Power Dynamics in Pedagogy

two of my former students demoing projects they did for our electricity unit in conceptual physics.

My time as a debater trained me to constantly analyze patterns of thought and assumption, even my own.  In the years I've spent (more than a decade, now) judging policy debates, I'm constantly drawn to search for trends in my decisions and perspectives over time.  Do I vote more often for one side of the resolution than the other?  Do I favor certain schools?  Do my decisions demonstrate bias against any particular demographic?  I haven't actually crunched the numbers. Perhaps one day I'll go back and take a rigorous look at the data, but at the very least what I can tell you from this thought experiment and a collection of other experiences I've had as a professional educator is that the transfer of knowledge and skills is not a totally neutral experience.

Like any communicative relationship that exists between human beings, the countless interactions between teacher and student, peer and peer in the educational process are influenced by the culture, history and power structures in which we are all inextricably entangled.  Since this month we're discussing the p-word (look to the top of the right column of the blog if you're confused about what I'm referring to), I thought this would be a suitable moment to reflect on the ways that gender influence the educational space.

The Soft Bigotry of Diminished Expectations

My more liberal readers will hopefully forgive the allusion to one of the more eloquent turns of phrase ever slapped together by George W.'s speech writers.  It's a question I've considered many times - do my academic and/or behavioral expectations shift when I consider female students versus their male peers?  I primarily teach AP Sciences, feeder courses for college majors where women are significantly underrepresented.  It's difficult to articulate a definitive answer to that question; in a post that will come early next week, I'll elaborate more thoroughly when I get into strategies for breaking down patriarchy, but suffice to say that I think that it's unproductive to apply labels to individuals, and much more useful to analyze particular actions.  I'm certain there are times when my viewpoint and to some extent my baseline for judging a student has been informed in subtle ways by societal norms attached to their gender.  I've definitely associated students' personalities with various gendered archetypes in the process of getting to know them and understand them, and that by itself inscribes some patriarchal norms onto those students.

A stereotype exists in the modern world that women are weaker in S.T.E.M. fields, either because those fields are inherently less appealing to them or because they are inherently less skilled in those disciplines.  Various people, some of them extremely prestigious, have ascribed various biological explanations to reinforce this stereotype.  For instance, the year I was graduating high school, then-Harvard University President Larry Summers, a fellow that had previously served as Clinton's treasury secretary and who would go on to become one of Obama's top economic advisors (#ThanksObama), made a long argument at a public address that women were conclusively worse at science than men at that said fact had been established by studies in behavioral genetics.  To even begin to unpack what's erroneous about his conclusions will require an entirely new blog post (come back tomorrow to read all about it!); if you read some of the anecdotes from Summers' address what you'll see is that his conclusions only come close to plausibility when viewed through the patriarchal lens that privileges typically male perspectives and devalues female perspectives.

I don't really know yet where this contemplative road leads us.  But I can say that I feel it's incumbent on all educator to work to build and practice intentional, metacognitive awareness.  I don't know if it's possible to unpack and neutralize all of the loaded assumptions we carry into the classroom with us, but I do know that discovering and challenging those assumptions is a necessary prerequisite.

Withering Under the Pitiless Gaze

This problem of loaded assumptions is complicated by the fact that not only do these assumptions exist, but most people, particularly the people that are disadvantaged by them, are acutely aware that they exist.  Which is to say that many female students are aware to some extent that they might be assessed differently than their classmates who remembered to bring their Y-chromosomes to school.  The insidious consequences of this fact manifest themselves in many ways.  Female students may be less likely to answer questions or to volunteer to participate than assertive male students.  Many self-identify as being weaker in math and science, having internalized the negative messages about themselves that have been pounded into them by the ascendant zeitgeist.  We won't even get into the differences between the ways the bodies of male and female students are treated differently and the ways that even younger female students are sexualized.

The natural consequence of such an environment is a desire to seek quarantine.  Most all-girls schools and secondary schools specifically market themselves as opportunities for female students to excel without the added complications that come with the baggage of patriarchy.

