Playing at Understanding Vygotsky

We actually read a decent amount about Vygotsky in our Psychology of Learning class, though interestingly enough, I don’t think that we actually read any material written by him.  During that time, I also began reading a book about approaching Vygotsky’s theories in tutoring situations, but I quickly lost interest.  The stuff people write about Vygotsky seems to be fairly confusing, but I didn’t find Vygotsky himself to be too far out there.  The way that he set up each chapter seemed fairly straightforward, and I definitely found myself agreeing with a lot of his points (even though my experiences are mostly confined to older children).  I really enjoyed the chapter on play.  I’m sure that a lot of elementary ed students get training about play theory and the purpose of play, but it’s never been an area that I’ve heard much about.  Vygotsky points out that play seems to be invented due to children’s unrealized/unrealizable desires or tendencies, and it is wrong to think that play is acting without purpose.  As a child, I liked to play school a lot, and I hated being the student.  I really wanted to be in charge, to have power, and that was a space where I could act this out.  Also, this make-believe activity was obviously not without purpose; even without the power struggle issue, I wanted to teach my little brother in the same way that my teacher helped me.  (I also wanted to dole out punishments on a whim.) 

Although Vygotsky states that play structures change as children grow older, I wonder how much of that change is due to school and societal restrictions rather than the developmental level of a child.  When I observed in middle school in the spring, I was surprised that the students didn’t have much time to just hang out on the playground.  Most of their time was structured, down to the second, presumably because the school administrators wanted to make sure that the students weren’t “up to” anything.  Not only does this confinement (and surveillance) make them feel constantly controlled, it also seems to take away their ability to “play” at being adults.  At age 11, all of their time is spoken for by academics.  Now, I’m sure they were required to take P.E., but that’s still a class that has rules, requirements, and grades.  Are we taking away their ability to play, causing them to act as adults far too early?

And speaking of restrictions, I think that ol’ Lev (I can call him that, right?) would have had some choice words about standardized testing.  He argues that writing should be relevant to life, even in a preschool setting, or it would become mechanized!   Obviously, the American educational system did not take his advice; my mother-in-law is a kindergarten teacher who must submit her students to a variety of standardized testing assaults.  Play is once again removed from the equation when these kinds of inorganic restrictions are imposed on writing because creativity does not fit within a small box.  Vygotsky believed that development occurs at some point after learning, so if we are teaching our students a very narrowed conception of what writing is, aren’t we essentially stunting their development?  I wouldn’t say that we are preventing development, but we are not providing a large enough zone for them to realize their full potential as writers and as citizens of the world.

A drive towards reconciliation

“I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love.”  (Freire’s footnote on p. 89)

I know that we’ve read a chapter out of Pedagogy of the Oppressed before, but I think that we should have already read the entire book—I feel like Freire’s work should be the bible of urban teaching/culturally relevant pedagogy.  I mean, I’m sure that it kind of is already, but I feel like it should be given out at the beginning of our coursework.  Its philosophy provides the foundation of so much of why we teach the way that we want to teach.  Honestly, I want to make time to return to it every year to kind of ground myself in what I’m doing.  As Freire points out, unless you’re constantly reflecting on what you’re doing, you could fall prey to going back to a position of the oppressed, wherein you “talk about the people, but [the teacher] does not trust them.”  In the Texas public educational system, I think that you constantly have to be at that work of praxis, of action and reflection, because so much of what you have to deal with in order to remain hired as a teacher is the enforced pedagogy of the oppressor.  It’s funny to think that the American public education system wants students to become critical thinkers, but the restrictions that are imposed upon the classroom create the opposite environment for that work to be done. 

At the heart of Pedagogy, Freire emphasizes that teachers/revolutionaries (I kind of just want to call myself a revolutionary from now on) have to be thinkers and doers—he likens praxis to the word, in that there must be both action and reflection.  It’s almost like Freire is talking about that educational term “best practice”; in order for the best practice to occur (and by “best practice,” he means transformation of the world order), teachers have to act and reflect on those actions.  In addition, they must charge their students to be involved in the same praxis through dialogue.  When Freire expounds on what he means by dialogue, I was pretty much swooning.  The language gets pretty New Testament biblical, I think, since he says that dialogue can only exist through love, humility, faith, and hope.  That’s some real talk.  Honestly, I think that we tend to think of those who love and have faith in others and have true hope for change as weaklings, in that they’re not strong enough to face the bleakness of reality.  No.  Freire points out that “love is an act of courage” (89), an act of bravery, and an act of freedom.  Control and manipulation in the classroom, and on an administrational level, is not an act of tough love.  That is no love at all, and when this kind of love becomes acceptable in urban schools, it is no wonder that the schools fail.  The students are still oppressed.

One issue that Freire brings up about the oppressed is the oppressor’s consciousness that they have internalized.  Because the oppressor views the world and those operating in the world as things to be possessed, the oppressed also begins to think of “being” as “having.”  My ELA IV students defined success in a warm-up at the beginning of the year, and most of them explained that success involved monetary comfort.  They may not have said that they wanted to be outrageously rich, but they all mentioned having things as being a measure of whether or not they’ve “made it.”  It’s difficult to work beyond this conception of success because, to some degree, they do need things, and I understand why they want more.  Who am I, a person from a mostly middle-class family, to be the person to tell them that success doesn’t have to be defined through accumulation of wealth?  I’d really want to have a year-long discussion on this idea, and return to it at the end of the year.  (Although, according to Freire, I’d need to make sure that they want to talk about this issue.)  Still, to get there, I need to make sure that I’m being a model of praxis and true dialogue, working with my students side by side.  Sometimes I find it difficult to cede control to others, but my resistance to working with would only mean that I, too, have played into the oppressor’s game where I am more concerned with a love of death rather than a love of life.

