thoughtsonPD


 * Background Readings for [|Konrad Glogowski]'s The Dialogic Educator: Becoming Teacher 2.0**


 * New Instructional Practices:**

Thus, teachers are scholars who both contextualize and produce knowledge, all the while sharing their abilities with students. Thus, the classroom takes on the appearance of a "think tank," an institution in which important knowledge is produced that has the value outside of the classroom. In modern positivism, teachers were instructed to say: "Give me the truth and I will pass it along to students in the most efficient manner possible." In the new paradigm, teachers are encouraged to support themselves, to assert their freedom from all-knowing experts, to operate in an unauthorized manner. Such teachers often say: "Please support me as my students and I explore the world of mathematic, sociology, or whatever." Teachers in the new paradigm refuse to accept without question the validity of the Western canon (the great books and ideas that have been taught in the traditional Western curriculum) as they seek knowledge from other cultures and traditions. Indeed, they are not content to operate within the framework that is taken for granted - they seek to recontextualize questions that have been traditionally asked about schooling and knowledge production in general."

[...] From the post-formal, new paradigmatic perspective the well-prepared teacher is not one who enters the classroom with a fixed set of lesson plans but a scholar with a thorough knowledge of subject, an understanding of knowledge production, the ability to produce knowledge,and appreciation of social context, a cognizance of what is happening in the world, insight into the lives of her students, and a sophisticated appreciation of critical educational goals and purposes.

[...] We are interested in synthesizing this diversity of ideas and insights in a way that helps students gain a multifaceted view of the world and themselves. Reuniting context, content, and methods, we attempt to make school an integral part of life - not a superfluous hoop that holds little intrinsic meaning for students. Without this connection to the lived world of students and dedication to meaning making, schooling becomes what Paulo Freire so aptly described as a banking process, where data deposits are made into the inactive mental vaults of students' brains. When this occurs dispirited teachers face a corps of passive, uninterested students and the potential for a meaningful, exciting learning experience quickly fades away.


 * Kincheloe, J. & Steinberg, S. (1998). Lesson Plans from the outer limits: Unauthorized methods. In Kincheloe, J. & Steinberg, S. (Eds.). //Unauthorized Methods: Strategies for Critical Teaching (Transforming Teaching)//. New York: Routledge.**


 * New Instructional Practices:**

"In our nation most colleges and universities are organized around the principles of dominant culture. This organizational model reinforces hierarchies of power and control. It encourages students to be fear-based, that is to fear teachers and seek to please them. Concurrently, students are encouraged to doubt themselves, their capacity to know, to think, and to act. Learned helplessness is necessary for the maintenance of dominator culture. Progressive teachers see this helplessness in students who become upset when confronting alternative modes of teaching that require them to be active rather than passive. Student resistance to forms of learning that are not based on rote memory or predictable assignments has almost become a norm because of the fixation on degrees rather than education. These students want to know exactly what they must do to acquire the best grade. They are not interested in learning. But the student who longs to know, who has awakened a passion for knowledge is eager to experience the mutual communion with teacher and subject that makes for profound engagement."


 * hooks, b. (2003). //Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope//. New York: Routledge.**


 * Building Communities of Learners:**

When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in anyway that I would not share. When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. But most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit.


 * hooks, b. (1994). //Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom//. New York: Routledge.**


 * Building Communities of Learners:**

RS: So one of the responsibilities of the teacher is to help create an environment where students learn that, in addition to speaking, it is important to listen respectfully to others. This doesn't mean we listen uncritically or that classrooms can be open so that anything someone else says is taken as true, but it means really taking seriously what someone says. In principle, the classroom ought to be a place where things are said seriously - not without pleasure, not without joy - but seriously, and for serious consideration. I notice many students have difficulty taking seriously what they themselves have to say because they are convinced that the only person who says anything of note is the teacher. Even if another student does say something that the teacher says is good, helpful, smart, whatever, it's only through the act of the teacher's validating that the other students take note. If the teacher doesn't seem to indicate that this is something worth noting, few students will. I see it as a fundamental responsibility of the teacher to show by example the ability to listen to others seriously. Our focus on student voice raises a whole range of questions about silencing. At what point does one say what someone else is saying ought not to be pursued in the classroom?

bh: One of the reason I appreciate people linking the personal to the academic is that I think that the more students recognize their own uniqueness and particularity, the more they listen. So, one of my teaching strategies is to redirect their attention away from my voice to one another's voices. I often find this happens most quickly when students share experiences in conjunction with academic subject matter, because then people remember each other.

hooks, b. (1994). //Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom//. New York: Routledge.**
 * (Dialogue with Ron Scapp)


 * New Professional Development:**

One of the most important examples of the liberating possibilities offered by teachers as researchers is presented by Paulo Freire and Ira Shor. Teachers, they argue, must research their own students. It is a research which focuses on the spoken and written words of students in order that the teacher may understand what they know, their goals, and the texture of their lived worlds. I can teach effectively, Ira Shor, asserts only if I have researched my students' levels of thought, their skills, and their feelings. In conducting this research in the classroom, he continues, success is possible only if the teacher creates a situation where students feel comfortable to open up and express what they are authentically feeling. To accomplish such openness teachers must exercise restraint. They must avoid monopolization of classroom conversation in order to encourage student talk - talk which reveals their idiom and their consciousness. The words of students are the ore of teacher research. From this ore the teacher as researcher extracts valuable insights into the student's cognitive levels, their pedagogical intuitions, their political predispositions, and the themes they consider urgent.

[...] If schools are to be places which promote self and social empowerment, teacher work will have to be redefined. Teachers will find it necessary to develop knowledge and skills that allow them to connect educational practice with larger social visions. When they inevitably pass such knowledge and skills along to students and community members, they will be providing the tolls which will allow them to become leaders rather than simply managers or civil servants.

[...] Change is a fundamental goal of the teacher as critical researcher. Henry Giroux develops the idea with the conception of what he calls the transformative intellectual. Transformative intellectuals treats students as active agents, render knowledge problematic, utilize dialogical methods of teaching, and seek to make learning a process where self-understanding and emancipation is possible. Giroux interprets this to mean that transformative teachers "give students the opportunity to become agents of civic courage, and therefore citizens who have the knowledge and courage to take seriously the need to make despair unconvincing and hope practical (Giroux & Aronowitz, 1985, p. 37).

[...] With their memory of educational possibility intact, transformative teachers work to relate student experience, popular culture, and the effect of dominant modes of thinking in the attempt to help students and community members make sense of their relationship to the world which surrounds them. When such concerns are informed by the academic perspectives of disciplines such as history, literature, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, and others, the possibility of critical thinking, and self-direction is enhanced.


 * Kincheloe, J. (2002). //Teachers as Researchers: Qualitative Inquiry as a Path to Empowerment (Teacher'slibrary)//. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.**