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Current educational practice tends to make children less autonomous and less empirical in their search for knowledge and understanding as they move through the elementary grades. This trend is strictly at variance with the aim of those who focus on inquiry. \u2026We continue to give teachers fifteenth century tools to deal with twenty-first century education. P.156 (Freedom to learn for the 80s, C. Rogers, 1983, 1969, Merrill)<\/p>\n
Inclusive pedagogical models ask that professors be willing to demonstrate their humanity by identifying weaknesses and sharing personal accounts. It is important for students to understand what experiences and philosophies shape the way their professors teach, for example, what ideology informs their practice. This approach seeks to alleviate perceptual barriers by asking professors to give students a sense of who they are as individuals when they enter the classroom.\u00a0 (Realizing A More Inclusive Pedagogy:\u00a0 Afterword. 2003. Harvard Publishing Group.\u00a0 Tuitt, F. and Howell, A.)<\/p>\n
Being pedagogically transparent<\/p>\n
I noted in the Prologue that I consider myself to be a teacher who was conscious of \u201cradiating\u201d an inclusive classroom environment. Tuitt\u2019s observations with respect to how a pedagogy of visibility plays itself out vis-\u00e0-vis his Black informants\u2019 perception of their own safety in making themselves visible and vulnerable as learners was not unfamiliar to me. Except for one point. Tuitt, you will remember, is clear that students of color must experience that their teachers are knowledgeable and articulate about their own racial positioning<\/em>. Students of color relax into an attitude of unthreatened honest engagement if they believe their teachers are openly reflective pedagogues. That is, their teachers know and talk about who they are, where they\u2019ve come from, and what governs the instructional choices they make as teachers, as best as they can determine. If a professor understands instructional interactions as including an intersection of equally important social and cultural systems, and if a professor articulates the limits this understanding imposes on them, then students will be more likely to feel affirmed about who they<\/em> are and what they<\/em> know. These are Professors who understand that students need to make personal connections to whatever is being taught in order for that \u201csomething\u201d to be deeply learned. It is impossible for professors to be able to make a connection of that sort. The connecting must be embedded in the particular lived life of each student<\/em>. Tuitt\u2019s informants told him that in this kind of setting, learning flourishes. In this kind of setting, they are not \u201cfigments of (professor\u2019s) imaginations\u201d. Great phrase! Students are free to reveal themselves as flesh and blood, thoughts and feelings, people with a present and a past, people with certainties and uncertainties. Professors can do the same. When this occurs, knowledge is constructed from the deeper appreciation of how cultural and social assumptions both bind and liberate the processes of teaching and learning. In an earlier time, Carl Rogers called this process the \u201cfreedom to learn\u201d. His ideas, coupled with the preparation I\u2019d received that centered successful teaching around listening more than talking, connecting more than information giving, and focusing on successes, not failures, were a political inspiration for me. In Roger\u2019s view of the client\/therapist relationship, power was returned to the \u201cclient.\u201d Race was immaterial.<\/p>\n Freedom to Learn, Carl Rogers<\/p>\n Rogers was an academic mentor to me. When I came to Vermont, he had just written the first edition of Freedom To Learn<\/u>. In Freedom to Learn<\/u>, I saw a theoretical justification to affirm the ideas of power, identity, and connection that had played so heavily in my UTPP days. Early in my career in the academy, I invited him to come to Vermont to speak. His letter of rejection is the nicest \u201cNo\u201d I\u2019ve ever received. I still have it. Someplace.<\/p>\n One upside of my early years in Vermont was the freedom I had to further these ideas as we developed APEX, the American Primary Experience Program. One downside for me, as I look back upon it now, was the cultural isolation of Vermont. There were so few minority students at UVM that I never saw cause to do the personal work I am only doing now. I never saw cause to deconstruct my life in a way that would enable me to better understand how I got to be a White teacher who had this intense interest in figuring out how to teach in a way that enabled impoverished minorities, especially women and students of color, to learn with breadth and depth, passion and risk.<\/p>\n Vermont was a sustaining place that helped me become better at my teaching. It was also a place that put definite limits on who I was teaching. Rogers was the conduit that enabled me to instantly grasp what Tuitt was talking about. Through Tuitt, I realized my work was undone. This book is my effort to add that awareness to my professional practice.