The Maker Movement will onlysurvive and fulfill its educational goals if the decisions are being made byteachers, education researchers, and education policy makers—professionalsthat really understand schools, teaching, and learning.
I'm cynical but I don't think it will be. Was a nice thought, though.
it is an organicmovement that grows from the bottom up, and depends much less on cen-tralized efforts than previous attempts to change schools did.
And that is so important. But the following is true, too. Lots of places try to include these maker spaces with no training, no understanding, none of that.
The influence of these scholars and ideas is quitepresent in today’s schools.
I think the problem is that too many people want to be at the helm of the Cool New Thing instead of investing in methods that already work. We try to reinvent the wheel too often.
students’ learning throughout the process should take prece-dence.
Agreed, agreed!
We have seen students creatingfascinating musical instruments, clothes, costumes, and visual artsprojects, working with and augmenting traditional crafts, and creatinginteractive art.
::waving furiously from the music ed side of things::
we should use the language that offers the highest probabilityof success, engagement, and motivation.
There we go with our Zone of Proximal Development again!
Therefore, job market concerns should not be the main justification tointroduce makerspaces in schools—otherwise, should we stop investingin those spaces when the shortage of engineers is solved?
Thank yooooou!
preconceptions about their own ability
YUP — this is true across many different disciplines.
oversimplification
YUP! Some kids do not have the emotional capacity for failure tolerance, again, wait as Gen Alpha comes up through the ranks.
all students in a meaningful way, withoutexposing them to excessive levels of frustration
Yes, this, I'm so glad it's mentioned.
which shows how individuals can perform below their ability levelwhen they suspect that they belong to a group that historically does notdo well at a particular activity.
SIGH
The oppositehappened when those novice students were gracefully introduced to thespace and the tools and exposed to activities and technological instrumentsappropriate for their expertise level and age range
Age appropriate pedagogy, what a friggen concept!
ven lower self-esteem than before coming into the lab.
self-efficacy in making! (we just did a meta-analysis on this topic in middle school music students)
need a considerable amount of onboarding and facilitationbefore they can start “hacking” and learning by themselves
yes yes yes yes yes yes...lots of direct instruction before they can start doing. Kids need a lot more hand-holding than we think they do. (Adults do, too.)
xternally imposed identity
But it happens, and it happens so often.
beliefs rather thanknowledge
This is why we need the cognitive science part.
revolutionary technologies” often leads to con-sidering their benefits as self-evident.
No silver bullet.
has been to know what those changes are, whatfosters those changes, and when those changes are likely to take place
But how important is it to know the exact moment of learning, when it varies so much from place to place? When it is so differentiated from kids? These children are walking, talking, breathing, screaming variables, and it's hard to know exactly what will work for one, knowing full well it won't work for their neighbor?
And let's not even get into the neural networks in these feral pandemic kids. They are going to wreck the curve, hard.
ignores the fact thatthe naïve concrete/abstract dichotomy is a category error.
Yup! This is true, too.
multiple modesof engagement with them and a sufficiently rich collection of models torepresent them
What does that look like on the ground, though?
The lesson foreducators is that the work in FabLabs and makerspaces can be enjoyable butshould never be “easy” fun, devoid of frustration and difficulty.
This has a lot a lot a lot to do with the issue at hand, obviously, but even more to do with the fact that frustration tolerance and other aspects of children learning play in here. What is the frustration tolerance? What is a child's motivation to get this thing done? Are there caring adults around to make it happen?
And furthermore, something we see in music ed all the time when looking into new methods, what if we build it and no one comes?
research done by teachers as well
Pardon my French but nobody gives a shit about this! This is extremely important!!!!!!! And no one wants to look at it that way!
keychains and other trivial objects but never move on
This is very much a music ed thing, too. Playing music requires a great level of mastery of skills, but sometimes kids just drop it before they get to the good part. It's hard.
science museums need to move visitors quickly, which creates an incentivefor speed and standardization.
My friend runs the makerspace at the Orlando Science Center, and this is definitely a thing.
quadrocopter
Like the racoon in the video game?
This also downgrades anddevalues projects such as traditional crafts, costumes, pottery, technology-augmented wearables and jewelry, among many others (Buechley, 2013).
Pardon me, but THIS.
This pattern is alsoreflected in the demographics represented within the pages of MAKE mag-azine (Brahms & Crowley, 2016, volume 2 of this series).
I have seen what maker spaces look like in public schools in poor areas, where the main population is Caribbean immigrants & migrant workers...I would like to see more focused on that.
The idea that “every child is a hacker” is, at its best, wishful thinking, and atits worst, an attempt to blindly impose a very specific mindset—generatedin a very atypical environment—onto schools
I agree. This is where many of these learning frameworks break down.
hackers,publishers, informal educators, and workforce—have fundamental incom-patibilities with a culture of democratic, equitable, and deep learning.
Looking at reading more.
or simply worthwhile pursuits for children.
This is maybe my favorite sentence I've read this semester. When we're talking about kids, sometimes we try to connect too much, assign too much meaning, examine every last thing a child does from a development or even democratic way. This is the more important question: does the kid get value out of it? What do they think? Do they enjoy what they're doing?
relationship of knowledge to media
Hey this is gonna be in my dissertation! I need to read more, then!
we might do better to remember that they aregreat learners and to try harder to be more like them
I disagree with so much of this, but I like this.
