I think there are rules here for these 5 things......so I'll start by copying Brian at Learning is Messy a super favorite blog....(actually I 'm in awe of the thought..."learning is a messy" such clear insight, it's complicated, sticky, drippy, sweet, sour, gurgling, a crumbly thing to paste ones' way into your tomorrows...that said...)

1. I have done some crazy things to make money.
I once filled an order for Macy's for 5000 silk purses I had designed (about falling over during a Christmas break) and definitely not making a profit,
I worked in a clown suit delivering balloons for birthdays at 30 dollars a stop,
I worked in a deli walking 12 miles to get to that job for 7 months daily,
I was a sign painter both for groceries and in store displays,
I've decorated name plates, designed and painted nursery walls, mural painted, art of every kind imaginable...
I worked in a shirt factory,
I spent summmers working in basketball camps,
I designed the Monongalia County Seal,
I worked as the Summer Recreation director 2 summers as a Monongalia County Park arts person,
I played piano,
I bartended,
I sold things in NY Galleries,
I made painted stools and furniture,
I tutored every subject and especially liked the calculus groups and adults learning to read,
I've worked summer schools all but one year of 23,
I've made hats,
and I've really just scraped along trying to find ways to ekk out a living.

What I want to do is teach art and make art and why I want that is it is a pure pleasure to watch a group of people create.

2. Okay who do I come from....my Dad was a McIntosh from the hills of EastTennessee. This through my grandmother Axie Seville Fender McIntosh makes me a direct descendent of John Sevier , first governor of the state. She's cousin to the Fenders of guitar fame and my favorite 2nd cousin to Tennessee Williams the playwrite who she met and knew. Now on Momma's side you have a family that owned the dairy in Doylestown Penn, they owned fruitstands in Wildwood on the boardwalk. Lucas and Himmelwrights...my grandmother Lucas was trained as a nurse at the Jewish Hospital was actually a Himmel and from this you see I have a Jewish tradition to honor too. In mom's grandparents were a grandfather who grew delphiniums and shipped them via train into NY and Philly. Her family had certificate makers, calligraphers, sign painters. Also Sunday artists, small businessowners...from England, Germany. One thing I always tell is my mom and Dad were in the Air Force. Mom could fly a plane and had her pilot's licence, though she never could drive a car. Dad was an Ag Economist....oh boy was that a mouthful....

3.Let's see ...umm I'm interpreting this to be things I can do
...I paint furniture, make drawings, love pencil drawing, like to crochet hats, I like to have flowers-violets are my favorite they are small treasures but dogwoods, lilacs, daffodils, irises, mountain laurel, fuschias,trilliums, zinnias, glads, dahlias, roses, orchids and more really make me happy and I like to paint flowers. Even dead ones and shoes.

I've pretty much lived the last 20 years feeling ridiculously out of place in ghetto life in CA which is oddly warm, sunny, violent, obscure, unconnected..so everything seems very temperal unlike my earlier life back east. I love Victorian houses and love drawing them. I really find portrait work that I love to do. I can cook pretty well and house clean and do domestic stuff. I do avoid the cleaning as much as I can. One secret is the state accidentally gave me a drivers licence that for years allowed me to drive any vehicle out on the road...that was something.

4.I've taught in West Virginia traveling art teacher in a junior high, and basically loved it teaching Ukranian egg designs, drawing BMX bikes, photography, doing sets for plays that were incredible..you name it we did it from candles to batik to weaving.....then I was asked by my husband and I went to California and taught in a place so dangerous, so violent it was a living nightmare. I'm sure it still it -the school was in the block with the most murders in a 15 year record I saw in the LA Times last year...there I learned the realities for poor black children born in Americas big cities.
I taught in a migrant farm community heart of the Salinas valley for 9 years mostly 4th grade learning the lives of immigrants and farm workers first hand, I taught in this district by the port in Oxnard in a hood school servicing a poor , mixed and badly interfacing group learning more about urban poverty and issues of immigrants. I love kids and teaching and I thinkI've really enjoyed all the literature, projects, walking trips, library visits, walks to shops, the trips to see missions, trails, CA history, art , chalk festivals, eagles nesting up in Lake San Antonio....it was a job where going , doing were so integral but under NCLB so much has disappeared most notably the integrity , drive, love of learning, teaching, the happiness , the discovery are dying or dead. I loved model economies in classrooms, learning Bucky Fuller for Geometry, I loved making the concepts and constructs live for students. I went broke practically channeling my money and time and life energy into helping and working on my classroom as a garden for learning...and now I'm treated at work really like dirt. And that's just the real truth. ButI care enough about education to try to work through this towards schools that give these kids access to technology, learning, opportunity...just like all kids deserve....I love to write poetry with children. In first grade children often are living poetry...so my work is an artform. I never forget this...

