It is in this way that the “parent as chooser” notion is also based on and enacts a fundamentally colorblind discourse that constrains parent involvement and neglects power relations
I often felt this way when I was teaching in DC and people would speak about solving the crisis going on in the schools there as being solved by school choice programs. However, in a city that sees so much segregation based on race and socioeconomic status like DC, school choice truly is no choice at all.
the achievement gap is not the cause of inequalities in our society;
I made a note on this section that summed it up better for me: Inequality causes the achievement gap, the achievement gap does not cause inequality. I think that this is something that as educators we keep in mind for our students, but not for their families. When we have conferences with parents who are not educated, do we speak to them with the same respect that we do of parents that are highly educated and have a great deal of professional achievements? Do we relate to them in the same way? Do they feel respected in our classrooms - and how do we ensure that they are being shown that respect?
He further describes how this openness of thought is antithetical to arrogance and elitism, “One of the necessary requirements for correct think-ing is a capacity for not being overly convinced of one’s own certitudes . . . correct thinking is in this sense irreconcilable with self-conceited arrogance”
This point reminds me of the importance of recognizing parents as the experts of their own children and their own families and to enter into relationships in our work from an asset based lens, focusing on the capabilities and competencies of those around us rather than their struggles. If we enter into every situation presuming to have all of the answers - with "arrogance and elitism" - not only do we continue the cycle of oppression of others, but we fail to be open to learning ourselves.
It is from this perspective that the primary pur-pose of the ecological experiment becomes not hy-pothesis. testing but discovery—the identificationof those systems properties and processes that af-fect, and are affected by, the behavior and de-velopment of the human being. M
This concept of experiments being about discovery reminds me a lot of our work both in ADAC and social foundations that reminded me of the importance of entering a situation with the mindset of curiosity rather than assumptions or expectations. Here, I am reminded that we also must be curious rather than presumptive about the contexts of our students in the systems they exist in outside of school.
DEFINITION 3. Ecological validity refers to theextent to which the environment experienced bythe subjectzJitt- a scientific investigation has theproperties it is supposed or assumed to have by theinvestigator.
I stumbled over this definition, but the way I understand it after reading further is an environment is ecologically valid if it contains what is needed to answer or inform the question being investigated in the research. Does anyone else have other thoughts?
ven more arbitrary, however, is theconverse implication that any investigation carriedout in a nonnaturalistic setting is necessarily eco-logically invalid, and thereby scientifically suspecton purely a priori grounds. Surely, this is to pre-judge the issue.
I wonder, then, what Bronfenbrenner would deem to be "ecological validity"? This conversation sounds a lot like his discussion of rigor and relevance, where he asserts that there is a balance between the two. But how do we achieve that balance?
pects of the environment beyond the immediatesituation containing the subject.
I read this quote and the part that Kayla annotated earlier as saying that considering the whole child is not enough - who must consider the whole child AND the whole environment.
The orientation proposed here rejects both theimplied dichotomy between rigor and relevanceand the assumed incompatibility between the re-quirements of research in naturalistic situationsand the applicability of structured experiments atan early stage in the scientific process. Spe
As I read this and the points made on the previous page about the inauthenticity of studies performed in strange places, I think about our work as educators and how we assess what we know about our students- both their skills and competencies as well as what we know about them as people. How are we balancing rigor and relevance in our work?