he communes with a goddess who instructs him that he cannot think, talk about or know ‘what-is-not’. Thinking through the ramifications of the potential truth of this statement in seminars was great stuff! We should be doing the same with our students. Not in trite ‘thinking skills’ kinds of ways using seemingly-open-ended-but-actually-closed examples. Instead of having something an outcome which you want to elicit, sometimes we should be simply encouraging students to think and develop neural connections which will enable to ‘think round’ problems in future. There’s precious little of this practised by students in an average school day at present, unfortunately. I used some of the conundrums and problems in [13] There Are Two Errors In The Title Of This Book a few times with my Year 8 tutor group at my last school. Whilst that was a bit hard for them to get their heads round, they enjoyed the experience all the same!

Joyce Valenza has posted reflectively in [4] Meme: “You’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, For the times they are a changin’â€Â?. In it, she looks back at how life has changed in various areas since she left ‘library’ school. She presents her information in tabular fashion and, at (many) others’ request, has prepared an edited, better-presented version [5] here. The table is split into three sections - what the situation in each area was like 1976, this academic year, and how she expects it to change in the future. For example, in the ‘Reference Service’ section she juxtaposes the following:

When left library school (1976) - Reference service at the desk, in-person reference interview, Mudge Guide to Reference Books

2006/ 2007 School Year - Students expect immediate interaction and 24/7 information service. Students expect independence in information access�on home PCs at any hour of day. Some libraries and states offer IM and email reference

Implications for Future? Learners, Educators, Schools? - Users expect information and services to be immediate. Need for blended service in the form of Web sites, blogs, pathfinders customized to meet students’ information and developmental needs. Need for extended just-in-time, just-for-me guidance/intervention. Libraries should aim to be a window on students’ home desktops. Virtual library as customized information landscape.

The issues brought to our attention by Joyce quite obviously demand attention and action by educators. I’d recommend taking a while to go through the table she presents and think about how what she raises affects what you do and perhaps more importantly, how you do it.

And finally, I’m not going to be able to smoothly link from another post to this seamlessly, so I’ll just plonk it on the end here. Ulises Mejias has written an interesting post entitled [6] Confinement, Education and the Control Society, in which he states:

The constant student is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Thanks to distance education, e-learning and technologies such as the Learning Management System (LMS), education becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which â€â€?more importantlyâ€â€? can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ career of the individual. Thus, assessment-based education helps reconcile control and discipline in society by helping to effect, in the case of those who fail, a transition from controlled subject to disciplined object.

The rhetoric surrounding ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘flexibility’, it seems actually has a dark underbelly. Workers, instead of becoming ‘emancipated’ by ‘retooling’ and ‘reskilling’, essentially become deprofessionalized and simply cogs which can be made to fit whatever the latest machine of the globalised capitalist economy. A depressing end to this week’s roundup, then. But true.

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