Posted on Jun 16, 2010 - 05:53 PM by Luis Moreno in Crazy Quilt
Spanish, like every other major language, is indeed a crazy quilt of various dialects as there arePosted on May 10, 2010 - 09:10 AM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
I am a teacher in New York City working in a very poor community with mostly youth of color. Every day I see the effects of centuries of racism and class oppression show up on my students' faces. On some days I have hope that we will be able to create a just future and I want their schools to be better. Some days are harder and I think the only way out is for their schools to be destroyed. What does IDEA have to offer me?Posted on Apr 29, 2010 - 08:45 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
Now, I'm not one for protests, especially not protests that end after a one hour march around some political building with people going back to their homes feeling they've done their best. However, I was moved to read about the protests of thousands of students in New Jersey this week (read all about it in the NYTimes here).Posted on Apr 12, 2010 - 09:31 AM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
My graduate students tell me that I am depressing them - that I am the unfunny version of Saturday Night Live's Debbie Downer . Well, they didn't actually call me that, but that's sometimes how I feel. I teach the foundations of education course at my university. This is the class where American education is looked at through a critical lens - comparing the historical, Jeffersonian democratic citizenship purpose of education to the social mobility purposes that seem most paramount in schools today. We explore and critique different philosophies of education, deconstruct our society's current politicization of education, examine the injustices of our education system's funding practices,... Unschooling Is About ContextPosted on Mar 19, 2010 - 08:31 AM by Khalif Williams in Uncharted Parenting
When my family decided to give homeschooling a try, we knew we wanted to define our own philosophy and approach. Being huge fans of the unschooling concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling) we began our adventure with the assumption that our children's curiosity would drive our inquiry, explorations, and adventures. We even use the term "unschooling" often to describe that to which we are up. This term keeps us grounded in our primary motivation for the endeavor: freedom and success.Posted on Feb 26, 2010 - 01:20 AM by Laura Stine in The Landscape
Editor's Note: Laura Stine is a member of IDEA's Advisory Board and a guest blogger. In this post, she responds to the recent exposure of a school district that used webcams to spy on students. She refers to a blogger with the screen name "Brainwrap" on the political opinion website The Daily Kos, which calls its blogs "diaries."Posted on Feb 15, 2010 - 06:16 PM by Claire Russell in Pulse
He stood there like a statue -- dressed head to foot in the full uniform of a United States Marine. His hands were behind his back with unmatched pride. He stood behind a table that was sitting in the middle of my cafeteria. The banner on the front of the table read "Marine Recruits."Posted on Feb 12, 2010 - 08:27 AM by Dana Bennis in News Feed
On Feb. 1, President Obama vowed to toss out the nation’s current school accountability system and replace it with a more balanced scorecard of school performance that looks at student growth and school progress.
I love the idea. Mr. Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have repeatedly criticized the No Child Left Behind Act for keeping the “goals loose but the steps tight.” On their watch, both men aspire to introduce a new law that keeps the “goals tight but the steps loose.”
With that more flexible standard in mind, I have a scorecard to propose: the ABC’s of School Success. It provides both structure and freedom by identifying five universal measurement categories—Achievement, Balance, Climate, Democratic Practices and Equity—and letting individual schools chose which data points to track under each category.
Howard Zinn: One of the Great Democratic EducatorsPosted on Jan 30, 2010 - 03:10 PM by Melia Dicker in The Landscape
"The interchange between student and teacher, the free inquiry that is promulgated in the classroom, a spirit of equality in the classroom, to me that is part of a democratic education." - Howard ZinnPosted on Jan 25, 2010 - 10:22 AM by Dana Bennis in The Landscape
I've followed Teacherken's writings on education for a couple of years now. Teacherken (Kenneth J. Bernstein, a teacher in the DC metro area) is one of the most outspoken voices advocating for more personalized and democratic education, writing on the popular Daily Kos blog. In a post written this past weekend, he reviews educator and author Linda Darling-Hammond's new book, The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, a great book I just picked up last week. As Teacherken explains, Darling-Hammond provides us with a strong argument to significantly change the direction of education in this country away from more tests and standardization... Working for Freire’s “True Word”Posted on Jan 18, 2010 - 06:26 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
Paolo Freire writes, "Human existence cannot be silent nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world."Posted on Jan 11, 2010 - 08:04 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
My friend and partner, Khadigah Alasry, in the fight to make education real again, developed a vision for a model of reform last year. We started presenting this model within the U.S. and over the internet. We've been invited to present in Dublin, the Cayman Islands, Hawaii, Dubai, Paris, and other places but due to our lack of funds and now time, we have had to kindly decline.Posted on Dec 27, 2009 - 02:41 PM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
I am currently on vacation in Nicaragua, and while I have been doing a lot of thinking, I have not been doing very much writing, as is wont to happen from time to time. And with thinking inevitably comes questioning. So what better place to explore some of those questions than here?Posted on Nov 23, 2009 - 10:28 AM by Dana Bennis in The Landscape
Think “landscape” and you might visualize an expansive nature scene, or maybe the nitty-gritty workings of the political landscape. Perhaps you think of the act of landscaping in terms of developing a park or other area. For the purposes of this blog, the landscape metaphor refers to all of this and more.Posted on Nov 01, 2009 - 06:47 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
My first week into teaching after my year in graduate school, I was filled with grand ideas and ideals as to what I would do in my classroom to help my students liberate themselves from the intellectual shackles of US public education. I entered my classroom and my school with the belief that my students and I would revolutionize the educational experience in Detroit forever--no hyperbole intended. This is how deeply I believed in my students and their potential to be positive change agents in a world which deemed them failures or equally insulting, average at best.