I agree with the article, "Education: The Case for Making it Personal" in the education journal Educational Leadership. Standardization has destroyed the personal connection between teachers and students in schools. It has also hindered real learning and replaced it with meaningless memorization. However, i don't think the article helps us too much. I feel at least here at the school of education at New Paltz that too much standardization is bad. I'm sure many educators would agree. The people who need convincing are parents and politicians and other non-education people. Without their support we will only have more articles like these that show a few diamond in the rough examples rather than making any real progress. If we want real change in schools we need to get out of our scholarly field bubble and reach real people about what we want to change in schools. Until then, this is only a dream.
The second article, "A Habitat for 21st Century Learning," kind of goes against the idea of personalization. I had a hard time relating to it for two reasons. First it centers around public schools in Illinois. If we want to personalize education each state with its own group of different cultures and systems, reading about Illinois and their problems does not help me as a New York teacher as much. They talk about making completely new buildings with every aspect to teaching in mind in the architecture and construction. They may have big open fields in Illinois to build on, but we have very little space here in New York. Although I enjoy the idea of making schools more community oriented I cannot relate to this idea very well either. My home town on Long Island is devoid of most culture and community. What do we do with a place that lacks community? See what I mean by we need to be more personalized in education. This article comes off as slightly ethnocentric to the situation the author is in. I would have liked the article to acknowledge that every school district faces a different set of problems when changing for the future.
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I think everyone needs to look at community in a different way. You can bring the community and culture into your classroom in so many different ways whether it is having someone who works in the community come and speak with your students, have your students have assignments that have to connect to the community. Community can be what you make of it. If you feel your town lacks community maybe the school can do something to help create a sense of community and culture. Like we saw in the video earlier in the semester, a learning center was built inside a pirate shop, who would think something like that would work.
ReplyDeleteIt is fun to dream sometimes and you never know what will happen.