Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "The Outside Groups Teaching YOUR Children Race Ideology & White Privilege" video.

  1. Comment on 7:50 mins on the relation between course content teachers and students "You have to se yourself in the curriculum". I remember at primary school and middle school our teachers took us on lots of trips around the local area. I live in the north midlands which at the time the City had large Mining, Steel and Pottery industries. The teacher was interested in us learning something of local history but also about the various "Reclamation" projects gong on that were turning former mining and steel refuse areas into parks in the early 70's. In high school we studied Social and Economic History of UK 1730-1860 focusing on the Industrial Revolution, which also connected well with the industrial environment we lived in. It helps you to see and understand the things around you. It not just a personal psychological history, but one tied in meaning to the local immediate world and that to science technology economics and politics. One possible way of teaching can begin with questions and problems but then to draw on in a develop from the students take up and often transformation of the problem over time in unpredictable ways. You have to have a wide understanding of subject matter and a creative gift to follow the students comments. It remains unclear how such an approach can be individuated since it turns on student student discourse its difficult to disentangle and asses individually distinct contributions. Also if it goes well it has no fixed end or aim or curriculum that can be metricised and facted in advance from the start. For a lesson plan you have a question or statement or example and then at best a kind of tree of possibilities in your mind which will never contain possible branches. Also problems can be faced when working with another teacher or assistants because on the one hand they find it difficultly to work without a clear linear plan and second they can tend to answer the problematic question directly and blow the whole thing in the first 5 minutes. Very occasionally a student can do this but that different. I was influenced by my taking Nuffield Sciences at school, having good teachers and reading the Marxist educational theorist Ivan Illitch. This is like marmite for teachers observing it: for some its disorganised and directional messing about "Write a Lesson plan"; for others "Its the only chance now, that students get to be creative and free in a lesson". Some students then love it but also some hate this approach too. This is more an art than standard teaching and would be impossible to make into a curriculum and legislation. I found a book on Teaching Ethics a few years ago that claimed to be following something like this but it was really only the appearance of such an approach as if it was a new teaching requirement, that was to be broken down into various knowledge and skills and then text booked. This was many years ago and I think teachers would be scared to open things up to the students like this now for fear of "loosing control" and of where it might go. I imagine that all the legal and social justice rules and laws and guidelines would reject this as a method from the start not just as risk but because they think ethics and value is about getting the student to learn propositions and commands that are transcendent and independent of the context place and dispositions and attitudes of the students. Indeed it is a priori to this paradyme, that what the students bring to the lesson is wrong. Not a blank slate then but a messy and sub standard mechanical product that ahs been rejected by quality control before entering the class room. One problem then is that a curriculum has ended and frozen a subject and its content from the context of discussion and discovery and creation. Its like teaching Plato by just stating the outcomes of the dialectic on a particular form and not the process of arrival. Like "Justice is abc". "What is Justice?"..."abc" Also and related point i read a book in the 1980s i think called "What teaching does to children" and i recall the writer was the first person ever to shadow one particular student in all their lesion for a week. The narrative of that one student does not exist in all the curriculums courses and lesion plans put together. One approach i was working on was just to get the students to cross relate between the various subjects in a lesson. So physics says "this" and religion says "that". but you get there from a concrete familiar example. the physics of boiling a kettle and cooling water, the history of tea and cultural significance etc. Some years later i saw a A level Philosophy and Religion course that had a whole section module jsut on what they called "Synoptic connections" between the modules taken. Thank you for the discussion Peter Whittle and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert.
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