Neither is relevant to the distinction about eggsand egg cups.
In pre-K & kindergarten math, they cover this extensively. Common Core has actually made things...better in this way!?
His description ofdifferent ways of knowing is far more important than quibblingabout whether they neatly follow one another chronologically
This is really it. I still believe in presenting a formalized structure, rather than a hide-&-seek learning, but also allowing students to express what they've learned in a variety of ways.
The image of McClintock shrinking into the cellhas a vividness that conveys a certain sense of an anti-abstractapproach, but to appreciate the point in more than a superficialway, you should read Keller's book or look for new additions tothe burgeoning field of criticism of traditional epistemology
Interesting nonetheless.
concrete
I still do not understand what he means by "concrete" here.
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Hence the dawning of the makerspace?
^"S^ 55 '8 " *8*nd dichotomy' with itsself-righteous certainty should be replaced by many uncertain andunexpected divides."
Is this a cultural thing or not?
by treat-ing each body as a particle with its entire mass concentrated at onepoint he could apply his equations of motion.
Interesting
Jeff someone who conforms to our stereotype of a"computer person" or an enginee
This is not just the work or the mindset of an engineer: event planners, therapists, teachers also think this way!
new that brings her breakthrough to con-necting fractions with "everything."
Again, it is an issue of scale. There is no budget in the world that could account for the number of teachers we would need to accomplish this on a truly significant scale.
The natural context forlearning would be through participation in other activities thanthe math itself
Again, I have witnessed math folks try to do this, time & time again. Their curriculum theory people are the most connected to these lines of thinking.
Use what you've got, improvise, make do
Most teachers do this intuitively.
that the importantmathetic skill is that of constructing concrete knowledge
Math teachers are doing this, with manipulatives, with so much of what they teach. Math curriculum folks may be most driven by research & theory, methinks.
whether we can work with this naturallearning process rather than against it
I want to know this, also. Can we work with it? Or is natural learning antithetical to what we want to do?
since people with a will do find a wayto learn what they need!
And yet if people don't have what they need, every last thing is blamed on schools. I forget who said that, but good lord!!
We also know that if we donot become involved with the area of knowledge, we'll havetrouble learning it with or without School's method
This is also true, but once again: what constitutes poor teaching?
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But are there any examples here? What constitutes "poor teaching?" I haven't seen this defined anywhere as of yet.
The kind of knowledge children most need isthe knowledge that will help them get more knowledge.
But young kids need a LOT of explicit teaching. A LOT.
butit is better to give him a line and teach him to catch fish himsel
The latter is far & away the harder part.
hegoal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning forthe least teaching.
This is the Montessori way, too, right? It sure did not work during pandemic learning.
often do more than simply allo-cate opportunities or resources
Affordances!?
who have historically beenmost vulnerable to data collection and surveillance
It really is all connected.
although there are reasons for wariness about both proposed solutions
Inclusive but causing harm, gonna get that tattooed on my face.
who such an assessment might disproportionately harm, even if itwas functioning “correctly”
This is my problem, too. There is an OCEAN between what the research says about standardized tests & what we actually do about them. I hate it. We need more theory in policy. How do we get there?
thatsocio-historical processes both within and outside of the classroom shape the design, use, and evaluation of educationalAI
Like Benjamin talks about, a more humanistic approach.
ncreasing access to learningtechnologies will reduce inequity in educational opportunities
We already know it doesn't.
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Here is what I wrote down about Benjamin's talk:
Conceptual tools for reading reality! I appreciate this.
Policing as a prime site of distortion. Eye-tracking technology…this is an important study, but all eye-tracking technology makes me nervous.
Science in creating these distortions. Observational bias, identifiable features…it had not come to me that this was a huge aspect of “phrenology” but this is what gives people something to hold up in terms of white supremacy.
Out of a whole editorial team, no one saw that LeBron cover & thought “maybe that’s a bad idea?”
I did Google “unprofessional hairstyles” & a image showing all of the information she gave is the first result. Some of the other things are also questionable.
“Things of value to some” is a good way to perceive this. “An attached incident.” Produces things for some people.
Impacts & Inputs
Imagination as a battleground. I like that. Living inside someone else’s imagination.
Axes of domination…creations of imagination, this is a good way to think about it. Constructed realities, not backed by empirical research.
“Tools imagined necessary.” “Technology inherits its makers’ biases.” “Coded bias + imagined objectivity” “Materializing imagination” here’s where arts come in :) Would absolutely be interested in bringing tech justice into arts as experienced online
And the paradigm has swung again. Climate has become hostile in places like Florida, where “woke” culture is being legislated against. Maybe my role (which I question all the time, absolutely all the time) is to amplify voices, of both adult creators and of child artists to create & examine works of art & culture and change the system from there.
More creatives rather than cogs, which I appreciate (although creatives can absolutely get bogged down and be cogs also).
Computer science & humanities. YAY! Substantive, not additive. Integrative. Building on the experimentation of oppressed peoples. “You can include people and still create harm.”
