EDTC 6431 - Student Expression, Creativity & Innovation (ISTE 1)

ISTE 1 - “Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.” 

My Module 1 Triggering Question: Which tools and procedures are best for recording, editing and sharing student-created podcasts? 

My research has helped me discover a gap in my triggering question. I recognize now that I may have been putting the cart before the horse where recording and production are concerned. That is, well before students are ready to record, edit or publish their masterpieces, they need to familiarize themselves with the medium and deliberately work on the pre-production elements of script writing, editing, reading aloud, and generally understanding the medium. Podcasting is not just talking into a microphone and demands deliberate planning and forethought.

Teacher Tony Vincent warns about the pre-production demands that both student and teacher may be unaware of saying "I've found that pre-production takes over three-quarters of the time to produce a podcast" (2008). He offers helpful reminders to students about determining exactly who their intended audience is and to make careful considerations where language and style are concerned.

Vincent also suggests that writing and recording the introduction last ensures that it reflects a concise teaser for the podcast that follows. This not only mirrors the styles of radio and television, it also mirrors the essay writing process. I have often encouraged students when writing a chunked and scaffolded essay with PEE paragraphs (i.e. Point-Evidence-Explain) to write their intro paragraph last. That way, it reflects exactly what the paper is about and that they are not unneededly pigeonholing themselves.

Considering mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery students need to familiarize themselves with the medium and the myriad genres within podcasting as a frame of reference before creating their own. I remember back to my journalism days in high school and college and the assignments where we were given a sample style and asked to write our next piece as if the sample author had written it. I think this could be a necessary first assignment for students to do a short five-minute podcast either autobiographical or a one-on-one interview and practice in the Fresh Air or WTF style of interview or the cliffhanger narrative style of Serial.

My research did yield some detailed resources to guide students to the best tools for recording, editing and publishing. When my students are ready to begin sampling the variety of available apps, I’ll send them to this EdTechTeacher link.

Greg Kulowiec gives a knowledgeable and succinct video tutorial of Spreaker which not only seems the most intuitive for me, especially where editing by clicking and dragging or selecting and cutting are concerned but also its accessibility. It is available for Chromebooks and for both Android and OSX mobile operating systems. I would encourage my students to peruse EdTechTeacher’s full list (pictured below) of sortable by column, free and field-tested recording, editing and podcast productions apps. (Kulowiec, 2016).

I am hopeful about the opportunities for student voice and creativity in production and assessment. I also believe that podcasts lend themselves well to group projects, considering their multi-faceted production elements. 

One intriguing finding from my research connected with my interest in differentiating modes of assessment. That is, what if we encouraged students to create a podcast in lieu of a research paper. I found a US News article that features an Edmonds-Woodway High School 10th grade English teacher Nancy Branum and librarian Karen Rautenburg who did just that. 

Branum noted that the structure of the podcasts paralleled that of conventional deductive style research papers but allowed, even demanded, for more creativity and intentional storytelling, which piqued student interest and engagement. “Just like a paper, a podcast needs a beginning, middle and end, Branom says. ‘You have to have a hook and an introduction with context. You have to introduce your interviews and you have to be able to decide, well, what chunk of this interview I'm going to take so it makes sense – kind of like evidence from a novel that you put in a paper’” (Pannoni, 2016).

I am intrigued that student-created podcasts could drive student expression through storytelling and critical thinking and differentiate assessments as students interview experts or each other and create primary/secondary source evidence, gain media literacy skills and contribute to our growing digital record of contemporary history.

References
Kulowiec, Greg (2017). Podcasting: Using Podcasts in the classroom. EdTechTeacher. Retrieved from: http://edtechteacher.org/tools/multimedia/podcasting/

Pannoni, Alexandra (2016, Feb 29). High School Teachers Tune In Students With Podcasts: Podcast assignments can show teens another way to tell stories. US News. Retrieved from: https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2016/02/29/high-school-teachers-tune-in-students-with-podcasts 

Vincent, Tony (2008). Creating Podcasts with your students. Reading Rockets. Retrieved from: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/creating-podcasts-your-students

The Constitution & The Future of Public Education

EDU 6120 Week 9

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” - U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1

For writing this week, I wanted to delve into both the case law and results that have informed the debate about religion in public schools. Specifically, this concerns the first sentence of the first amendment (above), and its two clauses, which have become known as the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. These two, somewhat competing notions, rather succinctly define the relationship between religions and the federal government and have been the basis for much case law that impacts public schools – both in terms of the expression of ideas as well as the utilization of space. Whether it is school prayer, posting of the Ten Commandments, public schools giving old free textbooks to private religious school or providing spaces for student-led Bible studies, the US Supreme Court has used this one monumental sentence of James Madison’s to further define the interwoven and complex relationship of religion and public education. 

Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) was one such important case in which the Court established the Lemon Test. “Under the ‘Lemon’ test, government can assist religion only if (1) the primary purpose of the assistance is secular, (2) the assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion, and (3) there is no excessive entanglement between church and state” (USCourts.gov). This often serves as three-pronged litmus test to determine if the particular relationship violates the establishment clause.

Then in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Courts decided that public schools must discontinue clergy-led prayer at school graduation and other required school gatherings. Simultaneously, the Court decided that during non-instructional hours, schools could be used as meeting places for student-led Bible studies as long as an “open forum” exists for all such student groups. This means that YoungLife would have just as much right to meet after school as the YoungSatanists. With this open forum decision, the Court believed this did not respect or favor one religion over another, thus meeting the establishment clause. And moreover, by providing the public space for student-led religious gatherings, the schools were not actively “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

As a social studies teacher, this is fascinating to me because it provides such immediate and tangible examples for students to witness the impacts that both the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court have on our everyday lives. Moreover, it can be a helpful exercise to understand the legal challenges of a constructionist reading of the Constitution. Such a lens limits or restricts judicial interpretation of the Constitution and is requires decisions to be based upon the exact words on the page. Considering the potential for discordancy between the establishment and free exercise clauses, this arena is rife for debate.

And, as much as I would like to spend the week writing about this high-minded debate that pits two clauses of one-fifth of the first amendment again each other, we live in such times where the immediacy of change demands our focus. We don’t have the luxury to daydream blissfully in the wheat fields of Constitutional Law. Instead, we must find shelter from changing political storm as the dark clouds of president-elect Trump’s decision-making looms like poison-filled zeppelins over our heads. These are eerie and ominous times we live in, especially considering Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as the new Secretary of the Department of Education. Trump’s initial proposal was to discontinue the federal DOE, which at this point, I think I’d honestly prefer.

DeVos, a billionaire with no professional experience in schools, has a noteworthy and troubling CV that includes donating to and advocating for the unsuccessful overhaul of the Detroit public schools. Her monies aided an experiment that doubled down on charter schools, which were also deregulated and faced little accountability despite continuing to fail students. As a helpful metric, we can look at the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) data to compare performance across struggling urban education districts and Detroit ranks lowest in the pack (Washington Post).

Moreover, DeVos, like Trump, supports the idea of school vouchers, which, according to the Washington Post “give families taxpayer dollars to pay for private and religious schools.” Trump and DeVos’ critique of status quo public education is that it is a monopoly that needs to be upended by privatized choice and olde fashioned capitalism. This means public education could resemble a marketplace where students and families take the per pupil allotment (a voucher) and decide what school they would like to attend. The money would follow the student. This could be applied to private schools, home-schooling and even religious schools with the Mueller v. Allen (1983) Supreme Court decision serving as ample precedent. Before even exploring the student and socioeconomic inequity inherent in the voucher system, it is important to consider the irony that “big government reformer” Trump is now encouraging a $20 billion federal system and the massive expansion (in financial power and bureaucratic breadth) to a federal department that only weeks ago he considered terminating.

Yeah, that sounds like smaller government to me. As quoted in the Washington Post American Federation of Teachers, the second largest national education union, President Randi Weingarten said that Trump’s pick [DeVos] “makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America.” This is not hyperbole. With Trump and DeVos’ proposed reformation of public education - a federally managed pseudo-privatized system of “choice” - we’d see the state and local framework for control (as established by the 10th amendment or reserve clause) and re-established with the ESSA reauthorization in December 2015 begin to evaporate.