5. Hummmm. I want to see Alaska, always have. My uncle was stationed there and a long time ago my then boyfriend wrote me letters of the beauty as he hiked the Gold Rush Trail.Now my husband tells me it would "kill me" to walk it, but I want to try. I would love to see China I've read about China for 25 years having an affinity for it somehow...I would really like most of all to return to Vienne, France a city I stayed in for a long time after we were married. It holds for me an special kind of joie de vive. And I love Antibes and Marseille too...so I'm ready to go God Willing when I hit the lottery...

So...how's this...did I do this right????

I had a great time Mum: here's what I wrote in my livejournal, if you're interested:

Went to see Jon Stewart stand-up today, with my mum: OMG, it was great. ;D It was about, eh, two hours and thirteen minutes long (roughly, haha) so we totally got our money's worth. Even if the (cheap) tickets were $75. Tickets in the front? $500 bucks a pop. Damn, that guy draws a crowd.

First of all, the venue: University of California, Santa Barbara; Thunderdome. Which is pretty much the big gym where they have basketball games. We were way up in the bleachers, and the expensive seats were folding chairs on the basketball court, and then there was a fancy stage set up on the right with two big screens for those of us who couldn't see.

We got there about 7:20, which was too early, as the show was to start at 8. Despite the rather large sign that said NO LATE SEATING, the real crowd came about 8:05, fashionably late, true to California form. That was all right, though, since everybody was fine by the time it started.

It was tremendously funny, how it began. They shut the lights off in the gym, all of them, and it was PITCH BLACK. I could only see the reflection off my mum's glasses until my eyes adjusted. And then lights flashed all over the stage, like a rock concert, spotlights and colored lights and all that jazz. They announced Jon, and he came out, looking very casual.

He started off noting the stage, which had these weird tall bushy plants all around it. "Are these, like, real?" he asked and went to look at one. "What were they thinking...'We will make it so he is in a forest!' Well, if I need to take a leak later..."

He did a little about UCSB, asking what they were known for, etc. They are the UCSB "Gauchos," which he ribbed, gaucho-esque accent and prancing and all. He asked us what a Gaucho was and several people yelled "AN ARGENTINIAN COWBOY!" "Ah," he said, "you went with something native to the area. No, but seriously, Argentinian cowboys? They're the best cowboys. Those Brazilian cowboys? Fuck 'em. Pfft."

At that, (and then several times throughout the night), everyone stamped their feet like you do at games, making the trademark thunder sound, I guess. He seemed to think that was very funny. "Where I come from, we call that a subway." Everyone did it again. "Don't you wish you could do that at your job, and it would work?" He mimicked us. We did it again. He cracked up. Very funny.

I shan't repeat his bit, since it was mostly things from his show, etc, stuff you guys would recognize. Suffice to say, it was very funny. A few bits were new to me, I dunno if I've just missed them sometime or what: Lieberman ("He'd be a hard guy to break up with."), his computer (which apparently has the power to launch a shuttle, but not his games), and a great bit on Bush. ("He's not stupid. He's a twelve-year-old kid giving a book report on a book he hasn't read. He isn't stupid...but he sure thinks the teacher is. *Bush accent* 'Treasure Island...is an island.")He came back at the end to give us a final thought--that one about 9/11, and the guy jerking off on his stoop, and everything being okay. We got plenty of accents: Lieberman, Cheney, Bush, something German, and the gaucho.

At one point about halfway through, some girl tried to, I think, get on the stage. The security people got a hold of her so fast I didn't even see what was happening--I was watching Jon watch them. He stopped in the middle of the joke and kind of eyed them. Once they took her out (I saw them handcuffing her on the floor in the back) he was like, "If any other hot women would like to rush the stage...please don't." A very male voice from somewhere cried out "I love you, Jon!" He paused hilariously. "Thank you...sir." He never finished that joke--lost his train of thought, I suppose; I would too.