Disciplinary diversity!
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This is just me, but from what I know of any form of radical politics, I appreciate the abolitionist model the most. It makes the most sense to me. But I also often hear talk about not adding to The State, and I get confused. If there is no centralized power, who does the auditing? If there is no centralized power, who provides items for people? Who provides education? Mutual aid can only go so far. This translates to another way in which I have concerns about scale in a number of these topics. We need large scale change, but we are working within a number of paradigms that only allow for small-scale work to be done. Organizing is SO important — I am a career-long union member & will continue to be one, no matter what happens with upcoming legislation. But so much of this only works within smaller societal contexts. What do we do to solve the large-scale issues?
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This is also important to consider, and again, relevant to Connected Learning Framework.
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I read elsewhere that for many people, witnessing George Floyd's murder did not necessarily prevent another murder of someone else like George Floyd.
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I know a lot of abolitionist teachers, and a lot of people who are invested in these things, as well as many more who are interested in abolitionist ideals. It is really important to decouple the celebrity from the actual social function of an app like Promise.
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"shrinking the carceral state" is indeed the only real solution.
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For the impact that Beyonce's husband has had on the music industry, he's still deeply invested in capitalism. Unsure we can untie incarceration from capitalism? That's among the many critiques I've read, but I've also seen reports from writers about how many people Jay & Bey have secretly bailed out of jail, well prior to 2020.
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This is an important way to address this issue. Out of jail doesn't mean out of the carceral system.
Why isn't it showing my text here?
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it's like she knew what would happen here in Florida.
Professors who em brace the challenge of self-actualization willbe better able to create pedagogical practices that engage stu-dents, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance theircapacity to live fully and deeply.
Honest confession: this makes me feel good reading this, but I also know that being this kind of teacher is a lifelong pursuit. I think that the college professors hooks speaks of may have once sought to teach in an engaged ways, but lost either that zest or whatever else.
It means that my voice is not the only account ofwhat happens in the classroom
This is an intense thing to know. “...my voice is not the only account of what happened in the classroom.” This is something I have always been acutely aware of, but I think something that teachers (especially music educators) don’t take into account often enough
addressing the connection betweenwhat they are learning and their overall life experiences
this is so flipping important! And also CLF!
m ired in structures of dom i-nation,
I wonder, though, do all structures have to be structures of domination? I think that maybe communication, understanding, clear scaffolding, all of that good stuff, it doesn’t have to be done in a way that is dominating to students. I got very into brain science & music cognition last year, and possibly might have the chance to work with music cognition scholars in London soon (which is a wildest dream that one of my professors is making come true), and while I’ll never do a post-doc in neurobiology like my dissertation chair did, I think it is absolutely essential to have some understanding of what makes our brains tick the way they do. How do we learn? When it comes to music, where does music activate in our brain? Why does it stick for some and less for others? If there’s such a thing as socio-cognitive studies, I’m all in for that, because along with the wonderful things that hooks says, I think it’s important to know how brains process. In that way, it’s also essential to consider how brains that aren’t typical commit to processes. Understanding and accounting for neurodivergence is hugely important in education, and for that purpose alone, we have to better understand cognition science.
More than anything they seem ed enthralled bythe exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom,the classroom
It’s been 30 years since this book has been published and it’s more necessary than ever.
N otsurprisingly, professors who are n o t concerned with in n er well-being are the most threatened by the dem and on the part ofstudents for liberatory education, for pedagogical processesthat will aid them in their own struggle for self-actualization
This problem is even worse now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The “conditions of the self” are essential, and aren’t they also essential to creating connections between the personal life and the classroom, right?
Maybe the problem is not worse, but we have taken a much more intense magnifying glass to it.
T here was fear that the conditions ofthat self would interfere with the teaching process.
I love how she ties back in the self-actualization, with the idea of keeping people in these professions who have some moral core & who are not abusers, a concept we wouldn't really take seriously as a society until 25 years after she wrote this.
espite those times when students abused that free-dom in the classroom by only wanting to dwell on personalexperience,
I am guilty of this myself, but trying to match up more of the personal experience with the learned theory.
conviction that itwas crucial for me
yup yup yup yup
about the classroom experience
Accessible, speaking to everyone from her own perspective, speaking of the absolute value of pedagogy, abstract but also concrete but also flexible, surely you’re not surprised but I think this is the best reading we’ve done all semester.
pleasure and joy
The joy in teaching. This is the thing that keeps going. Sure is.
concern for interrogatingbiases in curricula that reinscribe systems of dom ination (suchas racism and sexism) while simultaneously providing new waysto teach diverse groups of students
Pardon me, but if that ain’t goddamned it.
It is so difficult, because the ones who already "get it" aren't the ones that educators are necessarily trying to reach. We have to reach everyone. It's our duty. Even when we disagree, which I appreciate that she has talked about at length here. How do we get to the kids who want to do nothing but shut us out (when I say kids I mean students, K-12 teacher talking here).
Excitem ent is generated through collective effort.
“Collective effort” everyone’s presence is valued…that means they’re more than just a part reader. (Things I need to remember in my own teaching.)