Dewey, the Prophet

It’s crazy to realize (or reflectively think about) that John Dewey published How We Think over a century ago, because a lot of his cautions about the way that school can harm rather than help students are still very real issues in public education.  I feel like this quote could be taken from an editorial on teaching on this very day: “The large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress conspire to give it [giving the correct answers rather than reflective thought] currency.”  If anything, this sentiment is heightened, since we have added the correct way to think to the correct answers problem.

Dewey’s points are some that we continue to emphasize as methods of good teaching—prior knowledge is very important, students who don’t answer a question immediately aren’t dumb, and there are many different kinds of intelligence.  He recognizes that all children are naturally curious, and our job isn’t to create that thirst for knowledge; instead, our role as teachers is to (and this is one of my favorite quotes) “protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blasé from overexcitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.”  As high school teachers, I think that we definitely get the short end of this stick on this ability to protect the spirit of inquiry because so many of our students have been forced into a school environment where their natural curiosities have been forcibly shoved into the recesses of their minds.  Standardized testing and harmful accountability measures have guided their previous teachers to focus on following formulas with a sprinkling of incontestable facts. 

Instead of the true reflective thought that Dewey explains, our students come to high school, ready to escape because the work of school has become drudgery.  Personally, I think that the students sometimes think that all of life is drudgery, especially since we present a college education as a means to getting a job where they can make more money than their parents.  We (and I don’t necessarily mean only teachers) have taught students to define success as monetarily outdoing the generation who has gone before.  There is no spark of excitement in this definition; there is only the drive to finish.  And what happens when students get to the point where they think that they can’t properly mimic what is wanted by a test?  They drop out, trying to get a head start on the money-making necessary for the rest of their lives.  Students tell me all the time that they could make it if they drop out of school, citing the example of Bill Gates.  I have to explain that Gates dropped out of college, not high school.  Also, their example is telling, too; they don’t mention scientists or artists or others who have dropped out.  They talk about a man who has made lots of money.  Now, I know this is a function of the economic situation that they have experienced, and I don’t think anything is wrong with wanting to succeed in an economic sense.  However, I do think that by playing into this function of education, we are reinforcing the dominant powers of the society and ultimately supporting drudgery for all.  I think Dewey would be very disappointed in this brutishness.

Also, on Dewey’s statements about Columbus:  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

Just food for thought!  (I’m mostly posting this in reference to Dewey’s statements about Columbus’s brave thoughts on the world being round.)

The October Slump, or Why I Sound So Negative

(Apparently it’s getting to that point in the semester where teachers get really frustrated and lose all hope of a positive tomorrow.  Now, I wouldn’t say that I’m hopeless, but I did let loose a good stress cry yesterday.)

The Dreamkeepers is kind of the perfect text to read while student teaching, but it’s also a little daunting and frustrating.  (I’m kinda pointing to the example of the bad student teacher.  I know Ladson-Billings says that she doesn’t want to compare him with the teachers highlighted in her study, but in showing all the things he does incorrectly, isn’t she still doing that?)  Although I know that “teaching isn’t telling,” I think that questioning aspect of good teaching requires building relationships with students first.  Otherwise, they’ll be resistant to want to think for themselves.  I think that I am lucky in my student teaching position because I have the space to be able to create these relationships and try to avoid telling; however, in previous teaching internships, this rut would have been hard to avoid.  I’ve also noticed in some forms of academic writing (like rhetorical analyses and certain aspects of mechanics in writing), it would be difficult to avoid telling.

One part that I really appreciated is the idea that students who are treated as competent will demonstrate competence.  I’ve already witnessed this in action with the classes that I’m teaching.  One of my best students (“best” in the sense that he always works hard on both reading and writing tasks during class) is an honest writer who carefully crafts all of his notebook entries and essays, and I’ve told him that I appreciate him being in my class several times. He told me last week that his senior English class was probably the first language arts class he’d actually enjoyed, because he felt like he was doing good work and that he belonged.  I think that my encouragement of his competence (as well as the “caring” part, too—for me, these facets of teaching go hand in hand) caused him to want to keep writing and try new things, which, in turn, allowed his competence in writing to shine.  I wasn’t the person who taught him these writing skills.  I mean, really, I’ve only been with him six weeks.  But I am attempting to create an environment that is conducive for his success.

The last part of The Dreamkeepers with which Ladson-Billings really challenged me is the political nature of the work of culturally relevant teaching.  That seemed to be one part of teaching that all of the teachers commented on: “I do what I want.”  And that’s the ultimate issue in teaching in public schools, especially urban schools, who are sometimes reliant on test scores just to stay open.  Administrators want to see that you’re preparing students for the test, and it can be difficult to obtain tangible data from culturally relevant teaching.  I think that this will be especially hard when we first get teaching jobs, because we will likely have the more difficult assignments, the classes who have to take these standardized tests, and it’s likely that we’ll be required to perform “benchmark” tests on them every few weeks.  So how do you get to be one of these venerated teachers from the beginning?  Is that even a possibility?