According to the famed-Internet science blog and publication IFLS, the US National Education Association, the largest national educators union, criticized DeVos’ voucher proposal saying “These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education." Sadly, these are not DeVos’ only dubious “qualifications” for the job.

I couldn’t help but notice the parallel between my topic and this emerging news. DeVos, if approved, stands to have great influence over the relationship between public education and private, religious schools – a relationship that the Court has slowly and meticulously defined during the last 100 years. I am hopeful that precedent and our country’s commitment to state and local control of the great experiment of public education will win the day. 

Resources & References

Washington Post – Betsy DeVos – Nov 23, 2016   

Washington Post – Trump picks billionaire DeVos – Nov 23, 2016

New York Times – DeVos wrong way to fix OpEd – Nov 25, 2016

IFL Science – DeVos picked – Nov 25, 2016

Horace Mann, Oh How Little Has Changed...

EDU 6120 Week 7

Horace Mann’s commitment and ideology to the social and economic benefits of education laid the foundation for Common Schools in Massachusetts in the late 1830s and later inspired the nation to endeavor into the social transformation made possible through public education. It is empowering to read his words that still guide our thinking about social responsibility today. His deduction that education is the essential communal lever for social transformation is revealing as we still wrestle with these questions 170 years later. He queried, “To what extent can competence displace pauperism?” That is, can education of the masses lead to the eradication of poverty? He further inquires, “How nearly can we free ourselves from the low-minded and vicious, not by their expatriation, but by their elevation?” Here he muses, might the democratic state try to educate rather than simply cast aside or literally expel the ‘dead weight’ of society?

Mann’s democratic ideals and the belief in individual capacity and liberty are evident. I appreciate that he uses the larger economic realities of Massachusetts to assert his argument. He states, “by its [Massachusetts] industrial condition, and its business operation, it is exposed far beyond any other State in the Union to the fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty.” By recognizing the growing dual economy and disparate “haves” and “have-nots,” Mann compels Massachusetts to consider the responsibility to its citizens and the inevitable improvements, the result of an educated populace.

And although I am indebted to Mann for his argumentation and practical work that built of foundation for public schools in America, there are a few places where his assertions may have been too extreme in the belief that education was THE answer. He writes, “nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency of domination of capital and the servility of labor.” Really? nothing? What about actually having groceries stores in urban neighborhoods to eradicate urban food deserts? What about more equitable fair housing policy? How about infrastructural developments like public parks and better roads and public transit for cities and suburbs? Maybe even ending a federally induced War on Drugs that has conflated the public health issues of addiction with felonies and buoyed the prison industrial complex by disproportionately locking up brown and black boys – instead of actually educating them. It would seem that such policy concerns today are just as pressing as education access and reform.

Mann’s ideology even supposed that education “does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor.” This is sadly not so. Although public American education has done much to level the playing fields for opportunity, where race and sex are concerned (which are not yet equal or equitable), capitalism has still won the day. We needn’t look any further than the Occupy movement to recognize that class issues and income inequality are as stark as ever in our country. Public education has failed to close this gap. What’s more, the biggest boom of America’s middle class where arguably the greatest number of average Americans made the greatest gains both in terms of owning stuff (yay consumerism) and also generational wealth (yay living wages and retirement accounts) was the result of the post-WWII economy and not thanks to public education.

I think it is important to take Mann’s ideology to task considering so many of us are still wed to it. Rampant today are the public perceptions about the democratic import of public education that delude us to see education as THE panacea or at the very least, THE ONLY setting or medium, for improving social and economic ills. This has placed an undue burden on teachers and administrators by broadening the scope and weakening the impact of public schools. Moreover, it has driven arbitrary high stakes accountability measures so the public can annually quantify and measure its return on investment.

Now, I recognize that I am not being entirely fair to Horace. And honestly, from what I have read about the man, I think he’d be shocked at the present state our nation. Many of the political issues I raised and as well as the scope of my critique are anachronistic at least as far as Mann was aware. Yet, as I look around, so little about our system has changed since his time especially Mann’s proposals about how we should value and construct public education. Both ideologically and practically, our common school system is frighteningly similar to Mann’s time. Why are we still grouping kids by age? Uniform periods each course getting the same amount of minutes? Why for that matter are we still siloing content into discrete subjects? And why have we stayed wed to the physical structures of schools? Why use one room with desks all facing the same direction where one adult manages anywhere from 20-40 children? I think that someone like Mann, who clearly believed in society and the responsibilities therein would have an easier time figuring out what a smartphone is and how to use it than he would understanding why we’ve hardly augmented his schoolhouse model. Were he here today, he’d be on the front lines with us demanding reform.