Matching the energy in the room.
xcitement in higher education was viewed as potentially dis-ruptive of the atm osphere of seriousness assumed to be essen-tial to the learning process.
Excitement co-existing and/or supporting, stimulating intellectual & academic engagement.
pedagogical paradigm s to critiquethe limitations of fem inist classrooms
And also here we have actual concern for pedagogy. This is one of the reasons she is so widely read.
fem inist thinking,
Would encourage more feminist texts woven into this class in the future, not just a unit toward the end. That’s a critique that is often had in concert programming for orchestras etc., that there’s a “themed” concert with all women composers, or with all Black composers, when ideally concert programs should include composers of every walk of life all the time.
auloFreire
And here she mentions Friere and off we go!
reaction to this stress and to the ever-present boredomand apathy that pervaded my classes was to im agine ways thatteaching and the learning experience could be different.
“My reaction” that’s an unusually productive reaction, but then again, it’s bell hooks so I would imagine so.
used the classroom to enact ritu-als of control that were about dom ination and the unjust exer-cise of powe
Note to self — “rituals of domination” “Individual white male students…” wonder why academia is what it is right now?
they were n o tself-actualized,
“They were not self-actualized” is something totally different than we see in the music ed program. Dr. Fung may be one of the most self-actualized people I’ve ever met, he is, as he talks about what we want to be when/if we become full professors, a “role model,” and his deep connection both in lifestyle & scholarly ways to Asian philosophies and the actuality of Chinese wisdom (he wrote a book that we read last year with a subtitle “Classic Chinese Wisdoms”) indeed brings him closer to this level of self-actualization.
rare white teacher
Everybody wants to be that “rare white teacher.” How many of us actually are.
W hen we entered racist, desegregated, white schools we lefta world where teachers believed that to educate black childrenrightly would require a political com m itm ent.
“Eagerness to learn” as a negative thing. I wonder how this translates to schools today, and “learning loss” and what not among Black children or perceived anti-intellectualism.
nd n o t a zealous willto learn, was what was expected of us. Too m uch eagerness tolearn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority.
This is a privilege of mine: having a zealous will to learn. But even in a “safe” student, it is often seen as a danger. This connects back to Friere, and the ideas espoused in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
H om e was the place where I was forced to conform tosom eone else’s image of who and what I should be. School wasthe place where I could forget that self and, through ideas,reinvent myself
this makes me think back to the novel The Hate U Give, which largely centers around the main character’s code-switching, between her mostly white private school and her hometown. It is an opposite situation, which is interesting given an historical context.
went to school at a historical m om ent where I wasbeing taught by the same teachers who had taught my m other,her sisters, and brothers. My effort and ability to learn wasalways contextualized within the framework of generationalfamily experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits o f beingwere traced back
This, to me, is so important. I have read elsewhere that while desegregating schools was obviously a huge historical moment (I have spoken to prior students & said "if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't all be together here") that it had other less desireable ramifications for Black students & educators. And here it is, right detailed here in bell hooks's work.
also, this description of knowing the family is the essence of Connected Learning Framework.
adaptivity
All of these things can still be best completed by a teacher. This is what online learning requires, and a good teacher will always complete them better than a machine. I know this does not sound informed by much of what we've read, but I do still believe it is true. If human connection and the reading of subtlety is what helps to move education forward, than we have to continue to focus on that.
teachingmachine advocates made no attempt was made to garner “buy-in” fromthose tasked to manage the classroom, the teachers
Now they employ former teachers to sell us on stuff. :)
The timing of the Great Depression clearly undermined Sidney Pressey’sattempts to get schools to use his teaching machine. By the #%/6s and #%.6sthe economy had regained its strength, but costs to produce quality pro-grammed instruction unfortunately had grown quite high, typically morethan 9#'/,666 (over 9# million in today’s dollars), and it took over #/,666man-hours from highly skilled authors to create a typical linear programmedinstruction course. Branching programs required even more time andmoney to accommodate the many extra branching frames needed to reactto different answers
This paragraph is a really good summary portion, here.
he question Searle asks is,does the person actually understand Chinese?
A question for those who teaching English Language Learners, as well.
In fact, they worked best only in very speci! c areassuch as mathematics
Yeah this will never work in music, although we keep trying.
outshine traditional classroom instruction was in the timeit took to accomplish that learning, being typically /6– #66 percent faster
An affordance? I know for a lot of my own teaching, speed of completion & delivery (on my end) is definitely an affordance of a lot of the technology I use.
later arti!cial-intelligence-basedapproaches to automated instruction
High-stakes testing in the future?
where the stu-dents had to go through the instruction from beginning to end,
But this part I also don't really jive with, either. Respect prior knowledge of students.
it did not really describe how people learn
I'm inclined to agree.
wrong answers that students might remember.
"If you practice it wrong, you'll remember it wrong."
Even Skinner himself had abandoned the use of machinesafter he and Jim Holland wrote the programmed-instruction book TheAnalysis of Behavior.
Everything motivated be economics. Everything.
In a no-contest bid arrangement, the companyreceived 9*66 per pupil to take full control of the Banneker School usingits programmed instructional texts, provided it was successful in raisingthe student test scores.++8 While preliminary test results were encouraging,BRL was ejected from the school because of intense litigation from teachersand their unions.