A while after that, in between jokes, Jon pulled out his camera phone. "I just want to get a picture of all of you," he said, and pointed it at us and took one. I thought that was rather funny. I tried to return the favor, but the bright lights made it impossible to get a photo. Some other guy from the back (VOCAL crowd, lots of shouting--and Jon would always stop and ask for them to repeat it so he could hear) said something I didn't hear, probably like "I want one too!" and Jon said "You're going to have to fight all these people to the death to get it. I'm 140 pounds of asthmatic Jew, let's go." Awesome.

All in all, a great performance. I was worried my mum wouldn't like it much--she wasn't really a Jon Stewart fan--but about halfway through she leaned over and said "Oh! He's so cute." And I knew it'd be fine. At the end, she said, "He didn't say anything I found objectionable or didn't agree with," which I thought was pretty cool. I think she's a fan now. And, as Stephen Colbert says, there's nothing more important than your mom having a good time. :D I had a great time myself, bit my nails and laughed and laughed.

I'm a bit lazy getting a post out...Sylvia had a kidney stone two nights ago and I have to recover. She's 17 and by far a better writer so I thought we might enjoy her take on Room 10.

If you scroll down you can read MY TAKE on the Lot in the Box....



NCLB In Action: A Lot in a Box
Sylvia Puglisi

A pig puts a tan fox in a box.

The kids are sitting on the rug, reading a story from their first-grade textbook. The school is underperforming by NCLB standards, and thus everything has become obscenely structured in order to, somehow, raise their level of acheivement. This is "scripted instruction," where the teacher receives a piece of paper tracing out every word they're supposed to say, how every minute of classtime is going to be used up.

A pig can fit a wig in a box.

It's my mother's classroom, and she's never been one to follow the script, so while she gets the daily dose of standardization out of the way, I'm in the back tracing nursery rhymes onto pads of paper. These are second-language-learner students, who stare at me blankly when I start a rhyme like "Humpty Dumpty..."I write out "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick; Jack jump high, Jack jump low, Jack jumped over and burned his toe." On second thought, I draw a candlestick with a boy jumping over it in bright marker.

A pig can put a big hat in a box.

My pad of nursery rhymes is educational contraband here, as are the giant charts of songs which they sing in the mornings and the dozens of classic childrens books that were mine and my siblings' and now reside in this classroom. The rhymes these kids are supposed to learn are printed in their textbook; here's one for Chapter One: "If we do / All things together / All things can change / Even weather." Now, I admit, I have no idea how to fit four-and-twenty blackbirds into a pie, but it seems to make a lot more sense than that.

A lot can fit in a box!

The story is over, four pages later, and now for the questions. This story is labelled "Realistic Fiction," which confuses me, as I've never seen a pig put anything in a box, let alone a tan fox. What it should be labelled is "Plotless Phonics Stories," because that's what it is--a handful of short vowels and pairs of rhyming words. I have nothing against using phonics to get to meaning, but how much meaning can you get out of pigs and hats and foxes?

"How many things are in the box?" my mother asks.

"Four," the kids respond confidently.

She pauses at the universality of this answer; shouldn't it be three? "What are they?"

"A fox," the kids say, "a wig, a hat, a lot."

My mom and I look up and can't help but laugh. A lot in a box. Of course.

Then my mother tries to explain to them the principle behind a lot, without saying something as unintelligible as "quantity." I just sit in the back and trace "Hey Diddle Diddle" and smile wryly. Their logic is impeccable. A "lot" is a three-letter word like any other three-letter word to be rhymed and drilled and memorized without a trace of meaning.

It's not that they can't make meaning. Left to their own devices out on the playground, they coin such wonderful new terms as "a muddly puddle." Now, that's an invention that requires a grasp of word meanings, an ear for phonics, and an ability to bend language to their intention, to say what they want to say.

And in the current educational climate, that's not something you see a lot.

A Dialogue From A Two-Educator Household(Plus a LIFE FRIEND ) Documenting And Describing The Last Twenty Years Of Education In American Public Schools...or we are all writing again...