Discovering Virtue Through Socratic Seminar

EDU 6120 Week 6

Herbart wrote that virtue expresses the whole purpose of education. He defined virtue as the “inner freedom that has developed into an abiding actuality of the individual.” Put more simply, Herbart believed that education and the responsibility of the teacher was to create the environment where a student can grow by safely embarking down a twisting and challenging path of individual curiosity, discovery and as Maslow would say, achieve self-actualization. This, at first, might sound counterproductive to the democratic charge of education today, which focuses on socialization, multicultural awareness, and an emphasis on collaboration and collective responsibilities. However, I believe that exercises and strategies like dialogue circles, Socratic seminars and thinking routines simultaneously serve these two idealistic aims of education by empowering and awakening the individual all the while creating the space and patience for collaboration, understanding and listening across difference.

My first, and arguably best, experience with Socratic seminar came during my 12^th grade AP English course. Dr. William “Doc” Carter was an institution at AHS by the time I took his course. He taught my mother the same course 30 years prior, though he didn’t have his doctorate in philosophy yet. Question of the day, his brand of Socratic seminar, was a routine that today, 12 years later, I still reminisce about with my friends from high school. All of us agree, this practice was an indelible component of our high school education. And upon further reflection, I think it is memorable both because of its atypical and democratic design of a classroom (i.e. we all sat in a circle facing our classmates) and the premium it placed upon each person’s “air time” to work through their own ideas and truth.

Each day Doc posed a question for the groups’ appraisal and reflections. Sometimes it was as inane as: “what’s your favorite color and why?” and other times as essential and challenging as: “does the death penalty serve as an adequate punishment or deterrent?” Every individual would be given 30 seconds to a few minutes to share their own ideas before there could be any questions, debate or dialogue from the whole group. Some days sharing, listening and dialogue was discursive, other days it was cogent, reflective and pregnant with meaning – all favorite Doc-isms of mine. On occasion, the topic was so rich that we easily talked the entire 55-minute period – many of us eager to stay through lunch and keep going.

I only remember covering four texts that year: The Iliad, Plato’s The Republic, Hamlet, and Brave New World – in that order. How incredible (and meta) looking back that we read and explored the formulation of meaning through The Allegory of the Cave while in Socratic seminar. What a remarkable modeling of collaborative work that charged each individual with being reflective, present and contemplative. This was next-level democratic teaching. Doc’s carefully constructed routine was reliable for each of us and such a platform readily enabled improvisation and investigation.

During Hamlet we were tasked with memorizing Hamlet’s soliloquy “to be or not to be…” where he contemplates the merits of suicide. I can still perform the entire thing 12 years later and remember vividly each of us standing and reciting from memory as much of the soliloquy as we could. I remember that it was only one other band and theatre nerd (like myself) who could recite it in its entirety.

Additionally, we had spiral-bound journals that we submitted to him bi-weekly for feedback on our poetry, short stories, and reflections from seminar as well as personal musings. This exercise was a useful contrast to our usual outlet for self-expression in his class and often included extensive, detailed and probing feedback.

Through each of the pedagogical strategies, Doc imparted his educational philosophy: we were, in his class and throughout the rest of our lives, to embark on the work of knowing ourselves for the sake of our interaction with and pursuit of understanding others. We were challenged to continually ask questions of others and ourselves and never believe that we had answers set in stone – big or small.

During his 44 years teaching high school English, Doc modeled and imparted this philosophy to countless students. Both directly and indirectly he demonstrated the that the virtuous inner life and goal of knowing our true self meant continually challenging our assumptions and biases – especially when it came to listening and working to understanding another’s struggle, strife or perspective. Doc inexorably shaped my educational philosophy and practice. I hope that I can continue to cultivate the patience and strength to lead by his example and pay it forward just the same.