Again, these are not new situations. God bless the unions.
In the end, all of the leading ! gures from Roanokewould be employed by EBF, including Hollins president John Everett, Roa-noke schools superintendent Rushton, and the three Hollins professorswho worked on the project
Clearly the business model of many failed Silicon Valley start-ups was not a new thing. Do one good experiment, work for a single company the rest of your life.
Roanoke experiment continued to in( uence EBF
MORE RESEARCH IS NEEDED! CAN THESE RESULTS BE REPLICATED!!!!!!
Palo Alto, where the institute was establishedon the Stanford University campus
Aha, Silicon Valley.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
I try really hard to explain to my current students (all Gen Alpha) what it was like to buy a book every week at the grocery store, but they don't get it. Also, this relates back to Olivia's Serious Games mini-course that I took!
The eggheadsdon’t get slowed up; the clods don’t get showed up.
Interesting.
The difference between the help and no-help conditions wassmall in general, with better results for the students who received no helpfrom the teacher
I want more information about this experiment. My stats & quantitative teachers would flip over this.
the perennial bane of academic researchers, “Why is mychild being used as a ‘guinea pig’ in an experiment?”
It is a legitimate concern, though. Parents should have that information. This is why we have the IRB, although getting through it is SUCH a slog, because it's important.
students were taught usingprogrammed instruction books, but the teacher was free to help the stu-dents in any way they requested
This is almost exactly the FLVS model. Yeesh.
%6 percent retention rate
(Obviously I'm doing this exactly as I go but) yeah, okay then!
When tested using thesame assessments used for the ninth-grade students, the eighth gradersachieved the average grades of the older students taught by the tradi-tional methods.
Tested, but retained? Again, only one way to express knowledge (tell that to our legislature).
The late #%/6s and early #%.6s saw a severe shortage of quali!edclassroom teachers, which was further exacerbated by the large in(ux ofnew students from the post–World War II baby boom
It feels like we've always been here. Absolutely wild.
used a sales force consisting of '6 ex-schoolsuperintendents
So ex-teachers or school leaders leaving for tech is not a new thing. I see that.
“and only the massive upgrading of the scho-lastic standards of our schools will guarantee the future prosperity andfreedom of the Republic.”
Yikes. But this reverberates within arts ed, too...playing of patriotic music, etc.
That hysteriawould reverberate over the American psyche, the military industrial com-plex, and the nation’s public education system
Again, these weird, militaristic connections.
(andmy mother’s second husband
Okay, this is where the absolutely wild positionality of the researcher comes in. I mean...what is going on here?!
Pressey argued that allowing wrong responses could po-tentially show up misconceptions in the students’ cognitive processes (e.g.,adding one versus subtracting one)
Again, this is fascinating. Compared to what we know now about how we learn things. A "wrong answer" is definitively within the Zone of Proximal Development.
dehu-manization of the student-teacher relationship.
This is pretty funny, again, looking back.
and he signed a deal with a California-based steel drummanufacturer, Rheem, in #%/*, based on the new model that supportedhandwritten answers.
Connected to the development of steel pan drums, coming up from Trinidad...there are actually lots of steel drum ensembles in schools.
which the student spun to answer the questions, so it was suitableonly for simple arithmetic and spelling applications.
Trying to figure out what the affordances of these devices would be.
Bookishness hasbeen converted to true learning.” 4-Figure 3.9. Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.
Again, and I know you agree, but there have to be more ways to express understanding of the idea. There are so many ways to express knowledge, and so many ways to indicate what students know.
n average grade wouldnot do.
And that's part of how grades have gotten to be inflated as a whole in education? Fascinating if true.
Lev Vygotsky in the #%)6s described this idea ofbuilding slowly on what the learner already knows and extending out fromthere in his concept of a zone of proximal development (ZPD).
And this is where newer music educators are spending more of their time, although this is not a new concept obviously.
what the student already knew and expanded on that knowledge toward thenext frame.
This is what I need to add to my presentation on the Connected Learning Framework. Comparing CLF to operant conditioning & frames, which is where we tend to spend most of our time in the classroom in music education.
which he called frames
Skinner ➡️ Bob Duke in rehearsal frames This pertains to a diagram that I remember from one of the most significant books that I read in my masters degree, called Intelligent Music Teaching, in which each level of musical learning comes after another one, similarly making itself into frames. The author, Dr. Bob Duke, got all of his degrees from the Florida State University College of Music, which is where I also got my masters. The folks there, while wonderful, are very much into behaviorism (as I can see now, knowing what I know) and a LOT of post-positivist research. I know the feel here at USF is a LOT more connected to constructivist, qualitative research, and a lot of auto-ethnography-type stuff. However, because so many academics in music, particularly music ed, have come from FSU (the biggest producer of music doctorates in the US, maybe the world), that's what has taken over the field. It is changing. And the people who are there are also invested in social justice language, and connection, but the operant conditioning part is still such a part of what we do in music ed.
the philosopher Socratesleads his friend Meno’s uneducated slave boy successfully through solvinggeometry’s Pythagorean theorem by asking him to respond to a series ofsmall questions that direct him toward the solution.
