31 August 2008

It's like Freddie said...


After reading about the basic tenets of process pedagogy in Tobin's article and recalling some of the more detailed articles we [W509 people, this is a shout out to you] read last semester, I believe that an independent secondary educator who strictly adheres to process pedagogy [further referred to as pp] could be forced out of her position rather quickly. Because SATs and APs are viewed as popular benchmarks of a "successful" high school career, students, parents, and administrators thrive on high scores, putting the pressure to perform as much on the teachers as the students. On the SAT, students have 25 minutes to write a response to a prompt. On the English Language and Composition Exam, students write three essays (40 minutes per essay) in response to three exacting prompts. Under these conditions, a teacher who adopts pp will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to prepare her students adequately for these tests if students are used to choosing their own topics and continuously revising their papers under the guidance of either a teacher or their peers.

As an AP teacher, I believe part of my work needs to be to directly prepare students to succeed on these tests if this is truly what the students want; therefore, students need to practice responding to prompts, writing a first draft at a certain speed and quality, and understanding the audience and context of their essays...none of which is compatible with pp. On the other hand, the intention of pp to help students establish an identity as a writer that "will remain long after the course has ended" is the very underbelly of my mission as a teacher: to help students become lifelong learners. Pp favors discovery, failure, and surprise over a fixed, static curriculum, lending itself to the goal of lifelong learning. But does the practical application of pp really lend itself to lifelong learning or just lifelong rambling of students who have never been exposed to certain ideas? Don't we need to read and consider the ideas of writers, scientists, philosophers, etc. before we can make an informed opinion in our own writing? I cannot even imagine trying to form my own thoughts on epistemology or metaphysics or the like without reading several texts first.

Educators need to expose students to conversations that already exist, so students know the quality and depth they have the potential to reach in their own writing. Showing students where to access ideas, to think critically about the ideas, and to discover their own ideas (through writing) will increase their curiosity and their chances of remaining lifelong learners, and hopefully, lifelong writers. This is a successful high school career, not high scores on SATs and APs.

Let's pp all over these tests that dictate the k-12 curriculum.

I'm interested in knowing what you guys think the primary role of education is: to help students become lifelong learners or possibly to prepare students for employment, for citizenship, or for world domination.

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2 comments:

Jaclyn H. Lutzke said...

I feel I'm most failing to "expose students to conversations that already exist." Sure, that's happening, but do my students realize it because they haven't been told it outright? And how do I recover from that error, oversight, whatever?

The biggest 'hitch' in the whole PP thing is, truly, how much it necessitates an understanding of self. My students don't seem to get that there is so much in the world SO MUCH BIGGER than they--ideologies and whatnot, and that me standing in front of them saying, "who you are is valuable" is an expression of a certain understanding of the universe.

August 31, 2008 at 9:39 PM
LGsnitcher said...

It's strange, but in my limited teaching experience, I've found that with students, you kind of need to go through the back door in order to get to them. If I were to tell my juniors that their experiences are worth writing about or that they are valuable members of society, I'm pretty sure they would give me that "Oh, Ms. G is optimistic...isn't that sweet?" look. Sixteen year-olds are pretty skeptical. I find that if I can give them readings or have certain discussions with them in which they lead themselves to the very same conclusion (which we teachers have been plotting all along) that they are more likely to be affected by the experience because they believe they were the catalyst of the epiphany rather than the force of my sometimes wide-eyed optimism. Does that make sense? I don't know.

The other thing is sometimes giving them a loose prompt for a reflective writing assignment will sometimes light the fire underneath them too.

Let me know how it goes for you, Jackie!

September 1, 2008 at 10:07 PM

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