Deep down in my soul, I'd really like to believe that we can find a better way to live than dividing ourselves up into homogenous units because we can't figure out how to live together in heterogeneous groups without damaging each other.  It's a pessimist's strategy, one that invests in the idea that our messed up social relations are irreparable.  I'd like to believe the way forward is for oppressed groups to help the oppressors learn to see the world through other peoples' eyes.  But I'm not the one that 's being told by society that I'm just not as good at things as the other 50% of the population and my body and emotions are really only optimized to nurture infants.  So I'm not in a position to judge any female's decisions.

I'll close this one with a personal anecdote that I recently learned about my own mother.  When she was born, her father was at the hospital, and he was heard to say just as she entered the world, "Not another damn girl!", just before he stomped out.  She grew up being told time and again that she wasn't capable, that should couldn't handle complicated mechanical tasks like driving a standard transmission (which she learned to do), that she wasn't smart (even though she was the valedictorian of both her high school and college graduating classes).  And despite all of those clear validations of her worth from external institutions, despite going on to earn a masters' degree and become a professional accountant and then educator, she still to this day struggles with a devastating sense of personal inadequacy.  Because sometimes poisonous seeds that get planted too deep are incredibly difficult to root out.

That's what we're dealing with here, people.

Teacher Struggles: Plagiarism in the 21st Century

At first blush, it's almost incomprehensible to anyone who went to school before the ascension of the modern internet, but blatant plagiarism is rampant in the twenty-first century classroom.  On assignments large and small, students are very comfortable directly copying the writing of others with no acknowledgement or attribution.  When the more ambiguous territory of giving credit for others original ideas, the idea of plagiarism is almost unimaginable to this generation of students - at least in my anecdotal experience.

We as teachers could be doing more, and are learning to do more to create lessons that help students understand the necessity of giving credit where its due and the value of going through the process of constructing one's own thoughts and ideas rather than adopting someone else's, wholesale.  If there are any younger readers on this post, let me make it clear for you WHAT the adult generation views as plagiarism, and WHY you shouldn't do it:

The WHAT: According to the Random House Dictionary via Dictionary.com (see the attribution there?), plagiarism is "an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author."

There are two key elements to this - first, you're using someone else's ideas.  This can manifest as a direct transplantation (i.e. you literally copy and paste text from another's work), or slightly modifying another's work by changing a few words or phrases, but preserving the essential meaning of the original work.  The first case is totally unequivocal.  The second case creates some gray area - it involves consideration of what sorts of information are "common knowledge" that everyone would take for granted - for instance, no one would claim you needed a citation if you wrote that Barack Obama was the president of the United States in your paper.  As a student, however, the guiding principle is simple - if you're taking words or ideas from a source, even if you're paraphrasing them into your own language without copying and pasting anything, you should attribute those ideas to the source in which you found them.  Otherwise, you've committed plagiarism.

The WHY: There are several reasons.

1. Honesty.  I could get into the utilitarian ramifications of dishonesty, how it impacts our interactions in society and how basic trust is an essential element to human civilization, but hopefully I don't have to.  Hopefully you can recognize on your own why being honest is something to be valued.
2. Understanding. There may be nuances or elements from the original text which you omit or fail to represent.  Anyone interested in engaging with your work needs to know where to look if they want to get deeper into the subject areas about which you're writing.
3. Process.  This particularly important for students, who often focus too much on the necessity of the product that they're asked to produce.  "What's the point in trying to analyze Beowulf?  Everyone's already pulled out the relevant insights out of it."  Breaking News: Your teacher doesn't want you to analyze Beowulf because he/she expects you to break new intellectual ground.  He/she is asking you to do it because he/she wants you to practice going through a particular thought process.  The biggest victim of any academic plagiarism is the student who commits it, because the student is robbing him/herself of the opportunity to think and learn.  When you make the decision to plagiarize, pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for choosing the path of persistent ignorance.

