Fascinating snippets from James' Talks to Teachers

It's a busy time around here in January, so instead of writing a longer post, I'm going to offer you a couple of thought-provoking excerpts from a book that I just finished teaching in our doctoral seminar, William James' Talks to Teachers. I am a huge fan of this book: it's concise, elegantly written, and still incredibly relevant even 120 years after it was conceived.

From the chapter on habit, here's James on the importance of developing productive habits early on:

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music...We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few, and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age, but if not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given.

We say abstractly: "I mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to the thought of my time..." But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin today. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry...and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

Or, more pithily, are you going to be an interesting middle-aged person or are you going to be someone whose tastes are frozen in time at age 22?

The Behavior I Intend to Change Is

Last February, I blogged here about fatherhood.  It's time for an update.  In that post, I mentioned the "daddy-daughter dance" at my daughter's school, which caused a young friend, the daughter of two moms, to leave school in tears.  I am happy to report that my young friend requested a meeting with the school principal and shared her thoughts.  The principal promised that the dance would be structured differently this year, and to a certain extent it is.  This year, it has been renamed the "Sweetheart" dance.  "Daughters" are invited, along with a parent/care-giver of their choice.

I am not so happy to report that further conversations about the fact that so long as a dance is girls-only it continues to perpetuate gender stereotypes AND THAT IS NOT OK were less welcome.  Yesterday I lived out the recurring bad dream of many of us who once attended school: I walked into a school cafeteria filled with peers who did not want me sitting at their table.  Having co-signed a letter to the PTO thanking them for their inclusion of diverse families but asking them to reconsider limiting the event to girls, I attended the meeting along with several co-signers in order to continue the conversation.  After I talked about Title IX and the harm that comes to boys and girls alike due to the perpetuation of gender stereotypes, even fewer of them wanted me at their table.  Although I have more self-confidence now than I did in high school, at that point part of me really wanted to grab some friends and go out for a pizza bagel.  In fairness, although several of the mothers present shook their heads at me in irritated disbelief, others suggested that we work together to address the matter.  The Assistant Principal said that change has to come slowly, which I thought was kind of silly since the dance has only been held for two years.

What struck me about the meeting was how quickly the PTO attendees and administration alike were willing to stop excluding diverse families and how reluctant many of them were to address gender stereotyping.  It led me to the sad realization that Americans of my generation are willing to welcome single-sex marriage because in itself it poses no significant challenge to long-standing gender norms.  If you open the dance to girls with two moms, you can continue to celebrate girls as princesses who are to be valued as sweethearts.  You can also switch the "mother-son Cubs game" to a caregiver/son outing without questioning boys' commitment to professionalized sports and ritualized aggression.  But if you encourage boys to value the arts as much as professionalized sports. . . . well, I don't really know what will happen (although I suspect it would involve a significant reorganization of values and commitments), and neither does the PTO (who are smart enough to have the same suspicions).

Did I mention that everyone at the meeting, with the exception of the male Assistant Principal, was a mother?  As my post a year ago suggested, the demands we make of fathers qua fathers are pretty low.  They certainly do not include unrewarding tasks such as baking hundreds of cupcakes, decorating the gym, and spending Wednesday mornings listening to the viewpoints of working women who have not volunteered this year because they are too busy earning salaries, traveling to conferences in foreign cities, and enjoying the esteem of peers in venues beyond the school cafeteria.  When I apologized for needing to leave the meeting early to get to work, one mother wistfully commented "it would be nice to be going to work."  Let it not be ignored that the flourishing of our children depends also on the work, the real work, done by her and others who dedicate themselves to the raising of children and the maintenance of institutions in which that flourishing can happen.  As the Illinois Fatherhood Initiative essay contest reminds us once a year, there's a lot of behavior that needs to change.

Dignity and Education?

42nd ANNUAL MEETING OF THE NEW YORK STATE FOUNDATIONS OF
EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
April 5 – 6, 2013

THEME: “Dignity and Education”

Potential topics include:
• Implementation of the Dignity for All Students Act (NYS)
• Surveillance of students-GPS tracking
• Surveillance of teachers-APPR
• Dignity and education: Civil liberties
• Affirmative action issues
• Cheating among tutoring companies
• High-stakes testing
• Bullying in schools

Proposals due January 15, 2013

The New York State Foundations of Education Association invites
participation in the Annual Meeting from all those interested in the
foundations of education as scholarship and lived experience.
Especially welcome are proposals that develop “crossover discourses”
between and among sustainability activism, socially critical
curriculum, progressive politics/pursuit of global social justice,
comedy, theater, and visual arts/media literacy used in real
classrooms and/or civic and informal networks. You don’t need to be
from NY State. Undergraduate Students, Graduate Students, and K-12
teachers welcome! Alternative formats welcome!

Our conference is intimate, activist oriented, has no concurrent
sessions, and provides a great space for dialogue and feedback.

