Friday, July 30, 2010

Week 3 Readings Democratic Ideals in Education


I have found some comrades of similiar minds in the readings of McKenzie, J (2005) "Learning to question to wonder to learn" and Powell R, Cantrell S & Adams (2001) in describing a school project entitled "Saving Black Mountain: The promise of critical literacy in a multi-cultural democracy."

Firstly Jamieson McKenzie asserts that "Questions and questioning may be the most powerful technologies of all (p.15)." After all we are humans grappling with a new invention that has been overtaken with corporate interests and multinational control (Powell, Cantrell & Adamsp.772). Humans can use their "mindware" to overcome the plight of "MentalSoftness" by asking "smart questions" in the Smart State(McKenzie 2005)!

Full marks to Powell, Cantrell and Adams for advocating teaching as a "subversive activity (McKenzie 2005) as I have been doing this in my twenty years of teaching experience. Writing, e-mailing, petitioning, filming, photographing for real life literacy practises that capture socio-cultural awareness of young adult's pursuit of knowledge and action.

For over 20 years, I have been involved in various forms of “rich tasks” (Luke 1999) with my primary school students. From writing letters to government and corporate agencies about local, national and global environmental issues, filming debates on whether "To Zoo or not to Zoo" to investigate the pros and cons of preserving endangered animals, to simply propagating seeds and planting them in a school garden or community organisations. In 2010 I produced a DVD in conjunction with the Pullenvale Environmental Centred entitled "Nurturing Nature in the Diginative Age" documenting a Storythread Project espousing Values Education and the Children in Nature Movement. Many teachers and students in our state schools are actively involved, immersed and synthesising information to become information ‘literati’(I made that up?).

Now for the "digirati" ( Spender 1995)! The divide between the information rich and poor is highly visible when comparing Australian public school resourcing with the private school system which also benefited from recent government funding for schools. Maintenance of technology infrastructure in state schools is poor. Contract technicians are assigned to up to 4 schools resulting in once a week visits (Site 2 school visit 29-07-10).

Powell, Cantrell and Adams recognise that democracy is endangered with the schooling system held hostage by economic aims of governments and corporations resulting in a performance based agenda where teachers are forced into training mode and teaching to tests.

The American example of 4th graders defending a Kentucky mountain top from strip mining, easily translates to Australia's coal mining obsession, and the 2010 contamination of Kingaroy's water supply due to the mining industry, the expansion of coal mining in the Hunter Valley resulting in cancer clusters of local residents and there are endless examples of this happening here and now in Australia.

Bring back the notion of a democratic education process where literacy is used for "democratic aims (Powell, Cantrell & Adams)." McKenzie offers some useful strategies to use with students in classrooms and I will emulate his ideas below with my initial information literacy search lesson with my trial class.

Jamieson McKenzie’s website: http://fno.org/500miles/persistence5.html has some practical strategies for students to use when researching a topic of interest. He coins the term “prospecting” for navigating through the Web’s infinite sources.

While schooling in the 19th and 20th centuries was primarily about students mastering processed information - the core curriculum - it is likely that schooling and learning during the next century will be characterized by far more prospecting - the purposeful, skilled, but sometimes haphazard search for insight and truth across a complicated information landscape.

There are three stages to prospecting:

Locating reliable, high quality sites

Creating bookmarks for future visits when necessary

Creating a flow of information when possible


Power to the people!

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