Socratic method is still highly sought after in schools.
which he called operant conditioning. Itwas this emphasis on observable behavior that gave him con!dence thathis experiments on laboratory animals would lend insight into how peoplelearned,
Can you skip steps in operant conditioning? Because there are lots of paths to be taken, really. There are lots of ways to arrive at the same conclusions.
it was abandoned partly in favor of more promising research efforts, suchas the Manhattan Project,
“More promising research such as The Manhattan Project.” YEESH. It is so wild to think of educational research in the context of wartime solving. Is there a way to think of this in terms of STEM education supporting eventual workers for Lockheed Martin? It is interesting, to say the least.
animal computer,
“Animal computer” is fascinating, and especially so in the context of "learning machines." I imagine I'd like to read more about this as a concept...maybe.
desired behav-ior, the criteria would grow more and more speci!c until the bird was doingexactly what Skinner wanted.
Exactly as desired — what does that leave for kids? Where is their creativity? Things we still grapple with in K-12 teaching.
“had not come to gripswith the learning process.” -
US Patent office SAYS you are not allowed to reinvent the wheel.
movement
Author’s parents were strict behaviorists?! I wrote this earlier but I'm still confused by this.
law of exercise
Interested in Law of Exercise & research on musical practice. I know one of my classmates (who is studying SEL in private musical lessons) has covered this quite a bit.
A researcher later joked that he could iden-tify the brighter students in the classroom by the stickiness of their little!ngers. +
This is fascinating again, and it goes against so much of what we know now about the psychology of a "token economy" in the classroom, although those sort of things are still widely used (I admit to using stickers in the classroom with my youngest students). However, the more we understand about internal vs. external motivation, this would all be kind of bupkus. Also, the level of imagination, compared to what would come…
free the teacher from drudgery
Leave the teacher free for more important work. ALSO all dudes doing research for a job that they KNOW is all women. Additionally, I'm not quite sure how "flipping the classroom" takes the teachers away from drudgery, it seems more of a process by which teachers just make sure students come to class prepared.
“discipline envy”
This is a fascinating way to put it, as it seems like ego played a part in developing something that has had such an impact on our educational systems in the US. Why are we so obsessed with comparing education to other disciplines or industries?
meet studentswhere they were academically. -
and we’re still striving hard for this.
combined philosophy, psychology,
Psychology WITHIN philosophy — that is interesting, considering how much they don’t like each other now. (e.g. how this class is not at all interested in cognition studies)
“ways that schools might be made less bumbling than I found them.”
A century later, schools are still bumbling. 😐
ressey was in(uenced by many of theimportant ideas proffered by the nascent behaviorist psychology and pro-gressive education movements.
Pressey & “teaching machine” — Chat GPT & lesson plans?!
These controversies exist in part because expertshold different theories about the worlds into which they plan to intervene,as well as different theories about how an intervention should be designedand implemented.
And yet much like global reformations, or restructuring of societies, they do not consult the people actually on the ground, doing the work. I've seen this tremendously so as a current K-12 teacher. This is part of the reason I feel passionately about remaining in K-12 education while attempting to do work to sustain change from within.
ather, failure and contestationplay a key role in sustaining these worlds, and hence in generating newrounds of disruptive !xation.
There are whole industries essentially based on these ideas. Charter schools being one of them, and I'm thinking of the Gates Foundation for Education as well as the Jeff Bezos-funded charters that are springing up in local underresourced neighborhoods.
It is through these processes of problematization and ren-dering technical that reformers’ particular lived !xations arise, and it isbecause of these !xations that many factors are excluded from view.
I like this a lot. It also reminds me of many of these charitable movements, and because I have a popular music-fixed mindset, it reminds me of Bono's obsession with Africa.
whilemore contentious political issues—such as taxation and redistribution,or the power of workers in relation to global capital—are left largelyunexamined and unchallenged.
Well golly gee wiz.
Is the disruptive cycle focused on the wrong things here?
either deserve their lot in life or they were casualitiesof a broken educational system
Test you only to break you.
let alone the world, will continue to be low payingand in many ways undesirable, then reforms focused on more andbetter education cannot provide everyone with a middle-class life, ifonly they play by the rules.
All I have to say about this statement is Amen.
hey are educated in the wrongarea
Fine arts gang rise up!
If we forget about the rising inequality and stag-nating wages that also occurred during this period, !gure 2.1 appears totell an educational success story.
Also, as more women, and particularly Black women, have attained higher education, many of the jobs they often take post-graduation have experienced stagnated wages. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I do understand correlation and wage gaps (which although they are still significant between men and women, widen tremendously when variables such as race & ethnicity are taken into consideration).
Elementary school teachers,except special education
PAY SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHERS & PARA-PROFESSIONALS MORE!!!!!!!
Personal care aides
Pay nurses & home medical workers more!!!!!!!!!!
Table 2.1. Occupations with the Most Projected Job Growth between2012– 2022.
Would love to see an update of how this all turned out!!
talk about training everyone for the jobs of the future, the jobs they appearto have in mind are a particularly narrow and well-paying subset of theprojected future division of labor.
