💾 Archived View for welovedyou.xyz › janwen › notes › pfl4.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:12:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
- IS: The tendency now is towards "teacher-proofing" curricula. The profession is managerialized.
- "School bureaucracy thinks that schools could be run perfectly if only teachers and students didn't get in the way."
- Schools are reproductions of corporate interests in the public sphere, so it's not a question of just letting them know that better teaching exists. The teaching that they impliment is perfectly suited to their real goals.
- /// Is this true? I feel like "progressive" education strategies can and have been co-opted to conservative ends, although I suppose in these cases the progressivism of the strategy has been hollowed out and only remains in its jargon and pretentions
- So we're left with the question: in a liberating classroom, what structure is there? Is it chaotic and improvised or regimented towards liberatory ends?
- PF: Everyone asks me this. It's a good question.
- I think that a lot of educators misunderstand "rigor". Rigor is often misidentified with regimentation and discipline. This is not actually "rigorous", it is merely mechanistic and denies creativity its place.
- So when educators think that liberating education isn't "rigorous", we have to clear this up.
- IS: Teachers and students are so unused to being in charge of their own studies that they mistake the lack of adherence to centralized curricula with a lack of rigor.
- But even though we oppose control from above, our goal is not "chaos from below".
- The dedication required to truly wrestle with reality from your own subjectivity--that is rigor.
- PF: Yes! In a way, following prescribed curricula is exactly the opposite of rigor, as it is not taking responsibility for your own illumination.
- Rigor lives with freedom, and we have to fight passionately to show this.
- IS: Goodlad says that 1% of class time is dedicated to open discussion and 3% takes on any kind of emotional tone.
- /// ...wow... i feel like if classrooms were like that today, students would just rebel. that's probably the reason they've loosened up in superficial ways.
- The "rigor" we're used to comes from a business analysis. cost-benefit of the classroom.
- It's so ingrained in us that we can't just criticize the authority we feel oppressed by; we must also articulate our principles so we can begin anew with confidence. Expelling the "distant" authorities *within ourselves*.
- The "liberatory education" of the 60s tended to err on the side of laissez-faire, which helped conservatives claim that creativity was equal with unrigor.
- There is a difference between ***license*** and ***deliberate freedom.***
- We can't make any suggestions or make any curricula that are guaranteed to work in anyone else's classroom, since we always have to be attuned to the local. But! We can always talk about our experiences, find common ground, and take inspiration from others.
- PF: A mexican prof once told me that a dialogical experience that is "not based in seriousness, in competency" is actually worse than an average banking-model lesson. I actually agree with this.
- IS: What can go wrong?
- PF: For one, irresponsibility, acting like "knowing" is a miracle that comes from nowhere and cannot be structured. It's satisfying, but it's really hard work!
- Plus, so-called dialogic educators who are really just irresponsible further entrench conservative opinion
- We have to be demanding. We have to challenge students to do hard work. Both for their sake and for our opponents to allow us to continue practicing.
- Simply preaching revolution to the students is, pedagogically speaking, reactionary.
- IS: Typical schooling has a "closet full of cultural tools" to legitimate itself: tests, products, papers, etc. How do we demonstrate rigor without programming in advance or mechanistic testing?
- PF: Look, that's gonna be hard, because for our opponents, "rigor" includes adherence to describing reality, never questioning, questioning, or moving to change it.
- Creative rigor, on the other hand, means you are doing much more than observing or knowing, you are *changing*, you are *becoming*.
- I'm not interested in demonstrating to conservatives that i'm rigorous, but we have to prove to *students *that we're rigorous.
- This creative knowing doesn't happen by ourselves, but in community.
- Students *must read*-- this is one of the best ways to learn in community.
- "The students must read Marx, regardless of their acceptance or rejection of Marxist rigor"
- "I don't accept *scientific racism*, where some classics cannot be read"
- /// I'm a little lost here
- IS: Students should read the classics of a discipline, but never as objects of worship?
- PF: Reading seriously and critically, not just reading. A student told me once that his professor gave him 300 books on the syllabus. That's just useless. With that pace, you don't understand anything.
- But it's hard, because they *do *have to read, and it benefits them to read widely. it's a balance.
- In Brazil, a lot of students show up to university without the reading and writing skills required. "It's my job to teach Hegel, not to teach reading." I disagree.
