Integrity

I'm wanting to do something with my photographs - share them without the hassle of a more formal gallery show.  For now, anyway.  Enjoy.  My thought for Integrity is something like the purity and honesty of nature, in all its facets, ugly and otherwise, it is in all regards, honest and straight forward.

Revisiting Multiage Portraits

Multiage Portraits: Teaching and Learning in Mixed-Age Classrooms by Anne Bingham





(Written on the occasion of posting Portraits in my Goodreads account.)

A few nights ago, I was reading the first chapters of Naked Spirituality by Brian McClaren.  McClaren is asking us to reclaim and enliven our spiritual lives by spiritual practice, the first of which is centered on the word, "Here."  Something in his writing made me go back and read the introduction to Portraits.  In the intro, I touch on teaching as something you are called to do (for the really great teachers) and I make the observation that in these classrooms, when children become absorbed in their learning, it is almost a spiritual experience.  They feel and act within their very essence.  I just touched on the point lightly.  Now, almost twenty years later, having revisited the crystal clear descriptions of elegant everyday practice Peggy and Anne and Molly and Justine wrote about, and sensing again the power of being totally "into" what you are learning, I am more convinced than ever that I was right.

CR


I wrote this book along with Anne, Justine, Molly, and Peggy.  It was an attempt to describe what good multiage teaching practices looks like.  We did it two ways:  I did a participant observation study of Anne's k-4 multiage classroom (Part 1. of the book) and each of the teachers wrote multiple essays describing how they approached their teaching day Part 2. of the book).  Part 3. put Parts One and Two together through a reflection on the writing of Lev Vygotsky.  The book sold 1300 copies.  It is beautiful teacher writing, and the moment to moment interactions I describe in Part 1. aren't so bad either.  The teacher-authors taught multiage in the old fashioned way.  One class with a group of children who happened to be of different ages.  This is not about how to teach "combined grades" or "combination classrooms" organized because of mismatched numbers of children at different grade levels.  It's about teaching heterogeneous, family-grouped, collections of children, organized because of a philosophical commitment to good developmentally inspired teaching. Period.



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Animoto fun

Been playing around with Animoto, a way to make videos from simple to complex. This is a quickie I put together to explain a bit of Universal Design for Learning to an audience who glazes over as soon as they think they are going to see another powerpoint. What do you think?

UDL@UVM

It isn't just the words...

So much of what is being talked about relative to the killings in AZ has to do with the language of our devolving political culture.  It's much more than the words themselves.  Current neuroscience tells us that the emotions communicated by the manner in which words are spoken (think about the sounds of John Beohner's red-faced screams to congress after the health care bill passed) trigger anxiety and fear as much as the words themselves.  It would be really interesting to have someone familiar with how the  limbic system functions, particularly the role of the amygdala, come on Morning Joe and help make this point.  The denials from both sides of the aisle that these murders were not linked to our political climate is simply not true.  Our brains pick up messages in many ways, not simply through the words of communication.  Like it or not, this research brings us perilously close to affirming our political climate indeed laid the base for these assassinations.

A Visual Meditation

Nothing is permanent,
not even Winter.

I have to say, there are some days in late October and November when all the world seems defined by gloom.  My visual life, and a little time to put words and images together, leads to a wider perspective.  Not everything will be frozen forever, and beyond the moments when all is, are promises of warmth trending upwards once again.

Academic Bullying At UVM

It happened again last week.  It became clear to me once again that academic bullying is alive and well at UVM.  "Well, faculty have an authority that may be perceived as bullying when used with passion and a certain kind of intent" you might say.  "That's the way certain faculty are.  They believe themselves to be unquestioned authorities in their field.  Their role is to deliver their expert knowledge to their students and their students' role is to take it in and learn it!"

I understand this.  Believe me.  I wasn't a department chair for five years for nothing.  But there's a line that can be transgressed that separates normal, non-punitive authoritarian behavior from punitive, accusatory, and demeaning authoritarian behavior.  We all know faculty who are puffed up on themselves, full of self referential commentary, who might also be quite good as teachers.  They might even have a tad bit of self-awareness, occasionally poking fun at their puffoonary.  I'm not talking about these people, the normal academic authoritarians.

I'm talking about the faculty members who inspire fear, masters and mistresses of the put down, purveyors of the "how dare you question my methods" view of the student/teacher relationship.  Faculty members who go beyond normal levels of faculty authoritarianism to another place - the place of academic bully.  Faculty members whose classes are filled with students who've learned the survival game of never question anything, agree totally with whatever's being put forth, sit silent and nod in feigned agreement, or come to class overprepared for a random call to answer.  (I know, that latter point is maybe what some teacher's want, but taken in the context of all the rest of the academic bully's behavior, it is way out of line as a teaching strategy.)

A major problem with the academic bully is the victims often have no reasonable recourse.  Department Chairs are usually powerless to do much more than offer a rebuke.  Save sexual misconduct, faculty seem to have, unfortunately, unlimited license in terms of appropriate professorial behavior in their classrooms and offices, even in the internet email to students.  Students are generally in a powerless position.  If a department has a policy for perceived professorial misconduct, usually the first step is for the student to go back to the abuser and try to have a discussion about the incident - usually alone.  Not many students elect to take that option.  Some choose to go to a Dean, but Deans often pass the matter back to Department Chairs.

Academic bullying is a dirty secret of universities.  Universities would prefer their multiple publics to believe that every class is peopled by faculty and students who care about each other and their curriculum and who are excited about the daily pursuit of knowledge.  But students know differently.  Secrets such as these fester and boil and rot the reputations of institutions from the inside out.  They turn students away from participating in the great good that can be had in provocative academic environments.  The dirty secret needs to come into the light of day.

Cases of academic abuse need to be defined, and dealt with from a position of authority and power.  Students need a place of recourse other than the office of the perpetrator.  Definitions of abuse need to be clear.  Conditions of assistance and conditions of sanction need to be clearly stated and understood by all members of the academic community. 

For a start, I'd offer the following definition of academic bullying,  adapted from the harassment policy of a local school district.


Academic Bullying and Harassment means an incident or incidents of verbal, written, visual, or physical conduct...that have the purpose or effect of demeaning a student and objectively and substantially undermining and detracting from or interfering with a student’s educational performance or access to school resources or creating an objectively intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.

Short of rational process, I might also suggest a series of articles on the subject by the local campus newspaper.  If not able to be addressed head on, perhaps a series of vignettes would serve the purpose of putting the university community on notice that such behavior diminishes our ability to live out Our Common Ground statement and will not be tolerated at the University of Vermont.

Animoto and UDL

Had great fun using animoto for the first time and lookie here: a quickie video about UDL that communicates in image, text, imagery, and sound. All done within 5 minutes.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.