Now, onto the broader cultural exploration - why is plagiarism taken less seriously now?  I think there's an obvious connection to the internet, and I think there are several facets to this connection.  The first is the wide availability of information, which has a double-effect: first it creates the sense that the student will never be able to make a genuinely meaningful contribution because there is already such a proliferation of intellectual activity documented on the internet (see point #3) above), and second it creates a tremendous temptation.  Plagiarism is so much easier than it used to be.  On some niche websites, it's basically an industry.

The other aspect is more complex, because it has to do with appropriation and repurposing of others' work in the creative commons - the so-called remix culture.  I think there are genuinely wonderful things that happen when the flow of ideas is uninhibited and creative combination is encouraged.  But I don't know how to decouple this from the sense that the provenance of ideas is unimportant.

The Corporate Model for Interdisciplinary Teaching

I'm a member of the Teacher's Guild, and last week I shared some work that a few of my colleagues and I are doing to build an interdisciplinary unit centered around redesigning bicycles.  Our goal was to facilitate collaboration between different classes with few overlapping students.  The solution we're in the process of rolling out right now is a project-centered collaboration, where students in different classes contribute to design ideas that live in design briefs that travel from class to class.

Here's the flyby concept: Students in an engineering class used research and interviews to identify the biggest areas of improvement in bicycle design.  They worked up some prototype proposals for these improvements - ideas ranged from incorporating pneumatic suspensions into the seat post to modifying the tire tread to model the frictional properties of shark skin.  Then they sent their proposals along to students in my AP Physics class, who designed experiments to yield data on the value and functionality the engineering students' designs.  They passed their collected data along to an Algebra 2 class that did the number crunching for the experimental data, at which point the conclusions were sent back for the consideration of the engineering class, who is currently considering a second design iteration informed by the data.  In my vision, the student collaboration functions similarly to the collaboration that occurs between the departments of a corporation; the engineering students are Designers, AP Physics represents R&D, and the Algebra students are Data Analytics.

So far, the process had yielded both excitement and frustration for the students involved as they grapple both with the class content underlying their contributions to the project, as well as learning to communicate and collaborate with students in other classes through a variety of media (emails, technical documents, and in-person discussions).

There are certainly some tweaks that we'll make in future versions of the project, but I'm super excited about the general method, and I think it could be generalized to include nearly any combination of courses.  I present here a brief run-down of the major design considerations that went into (or perhaps should go into a future version of) our project design that could potentially be generalized:

1. Decide which courses and instructors will participate in your interdisciplinary project, then search for broad areas that could potentially provide areas of overlap.  All of our collaborating courses were STEM, so focusing on re-working the technical details of something like a bicycle was a natural fit.  However, I think that it wouldn't have been much of a stretch to include other courses as well; for instance, art students could work on visual/aesthetic design aspects.  Environmental Science students can prepare environmental impact statements to compliment bicycle designs, and so on.
2. Identify a course that can drive the initial launch of the project with design thinking.  Whatever your ideas is, designing your unit so that it originates from student curiosity and interacting with real, compelling issues are big factors in student buy-in.  If answering this question is confusing to you, think about it through the following lens: if you imagine your collaborating courses as departments in a corporation, what is the product or service that your corporation provides?  Who is its customer?  Which department will have the most direct interaction with the customer?  Whichever department is most responsible for understanding the needs of the user being served by your project (even if you don't literally intend to deliver your project to a user) is probably the most logical choice.  The project is like a baton that is passed from class to class.  You just need to identify who starts with the baton.
3. Consider if other complimentary opportunities for collaboration exist that can supplement the primary project.  For instance, our AP physics and Algebra Two classes will work together on three additional labs over the course of the semester.  These are labs I do every year, slightly re-framed to help the AP students learn the underlying physics while working through the lens of bicycle mechanics.  While working on force, energy, and rotational dynamics, physics and math students work together on experiment design, data collection, analysis, and forming conclusions.  We chose to incorporate these additional elements because
1. it primes the students for the larger collaboration of the project, allowing more opportunities for students to iterate on their communication/collaboration strategies.
2. it allows and enhances the students' understanding of the learning objectives that already exist for each course.  Physics students are forced to clarify and articulate their understandings.  Math students see clearly how their calculations correspond to and inform real measurements and designs.
4. Determine a timeframe for project activities in each course.  We looked at our learning outcomes (particularly in Algebra and Physics), considered how the needs of the project interacted with content we already intended to teach, and set a tentative schedule for collaboration between courses.
5. Design opportunities for exhibition and celebration of the students' design process.  This is the area where our project is most poorly articulated.  We are still working to determine what kind of final deliverable makes sense given the possibilities and constraints our students work within, and what sort of audience will get to see those deliverables.  I think that had we done this before beginning the project, it would have further improved student buy-in and help sustain their curiosity and interest as the project enters difficult iterative stages.