Keynote Speaker: Barrie Gewanter

Barrie Gewanter is the Director of the Central New York Chapter of the
New York Civil Liberties Union. Her path to working with the ACLU has
been unusual. After receiving a BFA in Stage Management, she worked as
a stage manager and technician in the professional theatre. She then
earned a Masters in Sociology and taught college courses in Sociology
and Women’s Studies. (She also tutored the SU Football Team.) As
Executive Director of the CNY Council on Occupational Safety and
Health, she worked with businesses and unions to promote worker safety
and health. She has been an advocate for women’s rights, gay and
lesbian rights, voting rights, economic justice and civil rights.
Gewanter played key roles in the implementation of Domestic Partner
Benefits at Syracuse University, in the passage of a Living Wage Law
in Syracuse, enactment of Bill of Rights Defense Campaign Resolutions
in Syracuse and Elmira. In 2011 she served on an Advisory Committee
that drafted revisions to legislation guiding effective civilian
review of police complaints in Syracuse. This legislation was enacted
into law in late December of that year. She has worked on class action
lawsuits challenging inequities in resources for public education in
NY State and deficiencies in its Indigent Defense System. Gewanter has
received awards from the Syracuse/Onondaga County Human Rights
Commission and Peace Action of Central New York. In 2008 she was
honored with a Community Service Award from the Syracuse/Onondaga
County NAACP. She is now in her 16th year representing the ACLU and
NYCLU in the Central NY Region.

Proposal Guidelines:

All proposals are due by January 15, 2013. To submit your proposal,
please visit http://conference.nysfea.org/ or
http://bit.ly/NYSFEA2013. Please register for a user account at the
site if you do not have one already, so you can log in to start the
submission process. Only those proposals submitted through NYSFEA’s
online submission site will be accepted for consideration.

For further information please contact Dr. Shawgi Tell at Nazareth
College at stell5@naz.edu.

New DEEL seeks proposals

New DEEL is an small educational leadership organization which shares many ideals of educators and scholars in the Deweyan tradition. I thought, in the spirit of cross-fertilization and collaboration, I would spread the word about their recent Call for Papers for their May 2013 conference. The proposals are due on Jan 7, 2013 (see details below).

According to Ning of the New DEEL organization,

"The mission of the New DEEL is to create an action-oriented partnership, dedicated to inquiry into the nature and practice of democratic, ethical educational leadership through sustained processes of open dialogue, right to voice, community inclusion, and responsible participation toward the common good. We strive to create an environment to facilitate democratic ethical decision-making in educational theory and practice which acts in the best interest of all students."

Currently, New DEEL is calling for proposals for their May 2013 conferenced which will be held at Temple University in Philadelphia. The theme of the conference is Creating and Sustaining Democratic Ethical Leadership: The Impact of the Political and Global Financial Crisis on Education.


Proposals for the 2013 conference are due Jan. 7, 2013. For more info and to see the 2013 Call for Proposals, visit this website

The DEFCON project

Here's a super-geeky video of me talking about our DEFCON video game project at Congress 2012. It was produced by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which provided infrastructure support for the project. DEFCON is a violent nuclear war simulation, and (somewhat counterintuitively, perhaps), we're trying to see if it might have a positive educational impact. The video explains it all.

The DEFCON research has been conducted in  partnership with two other Concordia faculty members--Ann-Louise Davidson and Vivek Venkatesh. We've got some good initial results, and we're hopeful that we'll be sending off a journal article sometime soon.

A massive lobbyist-driven smartboard purchase gets erased

In a surprise victory for the technoskeptics of the world, the Québec government announced today that it is scrapping the previous government's plans to buy 40,000 smartboards for Québec public schools. Speaking to La Presse, Education Minister Marie Malavoy commented, "It was a comprehensive program that, after examining the evidence, didn't seem to be the best option." Malavoy further noted that school boards didn't actually want the smartboards--"The problem was that the smartboards didn't really line up with the needs of the school boards and the schools. They didn't ask for them. It wasn't a choice they made."

Interestingly, this development comes a few months after La Presse revealed that the company that makes smartboards (Smart Technologies) had, in 2011, hired Martin Daraiche,  a lobbyist who had previously worked as an advisor to both former Liberal Premier Jean Charest and former Deputy Premier Nathalie Normandeau. The mandate that M. Daraiche was given was to ensure that "a directive was established following the [government] budget which would confirm the mandate to furnish every classroom with an interactive blackboard in order to improve student success." Evidently, given the level of success that smartboards had under the Liberals, M. Daraiche's lobbying efforts met with some measure of success.

In Science in Action (1987), Bruno Latour talks about a popular (but, in his view, false) conception of technological progress that he calls the "diffusion model." In this model, worthy ideas and technologies seem to spread and multiply under their own steam, without human intervention. Latour comments at some length:

...it seems that as people so easily agree to transmit the object, it is the object itself that forces them to assent. It then seems that the behavior of people is caused by the diffusion of facts and machines. It is forgotten that the obedient behaviour of people is what turns the claims into facts and machines; the careful strategies that give the object the contours that will provide assent are also forgotten...the model of diffusion invents a technical determinism, paralleled by a scientific determinism. Diesel's engine leaps with its own strength at the consumer's throat, irresistibly forcing itself into trucks and submarines, and as to the Curies' polonium, it freely pollinates the open minds of the academic world. (p. 33)

As Latour explains, people work very hard on behalf of both ideas and technologies to construct strategies that will make them "just catch on." If these strategies work well, no one will ever notice them--the machine will simply have been "built right" and will have "really caught on." Smart Technologies tried hard to do this in Québec classrooms and failed. But it is instructive to realize that it is the failures that we notice and not the successes, which are all around us. Cellphones are a great example of a technology where we have bought into the diffusion model wholeheartedly; we have forgotten all of the strategies that were pursued in order to make cellphones appear necessary.