<\/p>\n Rogers helped me develop and strengthen the commitment to teach in a way that caused my students to be wholly engaged with their schoolwork for important portions of their school life. In later chapters, this idea plays out in my advocacy for multiple ability curriculum, for students being able to engage a big idea or essential question from several different cognitive vantage points and modalities of learning, to be as concerned with variation in how students could show what they knew as I was in varying the representations of content I was teaching. \u201cWholly\u201d holds special meaning to me – it means that good learning activity is activity that engages not only a learner\u2019s mind, but their heart and spirit and physical presence as well. I recognized this disposition in the best of the multiage teachers with whom I\u2019ve had relationships. It\u2019s interesting to me how the ideas of power, identity, and connection echo in what I\u2019ve written about their practice.<\/p>\n There are teachers I would describe as believing that learning is as much a spiritual activity as it is an academic exercise. They know from their labors that a child deeply engaged in an investigation that has captured her fascination is engaged in an activity dominated by the mind as well as by the heart. That activity simultaneously defines who she is as a person and the person she will become. This positive affirmation of self has profound consequences. Of course knowledge is constructed. But the byproducts of courage, confidence, self-affirmation and delight are what buttress this most essential core. This is a vision we must hold as we think about what we want for our young children\u2019s schooling. This is the start they must have. And regardless of how they come to us, I remain convinced the settings we provide for them must hold this promise (xiiMAP, 1993).<\/p>\n Roger\u2019s position defines the heart of motivation for me.\u00a0\u00a0 In Freedom to Learn<\/u>, Rogers returns to a theme that is core to most every thought he had about the educational process. If an individual is involved in a learning that is someone else\u2019s need, a disconnect occurs: a disconnect between a person\u2019s emotional and mental systems, a disconnect that separates their mental selves from their authentic self, a disconnect that shatters the fully integrated individual, the individual whose wholeness is defined by an integrated mind, body, and spirit.\u00a0\u00a0 His professional life as a psychotherapist had convinced him that if enough disconnects occur in a person\u2019s life, especially during their formative years, the individual psyche is damaged, perhaps irreparably.<\/p>\n Experiencing your own empiricism<\/p>\n Thus for Rogers, to avoid disconnect, a direct, hands-on engagement with the world is necessary. For Rogers, hands-on learning \u2013 a significant practice for us in APEX, and for me during the UTPP days – is what he calls \u201cwanting children to experience their own empiricism\u201d. I\u2019ve never been fond of the word for it masks a host of instructional strategies that might otherwise be available to a teacher. I feel the word is an inchoate description of what could be a powerful and detailed explanation for a while range of learning activities. Robert Samples writes that good learning is a conversation between work and play, a dialectical relationship between the two modes of inquiry if you will. Play and work remain in constant tension and define, I believe, Rogers\u2019 idea of empiricism. At the moment of play when an idea strikes a child, s\/he begins to pursue that idea with the intent to more purposefully investigate what has become curious to her\/him. In this moment play shifts to work. Intention. An implicit empirical hunch being chased down until an unusual event captures the learner\u2019s heart and once again sparks the spirit of play in an ongoing investigation towards that moment\u2019s particular Truth. My granddaughter\u2019s nesting of cylindrical containers starting with the large \u201cQuaker Oats Old Fashioned Oatmeal\u201d container. My senior student\u2019s intent puzzling out the unexpected challenge from a troubling sixth grader. My complete absorption with trying to make these words describe what for me has been an academic raison d\u2019etre for 39 years. To be empirical in Rogers\u2019 language is to be intentionally serious and loving and playful about chasing down your hunches.<\/p>\n Testing wags the dog<\/p>\n Rogers worried, in 1983, as I do today, that children are denied this opportunity at the moment they pass through the schoolhouse door. Today, more so than in 1983, most school curriculum draws upon a narrowing definition of what constitutes good thinking. The testing tail wags the teaching dog, much to the detriment of learning. Only those children whose natural proclivity is to think in abstractions are served well by the current spate of high stakes classroom assessments. Other children whose manner of developing conceptual knowledge might be through visual design work or model construction or the use of creative imagination, these children are systematically disadvantaged by the limitations of testing we now impose on schoolchildren.<\/p>\n The growth in my understanding of how the ideas of transparency and absorption in the learning process wove their way across my academic career was not a sequential process. As with so many realizations in this book, they only begin to reveal themselves as I began to write. Deriving their meaning came from trying to reduce the tension of trying to create meaning from these layers of thought that one endures when they propose sequences for what most surely are overlapping and often simultaneous thoughts. My chapter sequence did not define the order of how my writing occurred any more than the order of my writing define how my understandings were built. The connection between Rogers and Tuitt occurred only after I\u2019d surfaced the idea that engagement and absorption in the learning task were central themes for me. And that connection was anything but sequentially derived. It\u2019s an interesting story of serendipity, once again.