When I announce to the senior honors class that today’s learning event is to analyze a clip of the film, La Cage aux Folles (Molinaro, 1979), Larry asks, “Will we be graded on this?”
I also taught Larry four years earlier at a heterogeneous eighth grade level, and he was keenly innovative, clever, and distinguished from other students in his thinking. Even when I respond “no” to his question as to whether I will assign a grade to the lesson, he and other students react to this humorous French film in a constrained and muted manner: short giggles, some blurted-out chuckles, a few out-and-out roars. It makes no matter whether humor is based on double entendres, socio-cultural comparisons, sexual binaries, or pratfalls. The class of students consciously muffles their responses.
Larry and other high-tracked students recognize that explicit communication about learning (Sambell & MacDowell, 1998 ) --- taking academic risks---- is distinct from embodied subtexts about high-status curriculum. They do not want to jeopardize their chances for admission to prestigious universities (Rogers & Oakes, 2005) or alienate themselves from their peers in that mysterious world of adolescence, in which identifying with adults is, in and or itself, an isolating activity.
My expectations for success differ from my contemporaries’ and may not sit easily with current department, district, or even state pedagogical philosophical ties to conferring content knowledge and passing of examinations (Davies, 2006). This plays out in ways that fall on a continuum from the merely startling [the teacher in the adjacent classroom asks, “What were you watching early today in class?” after she heard Cantonese exclusively spoken during House of Flying Daggers (Zhang, 2005)], to an outright professionally frightening [after a third summons to the principal’s office, I requested a union representative to accompany me as witness to the hegemonic discussion of what instruction for the public sector should look like].
I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify suppositions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking, among an infinite number of ways to define how humans actually think. Reflection, however, is particularly important, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).
Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world.
Risks for both teachers and students come when we together seek answers to hard questions. Risks are the norm because interest, enjoyment, and challenge in immediate experience to arouse student development (Dewey, 1898) receive less emphasis in the current instructional climate than does pedagogy toward cultural transmission. Dewey’s 1939 observation holds true today: “…there is much information about which (students’) judgment is not called upon to respond” (p. 41).
Students are not being invited to draw education, experience, knowing, and thinking into ways of assessing their identities within a democracy. But how can we as an educational community state that we create life-long learners if we do not actively insist on the varied process of thinking that stimulate real abilities to think about, interrogate, and know their worlds?
How do students’ thinking, reading, knowing, and learning rise from a backdrop of American enculturation? Does the ability to analyse one text transfer to another? To what degree are students able to discern communicative messages at each phase of the study? What levels of metacognition lead to student meaning making? How is student cognition related to hegemonic structures? These are the questions I am addressing with my own students this year in a teacher-researcher study.
I turn it over to you now: as a teacher or learner, how do you best accommodate new structures for thinking in this symbol-saturated world? I’d love to hear your comments.
Resources
Davies. (2006). Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? . Educational Review, 58(1), 5-25.
Dewey. (1898). The primary education fetish Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Dewey. (1939). Freedom and culture. New York: Prometheus Books.
Molinaro (Writer) (1979). La cage aux folles. In L. P. A. A. Da Ma Produzione (Producer): MGM.
Rogers, & Oakes. (2005). John Dewey speaks to Brown: Research, democratic social movement strategies, and the struggle for education on equal terms. Teachers College Record, 107(9), 2178-2203.
Sambell, & MacDowell. (1998 ). The construction of the hidden curriculum: Messages and meanings in the assessment of student learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 23(4), 391-413.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Zhang (Writer) (2005). House of flying daggers: Sony.
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