Fabulous.
the vast majority of occupa-tions that are expected to experience the most job growth between 2012and 2022 have little to do with STEM !elds
It's always fun to see how fine arts get in there with STEAM as well, kind of hilarious.
But yes, human services jobs are the ones that will be on the rise with a growing population and the conflict of rising temperatures around the globe. FUN TIMES!
The American Dream’s promise of equalopportunity for all does increasingly appear as a comforting myth, andso forth.
Wasn't it always a myth?
reformers’ anxieties,diagnoses, and prescriptions remained remarkably consistent.
YIKES YIKES YIKES
in 1909
YIKES
What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—
And from a political perspective, I really wish that we could drop the nation to nation competitive aspect of all of this. I am not here to support globalization as a whole, but cooperation has got to be better than continually gunning for the top and unending American dominance. I would also like to not see other countries pay the price for American dominance (i.e. child labor, etc.).
among“makers” in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia.
I genuinely feel as though these cultural mismatches & misunderstandings come from not being aware of education in other societies. What are parents in China saying about students in the United States? I have been either a teacher or a student for 35 out of my 40 years on this planet, hearing only that our education system is behind the rest, and yet we still have the most prosperous economy on the planet. Is this part of problematization? Is this part of the "disruptive fixation"? I'm not here to be economically patriotic, as I don't feel like corporate nationalism is what fixes the problems we have (such as economic inequality), but if everything is doing so bad then why did Google, or Facebook, or Amazon start here in the US? We are continuing to do things wrong educationally, but yet still putting out the most relevant tech companies in the world?
An old friend of mine talked about a friend of his who was a physics grad student in the 00s or late 90s. He was enrolled somewhere in upstate New York, and studied extremely hard for his comprehensive exams. He took them, and was told he had to take them again. He did the next year, studying almost to the point of a nervous breakdown. He took the comps again, and then made a record score the second time, the highest ever of the department.
The only problem is, he had actually passed the comps beforehand. He had done what he was supposed to do. His advisors decided to deceive him so that he could take it again and get that higher score, I suppose. They wanted the record, I assume, they wanted the feather in their cap, to know that their student had achieved the highest.
This drove my friend's friend away from science, away from academia, and nearly toward the edge. It enacted permanent harm on him, and forced him to essentially retire early and leave the country. I may be misremembering details of the story (my friend himself at the time was a distinctly miserable graduate student in life sciences), but this feels very much like what teachers have been put through for decades, even longer than I've been in the business myself.
This to me is how I understand disruptive fixation thus far, and problematization, and in so many of the ways its enacted, it is abusive to students and to teacher. Testing the way we do it in public schools is already a deep miscarriage of justice and educational malpractice. How much more do we need to put on the backs of those engaged in education in this country?
idiosyncratic places like California
This is a hilarious turn of phrase.
such views were, and remain, pervasive in the widespreadpush for science, technology, engineering and math in US education, as wellas calls for educational interventions cultivating people’s capacities for in-novation.
This is still true. Alas.
And 694,000 songs were downloaded illegally.
it is interesting read hearing about the outdated technology, as well.
produce more Tiger Moms,
Policy cannot change parents unless it gives them more resources.
as such, the wayto remedy problematic inequality and lack of mobility was through edu-cational reforms that cultivated these skills.
What is the research, what comes from these decades of STEM education? Has this previous silver bullet (that has been propped up as a solution for decades) actually accomplished anywhere near what it set out to do?
problematization
Can we say problematization as a part of finding problems and making problems where there are none? Or as stated before, putting the onus of societal problems on schools?
they gave new life to a long and cyclical process that repeatedly producesdisappointing results
Is there any situation in which these "lived fictions" give life to things that actually work? Or is education special in that way?
ived !ctions
I like this phrase too — lived fictions, or ideal conditions. It is frustrating that philanthropic organizations are always pie in the sky.
disruptive !xation
As a part of a cycle? or is it, just wanting to improve, coming up with a paradigm-shifting change that is supposed to fix everything and then doesn't?
would not spread automatically or evenly, the answer lay inurgently reforming education lest much of society get left behind
I think this pervasive theme of no quick fixes or silver bullet mirrors the actuality of teaching. There is no immediate pedagogical fix for the problems that are had — just sustained work and continued incremental improvements. That's what is necessary.
rates of relative economic mobility falling behind those ofmany other wealthy countries.
It's amazing, because I grew up my whole life hearing "American schools are behind everyone else." It's interesting to really understand as an adult where that's actually coming from.
ducational systemsoften catch much of the public outrage,
head asplode emoji
“There won’t be schools in thefuture. The computer will blow up the school.
It is impossible to disconnect these declarations from the experience of distance learning in 2020.
This recurring tendency to translatesocial, political, and economic concerns into educational problems and so-lutions has led to a situation in which public education has been asked tosolve many problems that are far beyond its reach
I'm so incredibly happy to finally read this sentence.
