This addresses something we talked about last week in the morning session; what is knowledge? Are we just teaching children stale information without connecting it to their lives? Can we say what we are teaching is relevant if we do not involve families and communities and children's prior knowledge when learning new concepts? Can there be learning without trust and relationship?

The idea that schools can miss the multiple ways in which non dominant parents participate in their children's education came through very clear in the two videos we watched this week (Eggers and Andrade). Particularly Eggers talked about a trust gap when he opened his tutoring center with the pirate store in front and he was puzzled when no one showed up. Not only did he have to get creative about how to make such a tutoring service legal in the city's eyes, but he also had to address the need of building trust in his community. I feel like this is a necessary first step in making sure parents co-participate in their children's learning.

By first defining urban education in the authors own terms and then underlying the complexity and singularity of locations I think the authors point out to the reader the importance of thinking deeply rather than in a shallow, superficial way, of seeking more questions rather than stock answers. In our cultural dialogue about education in general, and certainly urban schools, it seems like everyone also has a simple solution that rarely addresses the uniqueness of each urban community, its resources and its strengths. Acknowledging complexity can connect one to Freire's ideas of dialogue in the face of our uncertainty. One can be not only curious, but humble in the pursuit of building knowledge with others, rather than building knowledge by adhering to a set of guidelines or expectations decided by a few. This actually allows complexity to be at the center, as a strength, rather than on the outside as a problem to solve.

Yes. I feel like this all the time. I did Americorps and one of my projects was teaching in an elementary school in Brownsville, Brooklyn and then setting up and facilitating an after school program for the children that attended the school I taught at and lived in the same project complex as me and my team members. It became very apparent to me that year that the community had so much to offer that was not being utilized and all the conversation about education inside of the school walls was about deficits and lack as they were constantly in a struggle to follow state and federal guidelines that did not make room for the unique offerings and challenges of the neighborhood. Home and school were very much attempted to be kept separate and the families were rarely asked to engage except on the occasion that problems arose.The after school program was meant to address these family-school life gaps. Additionally, I think the demand on teachers is far too high, as we talked about in class with Maslow's hierarchy; food, clothing and a safe home environment need to be met before learning can take place. This tends to fall on teachers when students are "underperforming" but we forget that our society has failed the children first by not ensuring basic needs have been met. In terms of dialogic love, Freire is clear that each of us is unfinished, meaning there is still more to learn. This learning occurs in our encounters with others. If we are open to the "funds of knowledge" of others, even when they conflict, we can actually create community in a way that deeply supports children's development and growth. This requires not only active listening, but I think a desire to seek connections in places that are usually not connected, making children feel whole in their lives, rather than compartmentalizing school and home.

This ending feels like Bronfenbrenner is underlying the ethical nature of our work. What we decide to research and how we research it has implications for how we construct knowledge. If we continue to ignore the systems that effect development we will produce limited types of knowledge and collective understanding.

This idea of reciprocal processes reminds me of a metaphor of the mountain stream frequently used in dynamic systems theory to view human development. This metaphor is meant to counter the human as computer processing model. Esther Thelen writes:<br> "This is an apt comparison to keep in mind, because a stream is moving all the time in continuous flow and continuous change. Development is continuous—whatever has happened in the past influences what happens in the future. But the stream also has patterns. We can see whirlpools, eddies, and waterfalls, places where the water is moving rapidly and places where it is still. Like the stream, development also has recognizable patterns: milestones and plateaus and ages and stages at which behavior is quite predictable. In the mountain stream, there are no programs or instructions constructing those patterns. There is just water and the streambed under it. The patterns arise from the water and natural parts of the stream and the environment, such as the streambed, the rocks, the flow of the water, the current temperature and wind. The patterns reflect not just the immediate conditions of the stream, however; they also reflect the history of the whole system, including the snowfall on the mountain last winter, the conditions on the mountain last summer, and indeed the entire geological history of the region, which determined the incline of the stream and its path through the mountain. In addition, the stream also carves the rocks and the soil and creates its own environment, which then constrains and directs the water." Bronfenbrenner's work seems to address what is a huge hole in cognitive science which is that we are much more than just a brain in a body, we are also our past experiences and also embedded in systems that have a input in our development.

This idea of the transforming experiment very much reminds me of the work we do with provocations from the Reggio tradition. We as teacher-researchers, in our desire to better understand our learners, attempt to alter or provoke aspects of the learning environment. The idea of co-construction is important here as the authors of this article stated earlier not only does the environment influence the person, but the person influences the environment. Does anyone else see the resemblance?