Shift Happens
Networked Student
The Machine is Us/ing Us
What Do Teachers Make?
Quotes
"To me, that’s what 21st Century Skills are all about, teaching our kids to navigate the world as they are experiencing it, not the world we experienced.
-Will Richardson
"“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
-Albert Einstein
Chris Lehman at Practical Theory:
But I want to examine a different but necessary change in the rhetoric of schooling that, in my opinion, stems from this revaluation of care. It is common in the language of school reform to hear people talk about the need for a 21st Century workforce. Now, there are a lot of reasons why I think this is shooting too low, but Noddings offers another reason why that's the wrong lens. The notion that our job as teachers is to create a new workforce suggests to our students an objectified relationship that is the antithesis of care. To me, the language of school as pathway to workforce does not suggest an active, engaged, caring relationship between teacher and student. It, instead, suggests that education is something we do to kids in service of the larger need of society -- and a market economy -- to have an educated workforce. Personal growth, emotional well-being, the need to educate and care about whole child take a back seat in that rhetoric.
Instead, if we talk about schools that help students become 21st Century citizens, we can speak to their need to be engaged and involved in their entire world. We can talk about how our hope for them to find their place in our society, not just as worker but as person. That rhetoric, to me, speaks to a transaction of care, because it aspires to help students find a rich and meaningful life while also teaching the need to be part of the larger society in powerful ways. Surely, we can find ways to explain the need for mathematics, science, literature and the like through that rich lens. Surely, we can explain why our desire to teach those ideas to students speak to a care for them and for our world that can convey to students the belief that our schools -- and the people within it -- are there because they care about them.