- Even leftist professors can "demonstrate rigor" by giving zeroes. It's not helpful at all.
- What I would do is teach reading *while *teaching Hegel. I read with them. If they don't understand something, I teach them how to come to understand it, to engage in "permanent research".
- One time I asked grad students to read a six page interview with a Brazilian peasant who was criticizing the education system. It was a marvelous text.
- I modeled reading critically by voicing aloud my points of incomprehension and my metacognition. I voiced aloud my interpretation as it progressed. Then a student picked up for me.
- We spent *four class periods of three hours each *on that bad boy. A student told me that he'd read it in 20 minutes, then after those four class periods, he told me that he didn't even realize he hadn't known how to really read.
- After that exercise, it should be easier for those students to read alone. I like this method, of showing students how to read one chapter very deeply, then giving them more freedom to read the rest.
- A 300 book syllabus rests on "a very problematic epistemology": *"if you insist on something, you end up getting it."*
- IS: The paradox of the whole thing is that we have to direct self-direction. I think these four class sections must have been marvelous. For one, you were a co-learner with the students. For another, you valued a marginalized text. So many teachers worry about "coverage", often with institutional pressure, and they can face consequences for not doing so.
- IS: How can we produce proof of the rigor of our teaching, like that student's 20 pages of notes on the six page text?
- PF: I've had students produce amazing final projects, but know this: it's impossible to measure knowledge with rulers. It's not *how much you read*, it's whether you've "overcome opinionating".
- IS: In the US, textbook publishers make a ton of money. Students always complain about the books--both in content and size.
- PF: lol
- IS: By reducing the breadth, we enhance the depth. But we should also choose texts that truly speak our students' language and touch their lives. The schools don't teach things that really matter to our students' daily lives, and they do so in an alien language. It's easy to understand how they become anti-intellectual.
- To make matters harder, if you lessen up on the traditional definitions of rigor, students might think you're being soft on them, or they might feel lost.
- PF: A student once gave me a course evaluation saying that I had made a big mistake: I assumed that the students were ready to "assume the responsibility of shaping" themselves, which they were not. I killed myself in front of them, when really I should have let them assassinate me. If the students killed me, I would have the chance to be reborn as one of them. Since I had killed myself, my students felt like orphans.
- This is the difficulty: we have to avoid this laissez-faire atmosphere, but it must be democratic. You learn democracy by making democracy just like you learn to swim by entering the water.
- IS: Bringing in democratic practice must be matched with the students' levels of development. This liberating classroom depends upon a gradual release of authority and encouraging self-organization, and you can mess up by releasing it too early or too late.
- PF: I'm not sure I agree. It's not about releasing authority, it's about keeping your authority *non-authoritarian.*
- *<ins>**"Freedom needs authority to become free**</ins>*"
- Authority has its foundation in the freedom of others, and it becomes authoritarianism when this foundational relationship is severed.
- IS: This is a good point, and authority is necessary to my practice throughout the year. I try and show students that I am worth trusting.
- The liberating teacher is not "at a fixed distance", but varies depending on the needs of the students.
- The teacher, too, is re-created.
- PF: You can't just insist that students are equal to you and have it be true. *The dialogical relationship does not have the power to create such an impossible equality.*
- /// This is doubly true when working with young students whose inequality to you cannot erase
- Students are clever about this. If you say you're giving them freedom, they'll test you on it.
- And of course, "punishment" has its place "when [behavior] goes beyond the limits of democratic authority." I punished my kids, for example, when I had to. But I never beat them. I just explained what was wrong in a very serious way. I never told them no without saying why.
- I had a grad student who absolutely deliberately tested the freedom I gave her on the first day. I think she was expecting to get kicked out, but instead I just talked to her. She was a good student. We're not friends.
- IS: Students like that are like an ironic messenger, inviting the teacher to authoritarianism.
- When students challenge me in such unproductive ways, I try and behave in ways that short-circuit their manipulation.
- Unfortunately, sometimes I have to kick students out. I can't let one kid wreck everyone else's learning. Students with problems profound enough that school alone just can't fix it; "antagonism, alienation, and resistance"
- Larger classrooms are harder, too. More challenges and less room to experiment.
- Really, the differences between teacher and student are actually what makes liberating education possible. *"If the teacher is to challenge domination, he or she has to bring a political dream to places where this dream is only a possibility."*