Agency can be the difference between gaining nothing despite all the requisite learning supports vs actual learning
Category Archives: Blurring the In-School Ouf-of-School Line
The delimma of American education (From Chinese/Immigrants’ perspective)
“Criticisms of U.S. Schools/ schooling. In Haitian parents’ understanding, the goal of schooling is to instruct as well as to provide an education, the French word referring to providing children not only with reading, writing, and counting abilities, but also with moral guidance, a sense of civic duty, and interpersonal skills.” ((Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds, Fabienne Doucet, p2722) Continue reading The delimma of American education (From Chinese/Immigrants’ perspective)
The Lines are Less Blurry if you Find a Connection
“As a 1.5-gen-eration immigrant, I was able to connect to the students and their families in many ways. I speak Kreyòl without an accent, I have lived in Haiti, and I could relate to students’ stories about their parents’ values and criticisms of U.S. mainstream culture. In these ways, participants saw me as an insider and assumed I understood their experiences.”
Although Doucet’s study, (Re)Constructing Home and School:Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the(Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds, focuses on the boundaries immigrant parents place between home and school, I found her reflection on her bias to be my MVP for the week. Continue reading The Lines are Less Blurry if you Find a Connection
Check yourself…
“Rather than being avoided or dismissed, adolescent spirituality should be recognized for what it is—a wellspring of curiosity, imagination, justice, interconnectedness, and compassion.”
An excerpt from E. Toshalis’ (2008) “Adolescent spirituality in public schools” in M. Sadowski’s Adolescents at School: Perspectives on Youth, Identity, and Education. Continue reading Check yourself…
Escape and explore
“I decided to do SecondLife because I didn’t like MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, or Crushspot. Everybody at school was using these online social networking sites, and I don’t like people at school that much…They mess with me. I didn’t want to always have to be in school and deal with high school stuff, especially when I’m at home, you know what I’m saying. Anyway, I have fun on SecondLife. I don’t have to be myself because my life sucks. And then I feel like I can be more like myself because I don’t have to front about stuff.” (Kirkland, 2009, Researching and Teaching English in the Digital Dimension, p17)
This kid’s situation reminded me of my younger sister who had the similar experience, not enjoying school, lacking of friends but exploring a new world through the social networking sites. Like the kid mentioned in this article—Raymond who confronted awful situation at home and suffered a lot, my sister had been though much hard times because of her physical deficits in her left eye and her mouth. She was taken to the hospital every week for treatment which lasted for seven years after she was born. It’s hard to imagine the physical pain she suffered; however, it is always the psychological trauma that is harder to be healed. She hated to go to school and had little communication with either her classmates or her teachers because she was laughed at by her peers a lot and lacked confidence so that she only had one or two friends, and for the rest of her classmates, she barely talked to them. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a strange phenomenon in china that teachers tend to show bias to students who are outgoing or active in class and pay a little attention or care the introverted students so that students who volunteer to answer questions in class, ask questions after class and communicate well with teachers often times receive more care in all aspects. My sister was the opposite who never liked to talk because every time she spoke, people would stare at her mouth, so I was not surprised that her teachers paid no attention to her and never cared about her. Continue reading Escape and explore