Most schools in globalcities like New York do not accommodate students from such diversebackgrounds
For the multitude of shortcomings in US schools, this is one area in which I believe we lead the world. Public schools seek to serve everyone, and the honorable nature of that goal is one thing that keeps me in place. Many European countries don't have the same system in place, as per my understanding.
enacting adult-scripted activities
I think that, like many of the educational issues put upon us by the Florida legislature, these things are reactionary. We have this new innovation (I know this is old but I have been teaching since 2009), and yet schools particularly in the South get even more conscripted, teaching gets more limited, teachers in poor schools in the south get an "instructional focus calendar" rather than the room to innovate.
sacred paraphernalia of the school ritual
Sacred paraphernalia of the school ritual – what a great phrase.
n exercise which is liberating for somecharacter types becomes a straitjacket for others
Liberating for some but a straightjacket for others is a great description of music class very often
hide behind their expertiseand beyond evaluation.
Behind their expertise and beyond evaluation – sounds a lot like Elon Musk to me.
Finding resources for materials made specifically foreducation is only one--and perhaps the least costly--aspectof building an educational world.
It is mentioned here but it seems that libraries are the ultimate form of this. Access to “things” is one of the biggest overall issues in music education. It is really ridiculous how big of an issue this is.
wo distinct approaches can be taken to financing anetwork of "learning objects." A community coulddetermine a maximum budget for this purpose and arrangefor all parts of the network to be open to all visitors atreasonable hours. Or the community could decide toprovide citizens with limited entitlements, according totheir age group, which would give them special access tocertain materials which are both costly and scarce, whileleaving other, simpler materials available to everyone.
I have been teaching a lot of Harry Belafonte lately, especially the song “Turn the World Around” as performed on The Muppet Show. I watched a video of Belafonte performing the song & speaking at Henson’s memorial service in 1990, where he spoke at length of Henson bringing “hope to hopeless places” in terms of Sesame Street & Muppets. The terms Belafonte uses to describe “hopeless places” are outdated and almost colonial in tone, but the idea remains. And I do know that Sesame Workshop still works with refugee children the world over. This made me think about access, about why Sesame Street was invented in the first place (to provide open access to early learning for young children), and the paragraph about Latin America & television. Some of my dissertation research will center around children’s media, which is an absolute bonkers modern landscape, and yet one in which my daughter learned about the moons of Jupiter & Saturn at age 6. Suffice to say, I am a fan of a lot of large scale children’s media, particularly Henson properties, but I am very interested in how that landscape can and has served as one channel in overall learning but also musical learning.
Some storefront learning centers could containviewing booths for closed-circuit television, others couldfeature office equipment for use and for repair.
Reading all of this pre-internet is fascinating. Has YouTube met this TV need yet?
He finds peers who challengehim to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand;and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation orcriticism by an experienced elder who really cares.
By an experienced elder who really cares. This is the true kicker. Feedback without concern for the recipient of the feedback is useless. I like the things, models, peers, elders model.
The hidden curriculum of schooldoes all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken byteachers and no matter what ideology prevails
I do believe that modern schooling, while still reinforcing the hidden curriculum and the benevolence of the institution, definitely puts more emphasis on the facilitation of learning. But these public spaces still involve labor. Lots of labor. Who is doing the labor?
Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiatesthe citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided byscientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil themyth that increased production will"" provide a better life.
We need experts. We need professionality. The “benevolent institution guided by science” may be a fundamental neoliberal tenet, but we also need safeguards against the worst of society. And we need government institutions, most of all, schools, to accomplish that.
Before our centuryneither the poor nor the rich knew of children's dress,children's games, or the child's immunity from the law.Childhood belonged to the bourgeoisie.
But it’s not unquestioned immunity. It’s not unquestioned immunity at all.
What strikes me as I read through these pieces is the function of school as I know it now, having been involved in schooling as a professional educator for 16 years. Having taught (fully as a distance educator) during the pandemic while simultaneously supervising my daughter’s debut into public school through online kindergarten colors all of my perspective when it comes to critical studies of schools themselves. Reading the start of the Illich chapter, I find that as a society, we are more dependent on schools than ever before. Students at home in the earliest days of the American COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that society has put the onus of meeting community needs directly onto public schools. Families still met up at schools in order to receive meals throughout even the most unknown periods of the early pandemic. Many schools were the site of mass vaccinations and COVID tests as well. There is also much to be said about the labor of women in the home as well as women in schools, because I believe it is totally impossible to separate public education from the study of feminist labor. That may be an entirely different conversation to be had.
diverse and equitable pathways for recognition and contribution.
I hope this continues to be a focus.
Fewstudies examine learning that takes place across multiple settings, and methods for studyinglearning outcomes in this way are still evolving.
:) :) :) :) Let's make this happen.
building relationships that transcend a specific program.
That's so important. But as educators who have an ever-increasing burden on us (with fewer resources), how do we keep some separation between these areas of learning?
other sites of learning
This is so essential. So so so essential. Love it.
To add, as mentioned in another learner story, is the purpose of connected learning to start a business (contribute economically) or to be a part of the "scene" and contribute culturally? I understand reduced inequality is an important part of this process, but is entrepreneurship the main solution to that?
Note to myself, this is a really important page.
Engagement with popular culture is also a way of meeting youth where they are andconnecting practices to learning and opportunity.
Once again, when I get my act together, this will eventually be my dissertation. Very glad to read this.