These are the basic elements of our planning.  There are countless little details that will enrich this general formula (for instance, the intentional incorporation of self- and group- assessment after collaboration), but I leave the details to my qualified colleagues out there.

The Nueva School is featuring our bicycle project at its biannual Innovation Learning Challenge this afternoon in one of its #MashupILC sessions.  I can't wait to see the amazing ideas that will be generated.  Hopefully this design rationale will be helpful to those of you out there considering similar ideas.  

Debating for the 21st Century

four students participating in their first debate round EVER

Every year in late August or early September, around one hundred high school students and half as many adults gather to participate in a spectacle both terrifying and intriguing: a policy debate tournament.  More specifically, for the vast majority of the students it will be their first debate tournament. 

For as long as I can remember, a tournament has been organized at the beginning of the year to gently usher students into the world of competitive policy debate; in an age long past when I was competing, it was hosted by the Westminster Schools.  For the last three year, it's been run by the amazing people at Emory University's Barkley Forum, which functions as both a highly competitive college team (unquestionably one of the best in the nation) and as a service organization focused on bringing the benefits of debate to students from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds.

Why, you might be wondering, do students require a "gentle" welcome to debating?  Why do entire organizations exist organized around promoting its practice?  Both excellent questions (good job you, you're so insightful!), and both can be answered by understanding the basic structure and expectations of policy debate.

Students work in teams of two, and compete in debates over the course of the year anchored by a single question, usually refereed to as the "topic" or "resolution" of the year.  Debate topics cover quite a range of policy areas, but they all have one thing in common - they consider what actions should or should not be taken by the United States Federal government.  This year's topic is:

Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially curtail its domestic surveillance.

Given this starting point question, students and coaches come up with particular policies that the government could enact that would be consistent resolution - passing the State Secrets Repeal Act, applying strict judicial scrutiny to police searches, or banning biometric scanners at airports, for instance.  Then, at tournaments, the students are obliged to debate both sides of the resolution (at least twice, sometimes three or four times), defending their own policy some rounds, trying to convince the judges that other students policies are a bad idea.

To convince judges, students construct an argument built on constant reference to high-quality scholarly sources and breaking news publications; they debate factual challenges, opportunity costs, unanticipated externalities, epistemological and philosophical questions, and even the meaning and parameters of the words that make up the resolution.  They do all of this under immense time pressure, speaking and listening at more than one hundred words per minute.  No kidding people, debate is like the Olympics for your brain, and students that get into this end up going to tournaments like this forty or fifty times over the course of their high school careers.

Those of you that aren't high school teachers like me might not spend as much time considering the structure of American education and how it evolves in response to the information environment of the new century, but it's a question that sorely needs considering.  A model of school that puts all its emphasis on the delivery of knowledge is laughably outdated - most students (particularly affluent students) walk around with access to a billion textbook's worth of information in their back pockets, and convincing them that they really need to dedicate mental energy to memorizing certain facts is a very hard sell.  The best case scenario is motivating most students through extrinsic fear of bad grades, which isn't going to inspire them to hold on to these tidbits for the rest of their lives.

