Talk:Common learning/foundational knowledge
From Studyplace
What educates, in terms of “Foundational” readings in education? (A Voice from Canal Street.)
For the past 15 years I have been teaching a two-credit educational philosophies course that is required of all graduate and undergraduate students at Metropolitan College of New York.
Most of my students are working adults who also have family responsibilities. Thus they have limited time (or patience) for assigned readings that are lengthy, convoluted, or abstract. With these constraints in mind I have put together a course pack of short, provocative, and historically important selections from the history of educational thought that I use together with a more topical text to generate student engagement with their learning.
Over the years I have found that the selections (listed below) work extremely well in terms of generating critical thinking and an appreciation for perennial questions in educational discourse (One former student even referred to the Custom Course Packet as her “Bible”!) The contents are as follows:
Plato: The dialogue with the slave boy from the Meno (12 pages).
John Locke: Selected key passages from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (5 pages).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Selections from Emile (I have used my Abridgement of the text that is on the ILT website, about 40 pages).
Horace Mann: Selections from the “12th Annual Report” (5 pages).
Booker T. Washington: Selections from Up from Slavery that focus on Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition Address” (10 pages).
W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from Dusk of Dawn and Souls of Black Folk that contain his disagreements with Washington (7 pages).
John Dewey: “My Pedagogic Creed” (5 pages)
Paolo Freire: Selections (mostly from Chapter 2) from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (8 pages).
The whole packet ends up being less than 100 pages, which in the undergraduate Human Services course I cover in the first 8 sessions before moving on to Wm. J. Noll’s Clashing Views on Educational Issues, (part of McGraw Hill’s Taking Sides series). In the Masters in Education course I intersperse the readings in the course packet with chapters from Gerald L. Gutek’s Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education, which also has the advantage of providing SHORT selections, but which is somewhat weak in other ways.
Comments: I generally assign both Plato and Locke together, to open the students to the question of where knowledge comes from. The readings provoke lively debates between those who side with Plato’s provocative claim for innate knowledge that only needs to be drawn out and those supporting Locke’s argument for learning through sense experience of the environment. With the more lengthy Rousseau selection I let the students pick and choose, and often it is this assignment that is the most compelling for them, with responses ranging from debates over swaddling to observations on the ways that today’s consumer culture, by generating artificial needs, actually makes children weaker and more “wicked.” The Mann text invariably generates earnest and fulsome tributes to the importance of education in fostering social, economic, and personal empowerment. I assign Washington and Du Bois together to provoke a debate about vocational vs. humanistic education, and students often get vehement in their discussions of this issue. The Dewey text (again mercifully short) provides the occasion to reflect on the extent to which the students’ own education at MCNY is Deweyan in its general aims and methods. Finally the Freire text gives us a chance to unpack a relatively challenging philosophical reading together as a group.
I am convinced that these texts do “educate” in terms of opening students’ minds to new possibilities, And in terms of teaching, I must admit that I never tire of them and never cease to learn something new from each reading, even thought I’ve been using more or less the same passages over and over for over a decade.
One more thing about what educates: I am a firm believer in the old idea that the work of writing educates, and so with each reading assignment I assign a short (2-4 page) writing assignment that I grade and hand back the next week (and encourage students to re-write). These papers form the basis for the class discussions and for the essay exams at the midterm and at the end of the semester.
Grace Roosevelt
Except where