As I was writing today I was feeling unusually blocked in my progress and was having difficulty summarizing some key ideas I've been working with. After some reading and pondering I hammered out this little gem about the "site" of school reform:
What we need to address is how we prepare school administrators and teachers to change the system from within. Too often our teacher and administrator preparation programs merely reflect the current realities of "schooling" in America, and by focusing on those realities they inadvertently replicate them. We need a new model of personnel preparation that develops teachers and leaders who are skilled at bringing the community, culture, and context into the classroom; thereby acknowledging the interdependence and, paradoxically, the individuality of the students. Schools should not be "liminal spaces" suspended between hegemonic values and individual students' cultural identities. We need teachers and administrators who can create spaces that value students' "place" in the world while also giving them the tools to navigate and, if possible, recreate the hegemonic ideals that promote exclusion and cultural homogeneity.
It's still pretty rough, but I think it gets the idea across...your thoughts?
Sounds good to me, but how? How can you change something that has been created to not be changed? Also, how do you teach people to think for themselves after they have already been taught to think with only a lesson plan or book or even sometimes their boss? Too many teachers depend on what their administrators or lesson plans say (which just so happens to parallel what material is on SATs) that they don't know or have forgotten how to teach differently.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, but I recently overheard: "Why couldn't we use all that money they throw away on disabled students to save the jobs of the professors we lost?"
ReplyDeleteSo, do we need to take one step back and look at those who prepare school administrators and teachers first?