And the truth is that at least to some extent, these students are right.  They shouldn't be spending huge amounts of time memorizing information.  They live in an era where the primary skill for success won't be knowledge acquisition, but rather information processing.  Students that can research well, that can listen to claims and assess for validity, that see into the agendas that exist behind the reams of information available on the internet - these are the students that will rise to the top in the twenty-first century.  

No activity can do more than policy debate to make you better at ALL of these things.

As I geared up for the first tournament of the year, I've been having conversations with my colleagues, and several times, after hearing what students experience while participating, the listener has told me "every student should do debate."  I couldn't agree more.

Do You Speak Science?

For all the high school graduates out there, how many of you can still tell me how to predict the formation of ionic solids in solutions?  Or compute the terminal velocity of a projectile?  Or give me the Linnean nomenclature for more than three species?

Of the people that answered yes to the questions above, how many of you are not working in a science-oriented profession?  I'd be willing to bet the fraction is staggeringly small.  And I also think that's ok.  Clearly, many Americans have grown up to become successful contributing members of society while simultaneously forgetting the finer points of chemistry and physics.

On the other hand, if the intricacies of many scientific subjects aren't essential for a life well lived, and if many people who are exposed to these ideas don't retain them or retain a significantly inaccurate impression of the state of scientific understanding as they move forward in life, it does raise the question of what we could or should be doing in our science classes.  My argument is that while a robust exploration of science content is valuable for students that are particularly interested in those disciplines, ALL students need a thorough education in science literacy - that is, understanding the essential nature of science as a world view and methodology for increasing human understanding on the world, and where that fits into the spectrum of human experience.

So why shift gears?  What do we have to gain?  How could that possibly compare to what we as a society might lose if our students are required to complete a rigorous curriculum in biology, physics and chemistry?  Well, I think there are three salient points to consider.

1. Most people don't remember (or inaccurately recall) what they learned in high school science classes.  If your own life experience isn't enough to convince you of this, consider the findings from this Pew Center report on the level of science knowledge in America - granted the sample size of thirteen questions is relatively small, but it's still quite telling that 50-80% of respondents incorrectly answered EXTREMELY basic science content questions - I'm not talking fine details here, I'm talking about high level bullet points covered in the first week of class.  In the same way that you're unlikely to remember the details of the plot of Gatsby unless you read and discuss it semi-regularly, you're not likely to recall these sorts of details unless you leverage the knowledge on a semi-regular basis.  That trend is pretty well established in cognitive neuroscience.  So what's the harm in shifting gears?  Most students don't recall what they've been taught anyway.

2. A detail oriented, rigorous science curriculum is disempowering for people that aren't naturally inclined toward math and science.  From the same Pew Center study linked above, nearly 50% of people who took the pool said they steered away from math/science majors because "science is too hard"; now granted this pertains to choices of academic major, but I think it's a fair wager to say that the same phenomenon plays out on the high school level.  Students that find science too difficult will write off the entire subject, and close themselves off from an entire realm of human knowledge and exploration.

3. Understanding the basic nature of science is more important than ever.  If you want to be a responsible member of a democracy, you need to have the wherewithal to evaluate claims made in the public sphere, to decide which policies and candidates you will support, and to understand when you're being fed a giant load.  Many of the arguments surrounding global warming, for instance (particularly from the Conservative side) play upon a deep misunderstanding of the way that science works and the way scientific knowledge is developed.  People who don't understand science because they were alienated from it at a young age will be susceptible to buying snake oil from its many talented sales agents.

A science education focused more on developing high level conceptual understanding of science practices and norms, rather than obsessing over the details, would resolve all of these issues, because it would allow the repetitive development of broad themes (better for cognitive retention), demonstrate clear applications to real world policy discussions (leading to lifelong retention, application, and understanding), and be more approachable to a broad base of young Americans who will be bombarded with more scientific claims and skeptical grousing than any previous generation.

If you're curious, by the way, about how well you "speak science", try the Nature of Science Questionnaire used by curriculum researchers.  If you have a really hard time answering these questions... well, maybe that tells you something about what you should have been learning in science class.