Deborah Meier, in a recent blog post advocated for what I’ll call a responsive curriculum, saying that
The best education I ever had was over the dining room table, as adults talked politics and culture (and how they dealt with the daily realities) in the presence of the young and with due respect for their contributions.
I’m in sympathy with her point of view. But how do we manage this kind of give and take in a public school classroom?
Consider the case of Deborah Mayer (different Deborah), who lost her teaching job because she told a group of elementary students that she honked for peace. I’ve been following a discussion about this on the eddra listserve. Mayer’s class was reading an article in Time for Kids about opposition to the war in Iraq, and one of her students asked if she would ever join an anti-war protest. She noted that when she drove by the peace marchers in Bloomington holding the sign “Honk for Peace” she honked her horn to show support for finding peaceful solutions to conflict before going to war.
Mayer was told by her supervisor that she could teach about the war as long as she kept her opinions to herself. And according to a US federal appeals court:
…a teacher’s speech is “the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary.” The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.
….As far as the courts are concerned, “public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and … its employees are the mouthpieces of the government,” said Vikram Amar, a professor at UC’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
There are pitfalls for any teacher who embraces the unexpected. The news article is worth reading, and goes into some detail about the legal limitations of the decision, which appears to be confined to the jurisdiction of the seventh circuit. But the expectation that teachers keep their opinions to themselves in the classroom is widely held, and should be considered when we find ourselves in troubled waters.
On the other hand, there also are possibilities for teachers who invite open discussion in the classroom. Because of this story, I’m thinking more, now, about Deborah Meier’s recommendation that teachers explore controversial issues as a means of developing critical habits of mind.
The habits of mind that Meier refers to are these 5:
- The question of evidence, or “How do we know what we know?”
- The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or “Who’s speaking?”
- The search for connection and patterns, or “What causes what?”
- Supposition, or “How might things have been different?”
- Why any of it matters, or “Who cares?”
This could be a poster. Critics of this approach claim that it somehow negates or sidesteps the adopted curriculum, but I disagree. The adopted curriculum might actually invite discussion and controversy if you study the curriculum document itself with students. A couple of years ago I was surprised to discover that my sixth graders didn’t know that there even was such a thing as a curriculum. They thought the teachers decided what they had to learn. In fact, textbook publishers are more effective at limiting and controlling curriculum content than teachers or school boards. It takes a lot of thought and planning to observe curriculum guidelines, in contrast to following a teacher’s guide.
My thinking is that if we take a critical stance toward curriculum, we can still use it, and at the same time question it’s content, viewpoint, assumptions, and relevance. Along the way we can teach what it intends for students to learn, and we can also think about why. Learning that’s embedded in a real social context stands a far greater chance of making sense than simply reading through a catalog of goals and objectives.
A case in point: Earlier this year my students were reading from the social studies text about Seward’s Icebox, and the purchase of Alaska by the US from Russia. One of them asked Who did Russia buy it from? Well…..the answer to that question saw us through a lot of other events in US history, and became the basis for an extended discussion about colonialism.
I don’t want to tell my students what to think. But I certainly do encourage the activity.
7 Comments
At a local middle schooling conference a couple of years ago, I attended a session by a Year Six teacher who actually ran a formal philosophy program with his class, utilising the moral dilemmas in popular TV shows like the Simpsons. His words were something similar to your last paragraph, “I don’t care what my students’ opinion is. But I do care that they have an opinion.”
One can only think of this quote……and these times….worry the mind…
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society . . . ”
—Vaclav Havel
I feel the following more strongly with every year I teach (it has been a few):
My students (third graders) really want to know what I think. They want to know who is right and what is wrong. My opinion is a factor – in their decision making, forming prejudices, and developing ethics. I am an important person in their lives. They spend more time with me than their parents. I will not deny them this knowledge because I am supposed to be only a dispensor of curricula or a moderator of conversation.
There are grey areas, of course. And common sense.
A couple of thoughts come to mind as I read this article.
First, we are beginning to implement pr-AP vertical teaming in our middle school. The big picture in my context is that teaching critical thinking skills are now part of the curriculum. That the government might not protect teachers who express their opinions during conversations that encourage kids to think critically puts some of us in a precarious position. Of course, I already tend to censor my true beliefs when I know they fly in the face of the local norm . . . so, I guess I am used to side-stepping controversy.
Second, I recently read an article about the way that Orthodox Jews stody the torah. I found it fascinating that it’s a loud, seemingly chaotic process where students openly express opposing viewpoints about interpretations. Talk about putting Meier’s habits of mind to practice! I wished that I had such training and could not help but wonder how much deeper public school students could learn to think were we to teach them that way.
I teach Spanish, and so there is very little re: my opinion re: Spanish that students ask. However, as they grow more comfortable with me, they do ask me about things which are not related to Spanish, such as something that happened on campus, a television program they saw, an article they read. BTW: I teach 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th graders. While I don’t voluntarily share my opinion very readily or often. However, I do add it as another point of view if the students ask, or if it will help them to clarify things. It is truly an area which is messy, but, so isn’t authentic human interaction.
Wow, that “Honk for Peace” article is a real eye opener, and provides some great background on past legal opinions in the United States with regard to the existance or the extent of teacher free speech rights.
As I read Mark’s comments, I was reminded that developmentally before puberty, students tend to see things in very black and white ways. I would guess the opinions of the teacher might be valued and possibly internalized by pre-pubescent students to a greater degree than older ones. But each person is unique, so it is impossible to generalize that across the board. Still, I wonder what developmental psychologists would say about that?
I also wonder what the international (non-U.S.) views on this are? I would suspect many schools are tied to the old paradigm of transmitting content more than developing critical thinking skills, and so even though the legal regimes vary the experiences of teachers are similar.
These are vital issues. I especially appreciate the link to “Habits of Mind.” I had run across that awhile back but forgot the resource, now I’ve saved it to del.icio.us so I’ll be able to find it again and explore those thoughts in greater depth.
Along these lines, I think using debate to help students explore, engage with and begin to own the ideas of the formal curriculum is a great strategy. I saw a GLEF video about “Urban Academy” a few years ago where they used this method. Critical thinking skills can certainly be developed in that context. I’d love for my own children to attend a school where inquiry is emphasized over simple idea consumption.
Very late, but a) this is a great post, and b) I try to frame my responses to opinion questions by giving it, then trying to articulate opposing viewpoints as validly as possible, and concluding with a “grown-ups disagree, so it’s up to you to think your way to your position” kind of thing.
c) Weird, but I’m thinking digital recordings of class discussions would be possible safety nets here. Maybe not.
I think the “habits of mind” approach is the way to go. Like Wes, I’ll bookmark this one.
4 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] my political-speech-in-the-k12-classroom theme from the previous post, I notice that Sol Stern is alarmed that teachers in New York are using radical math projects to to [...]
[...] is how do we make this happen within the confines of what we are mandated to teach? Maybe the “teaching the controversy” approach advocated by Doug Noon is one possibility. I also struggle with my deep-seated belief that [...]
[...] pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming [...]
[...] pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming [...]
Post a Comment