<\/p>\n I\u2019d headed out towards the library that particular morning at 8:14am, determined to gain some headway on understanding how I was going to relate what at that point seemed to be a series of interesting but unrelated life stories that had something to do with understanding my role as an equity educator from a newly formed appreciation of my white positionality. Having gotten that far, I needed to begin to create an overall vision of what this book might look like. I thought if I mined this lode for a while, the overall frame of the book would surface. What I was working on was what Maisel calls the \u201cwhatever-it-is.\u201d The big idea, the passion that drives writers to share their passion with others, the theme that bounds a piece of writing. This \u201ctheme\u201d has the power to excite great passion and commitment to put pen to paper, and still be \u201cmurky and inexpressible.\u201d I can relate to that, for sure.<\/p>\n \u201cOnly rarely are writers able to put these ideas into words. Only rarely can they articulate their themes in simple sentences. The idea is understandable to the self, but no words come attached. The writer has everything she needs \u2013 a feeling in the belly, an image in the mind, some stray phrases \u2013 and she is ready to work. But as to what she is working on, she is not prepared to say.\u201d p.36<\/p>\n When I got to Bailey-Howe, the doors were locked. Saturday morning. Not open until 10. Dammit. I wanted to be here, sealing myself away. I\u2019d left home, left Ann with the kids, always a decision I struggle with. Now I\u2019d have resort to my office to write. I love my office but it is way too appealing for me relative to the distraction index and this was not a morning to exercise that particular disposition. I had three and a half hours. Period.<\/p>\n I get there, unpack, and go to work. There I am, in my corner, hunched over my iMac, tap tap tapping away, and thinking about a proof text, a quote from another writer that might set out the central construct of this project. I\u2019m desperate for inspiration, ideas, the word of God, anything!\u00a0\u00a0 I look up at my books and bingo!, there it is. The universe has provided! The blue cover of Freedom to Learn<\/u> stares out at me, right in front of my eyes. Why didn\u2019t I think of that?\u00a0\u00a0 I open the familiar pages, scan for content on absorption and before I knew it, I\u2019d found what I was looking for. But this was a breakthrough moment as well.<\/p>\n Carl Rogers, meet Frank Tuitt<\/p>\n The breakthrough moved my \u201cwhatever-it-is\u201d to \u201chere-I-go\u201d. That \u201chere-I-go\u201d was the belief that autonomy, self-direction, personal affirmation, and the sacred quality of these almost holy moments of learning are what drove me when I started teaching and they are what drives me now. They are thematic for me and they capture my devotion to ridding schools of at least one negative set of practices for Black kids and their families, to say nothing of University classrooms.<\/p>\n I learned about the power of this learning when I was teaching in those urban schools. Both occurred together in my personal history and they remain inextricably intertwined. The \u201cwhatever-it-is\u201d for my sabbatical writing needs to be about this kind of learning, the learning that captures all learners including those kids from Madison Junior High School and all their progeny into today. No one, let me repeat, no one should be denied the exercise of this very human capacity. The urban kids I taught in 1964 are no different than the college kids I teach today. Each has precious little opportunity to feel from within the total affirmation of these wholly engaged moments. Each needs to be embraced in an atmosphere of \u201cunconditional positive regard\u201d, to use another one of Roger\u2019s well-known cultivated dispositions. And it is in the place called School that these opportunities should occur. Especially for teachers to be. If they\u2019ve not been taught about it, if they\u2019ve not experienced it, how can we expect them to honor those moments for kids?<\/p>\n I had it. I had my whatever-it-is. Thank you, Carl Rogers. It was only much later that I realized how important it would be to my students of color especially, that I deconstruct my process of getting there; how this white guy came to understand the importance of pedagogical transparency and absorption in the learning process of minority students of all colors as the sine qua non that forges their opportunity to learn. Thank you, Frank Tuitt.<\/p>\n Learners need frequent experience with moments of complete absorption, of being in a state of flow, connection to the task (Csikszentmihalyi, M.). No excuses, no exceptions. Schools must ensure this occurs for every learner, bar none. Colleges of Education are not exempt.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Current educational practice tends to make children less autonomous and less empirical in their search for knowledge and understanding as they move through the elementary grades. This trend is strictly at variance with the aim of those who focus on inquiry. \u2026We continue to give teachers fifteenth century tools to deal with twenty-first century education. … Continue reading Chapter Ten. 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