Are some of you out there reading this teachers and professors that are struggling with technologies that are trying to inevitably diffuse their way into your classroom? Is a smartboard or clicker system that will revolutionize student success just around the corner for your little nook of the educational realm. Tell us about it in the comments.

Killer Robots Bite Back (with a helpful educational website)

Some years ago, back in grad school, I asked one of my fellow students what he was working on. "I'm working on building robots," he told me, "Robots that fly around and can bite people." At the time, I was a bit taken aback by this, and I took some consolation from the fact that educational theory, my own subject, had somewhat less direct destructive potential.


As it turned out, however, my colleague had picked an excellent dissertation topic--as of 2012, the robots that bite (and that do rather more than bite) have been proliferating. One might say, in fact, that we are well into the era of the killer robot. Naturally, not everyone is overjoyed about this. What with this business of unmanned aircraft wiping people out left and right, people are starting to see these 21st century engineering marvels as harbingers of the surveillance society. As a result, drones have a bit of a PR problem.  

Conscientious objectors to the testing regime

This post comes from guest blogger, Carolyn Browder, a masters degree candidate at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University:

I recently read an article in The New York Time which profiles a movement of Brooklyn parents who are boycotting the standardized testing at their children's schools. Their complaint is not with the content or style of the tests--they concede that the tests may be worth while for measuring content knowledge as their children progress through school. They are instructing their children to sit out the tests out of fear that standardized tests are being overvalued in teacher evaluation. Many school districts are evaluating teacher performance based primarily on student test scores, and these parents fear that this will produce unhappy, unsuccessful teachers. First, placing such a tremendous value on the tests strips teaching of any artfulness or creativity. Second, teachers who believe they are successful because they train their students to perform well on a multiple-choice test might have an inaccurate perception of what successful teaching really looks like. For both of these reasons, Brooklyn parents and other around the country are showing concern that not only are standardized tests potentially disenfranchising students but they may also be causing harm to good teachers and reinforcing undesirable attitudes in bad teachers.

Obama’s Re-election: What Can We Anticipate for Education?

On the day after the election, many of us in education may be wondering what might have been and what will be when it comes to the presidential impact on schooling.  Mr. Romney’s election may likely have ushered in increases in school choice programs (especially vouchers and for-profit charter schools) and decreases in school spending (at least if Mr. Ryan’s budget would have held out).  With those changes on the loosing end of the ballot, should we anticipate more of the same from a second four years of President Obama?  In some ways, yes, I believe we will see more of the same—for better or worse. 

Given Mr. Obama’s emphasis on the need to keep America competitive in an increasingly technological and knowledge-based global economy, we will likely see more focus on recruiting and (hopefully) preparing math and science teachers, which will be backed with government funds.  We will likely see continued efforts to alleviating bullying and the achievement gap in schools, but we will likely see less federal funding to aid in doing so, especially as the last of the stimulus money dries up, putting Obama’s major first-term project, Race to the Top, at risk.  And while Race to the Top funding may cover some of the performance pay plans that the president desires, others will go unfunded by struggling local districts. 

Money may be sought from other sources, however, as I believe President Obama will continue to celebrate philanthropists and foundations that sponsor educational innovations.  Relatedly, I think President Obama will continue to applaud the efforts of organizations leading the charter school movement.  If his pattern from the first term holds, he will likely do so without enough careful scrutiny of the practices of those schools, especially in terms of how they use public dollars or meet the needs of poor and minority children with pedagogical styles that sometimes jeopardize other educational opportunities, like the development of good citizenship. 

I suspect we will also continue to see Secretary Duncan offering NCLB waivers, despite the fact that these have angered many political opponents who see them as circumventing the good intentions of the original law, which had Democratic roots, bipartisan support at the time of signing, and a Republican legacy.  Hopefully this situation might provoke positive changes and a reauthorization of the overdue ESEA law during Obama’s second term.  Additionally, I anticipate that Republicans at the state level will continue to push school voucher and tax credit legislation despite Mr. Obama’s position against it, as demonstrated by his stance on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.  Finally, the next four years will begin to show us the usefulness and effectiveness of the new Common Core State Standards, an endeavor that Obama’s administration has supported, sometimes dangling funds in front of leery states in order to get them on board.

This is what I anticipate.  I welcome hearing from you regarding what you suspect we will see in the next four years.

Photo credit: Romeo Area Tea Party

Just came across Ushahidi and am wondering how this "crowdsourcing" tool might support the kind of communication and community-building (read education) that Dewey -- and Jane Addams and others -- locate at the heart of democracy.  Remember, the cure for democracy is more democracy!   Anybody have ideas on how this came be used educationally?