I just want to highlight one point from class yesterday and raise a question about it. Then, I would like to bring up something about the Maxine Greene reading that we didn't have time to discuss:
1. One point that we made about the Tyack and Cuban book is that they are pretty content with the current state of American education. In other words, they have "cautious optimism" about the direction of American education. They feel that teachers, doing what they do from year to year, will lead the process of educational reform through self-reflection and if we have districts that allow schools to personalize instruction. To me this attitude just makes us believe in the status quo. In other words, just continue to do what we are doing and we'll be fine. How do you feel about this? Do you believe that we should continue business as usual? Or, on the other hand, might there be some techniques that would greatly improve our instruction quickly?
2. There was one point from the Maxine Greene reading that we didn't have time to talk about in class. At the end of the essay she talks about how the arts can promote multiculturalism. As she writes,
"They [students] can, at once, attend to the judgments made by members of other cultures - not only of what is valuable in their worlds by of what demands confrontation in our own. Yes, we want our students, in the expanding communities in which they will live their lives, to attend to particulars, to engage, to move in the spaces opened by works of art, each of which makes its own distinctive demands."
This passage brings the word "empathy" to mind. Art, in other words, can help us see things from the perspective of a person of different ethnic origin and attach a meaningful emotional message to the piece. Earlier in the essay Maxine Greene mentions Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man which details the fictional life of a black man in the U.S. after WWII. One of the recurring themes in the book is that despite of the young man's contributions to society, his efforts are invisible. I remember having several "authentic encounters" with the text that helped me understand a little more about African-American struggle in the 20th century. In that way, I experienced empathy. That's the power of art and I think it's what Mrs. Greene is talking about.
1 comment:
I completely agree with you about the value of the arts. I remember reading Ellison's book and for the first time really understanding what its like to be a minority. The arts, in all its forms, allows for a degree of subjectivity that a textbook could never truly offer. The experience is made up purely of what you bring to it and what you take away from it. Ellison's work made me feel a variety of emotions, from fear to desperation. The only desperation I ever experienced while reading a textbook stemmed from the length of the assignment, rather than the raw content.
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