Reflections on “La Escuela Fratney”

Usually I reserve a post for reflecting on an entire book, but the second chapter of “Democratic Schools” edited by Michael Apple and James Beane is worthy of it’s own contemplation.

La Escuela Fratney is a bilingual (english and spanish) K-4 school on Fratney St in Milwaukee,WI. The school was founded by the negotiations of both local politics and a grass roots community groups (like the NNF, Neighbors for New Fratney). Central to the theme of the school lies a deep commitment to fostering unity among a diverse intercultural neighborhood school by valuing the individual value of the students and parents while instituting collaborative governance that deeply involves the local families.

A number of specific items impressed me:

• Two part-time, later one full time staff, were hired for the express purpose of recruiting parents to get involved.
• Use the whole language learning method results in exceptionally high interest in reading and writing including the formation of a section of the library dedicated to student authored books.
• Agility and time given to school strategy and initiatives such as the no-TV week challenge (and resulting critical media literacy projects to understand the hidden messages in media) and the clever idea to start school 10 minutes early every day so once a week student can go home early and give teachers a half-day to strategize together.
• The dedication of the staff to mentor students into mature responsible individuals by taking the time to process things like discipline issues in class and through discussion.

I suggest to get the book even if just for this one chapter.

2008 Student Technology Surveys

2008 Educause (ECAR) Study

Every year, Judy Caruso, a member of the CIO office of my department at UW, conducts a survey of about 25k students to see what they think about technology. Here is the complete ECAR study. Here are some findings that caught my eye. Some of these numbers are for only for the University of Wisconsin Madison:

• Only .3% don’t own a computer
• Only .9% use dial up internet (the rest have broadband)
• 59.6 own an internet capable cell phone (16.4% plan to get one in one year)
• 18% of freshman spend more than 16 hours/week on social networking
• Fine Arts use the least amount of technology well, Engineering uses the most
• Students believe that instructors do NOT understand their IT skill level
• 47% of students believe that IT improves learning in courses, 37% were neutral
• Only 26% believed that online recording of lectures tempt them to skip class more often
• 76% believe they like to learn through internet searches, followed by 50% for games
• 56.7% use social networking to set up conversation with other students about course material, only 1.7% use it for contacting their instructor 

DoIT Student Technology Report

This study was conducted by the DoIT communications team. The main thing I notices were the differences between the student and faculty uses of tech. Here are my favorites:

• 88% of students, but only 59% of faculty use wikipedia
• 78% of students, but only 39% of faculty use portable media devices
• 85% of students, but only 45% of faculty use youtube
• 75% of students, but only 35% of faculty use SMS
• 65% of students, but only 31% of faculty use IM
• 41% of faculty use google apps / gmail
• 32% of students use a gaming console

Response to Reading and Writing the world with Mathematics by Eric Gutstein

In this short, 200 page read, Gutstein captures both an integrated theory of teaching and a snapshot of his own convictions that finds audience with both the activist and pedagog. I found the passion of the author to be magnetic and the constant interruption of student reflections gave the text an honest feeling. This is not a theoretical book, it is the story of a real teacher who wanted to do something profound.

The first chapter contained a definition of functional mathematic literacy and its contrast with critical literacy, an idea I can tell will influence my thinking for some time to come. According to Gutstein, functional literacies have traditionally been seen as the set of skills or competencies required to function within a particular society. The particular set of these skills may vary based on the individual’s position in society.

Critical literacy, on the other hand, is the ability to analyze, deconstruct and see the relationships within a body of knowledge. Gutstein even goes as far as to say that this could all be done in context of a particular social-cultural-historical setting, asking the question, “who’s interests are being served by this view?”

The understanding of literacies, however, was only a detail along the way to the primary theme of the book: mathematics can provide a unique language to understand the world, and a set of tools to interact with it. I believe it would be safe to say that Gutstien would not object to this idea being extended to all subjects of study, not mathematics alone. This is a proposition I hope is true. If he is correct, then he has indirectly given value to the endeavor of studying mathematics, provided a framework of contextual learning and defined a rubric for assessing a student of the field.

Unfortunately, I fear that the direct application of simple arithmetic (I don’t remember seeing any examples of more advanced maths) to complex social issues may be like trying to study atoms with a magnifying glass. I thoroughly respect Gutstein’s desire to design projects that utilize math to understand the issues that are part of his student’s world, but he often mentioned asking his students questions like, “Was there racism here?” with only a few numbers to draw conclusions from. In addition, the curation of the particular set of numbers, done by Gutstein himself, lends itself to have biased conclusions ‘discovered.’

That said, the process in which he led these projects allows room to correct for the mis-application of math to politics if the teacher has enough critical mathematic literacy to draw from while leading the activity. For example, statistics are easily constructed which misrepresent reality, but an expert statistician should be able to identify bad statistics and have their students start over. Numerous times through the text Gutstien mentions doing just that, but never did he thoroughly explain his process.

Digital Storytelling

I just presented at the Digital Storytelling conference here in Madison, WI. In short, I made a case for a new way to look at learning, based in experiences rather than information transfer. 

Along the way, I told some stories myself: The pastor who worked with a neuroscientist to show that we live the lessons of your experiences not the facts we have learned, the sadu teaching content beyond facts and figures by telling stories in India and the programmer who could tell a tale about how they came to a solution.

We also talked a bit about the ARIS project and how we are building a tool to situate stories into spaces. I haven’t had much time to blog about ARIS, but I’ve presented on it four times in the last 6 weeks.

 Long story short, Chris Blakesley, Kevin Harris, Peter Debbink, Seann Dikkers and I have been working the last year and a half to design an iPhone game engine so that teachers can write mobile learning games. We are just getting out way to a “feature complete” version that we can begin sharing.

I hear the session was recorded, I’ll post the link when I find it.