Learning Languages

Sarah Puglisi....wife and teacher

Today brought an interesting language experience into my room.
I teach 1st graders in a program dubbed “Sheltered Immersion”. Within this program students who are placed in English from primary language Spanish speaking homes are supposed to be assisted into English with support programs (SIOP, “Focus Approach” what we used to call Sheltered English) among other strategies using the same grade level standards (and oddly also sameness in pacing -despite the clear contradictions within their own materials and written strategies for these students based in Language Acquisition knowledge) and criteria from English Only (EO) students with the addition of more supports for vocabulary and experiential type connection. In reality my 1st graders are segregated from EO peers academically into my room with only themselves as models, thus placed in rooms without more fluent children or real English speakers. It’s a dubious (if not more ominous) thing to do given what we know of the role of models in this age child. But nonetheless I volunteered for the position so with that in mind I’m trying to deal with the segregation… and the need to develop English language in students who are both poor, non English speaking and not fully assimilated into America. A task making me at present …The least Respected Teacher in our country carrying the greatest burden. It is mine to carry. And mine to try to speak to…..


Today I had our phonics driven story out; it is called Wigs in a Box. It is the third story to use “wig” as a part of the text in two weeks. Now I would argue with no amount of sincerity that nowhere on earth have I used the term wig this much except in thinking about the Dolly Parton bonanza week aspect of my life a story for another time…but these 1st graders at least reminded me today that Halloween is coming and a good wig will do for that. In this story the Pig throws a ball at a carnival and gets a box. In the box are five wigs that are different colors and shared with a fox (of course) and a cat, dog. Basically the story taught the words five, four, three and a few other sight words like “red” that I’d taught them weeks ago myself doing off task things and filing in the holes in the program with teaching I justify as meeting their language needs.

Second language learners need lots of “contexts” to learn. This story had no real plot, not uncommon in these phonics driven works. It would appear they consider that unnecessary for a young child. The “golden delight of decoding” wasn’t holding up today during the story- ten children on and off asked to go to the restroom or to get a drink. Later when I read with them, “The Story of a Sunflower”, a much more complex text so we could plant our seeds and draw our pictures NO students asked for anything. I wonder….

After this story Pig Wig Box story we read The Box, now this is a really difficult one for me. In this story a box owned by Pat gets filled with a tan fox, a hat and …I forget…and then it is remarked, “A lot can fit in a box.” I love this because the comprehension question that is asked is, “How many things can fit in the box?” And the students answered gleefully four. A hat, fox, thing I forget and “a lot”. If I were to give you a basic understanding of what happens when one-size fits all programs are shoved down child throats- this would be a perfect example. A “lot” is a concept that for my students was just like the other excessively meaningless three letter words. It’s a thing to count for them. After ten minutes of explanation, most still voted for four things in that box…and so it goes. What we are applying in our phonics driven Directed Instruction political minefield of present day programming is “a Lot” …both a lot of nonsense and in the way of a big giant “parking lot”, it’s a place we are sort of stuck in. We are working with children in poverty and with issues of needing contexts for understanding. And I suspect all children probably prefer contexts too, and I also suspect that many are bored to death by these stories in rooms with more English skills and ability to get at reading. My own children would not have fit these materials, I’m lucky, they grew up before all of this came along….. “The lot”…that’s an image I’ll be thinking of as we go along this month in my world of language confusion.

Language is power…that’s the thing I always recall from classes I took in learning to teach art, then in learning to teach reading. It’s power and in the classroom “scene” children who can unlock it well, and get it done early usually dominate in the social structure with peers. They have advantages, praise, information, practice it as they use it, they frame meanings and understandings for others, they can decide things, they can use their language as a help or hindrance, they can build esteem and resiliency, they can access more information and in the old saying “get richer”. Even in my classroom the children who have “the reading” as Gabriela so hilariously always puts it “gots the chosing” and they “gots the friends who will not listen to me teacher and bees my friend anymore forever cause I no got the English they gots when we were trying to tell the duty the way we were finding the sweater and got to the trouble and now we have no more recess. And they are mad, teacher. So we no have the recess, and I no more have the friends forever.. “
And they also don’t have the power to solve the problem with the dubiously intelligent duty aide to explain to her about why they tried to leave the lunch play yard to get a sweater a child forgot in a lunchroom. So it was stolen before they could get to it the next day costing the child an incredible punishment from a very unsophisticated parent who doesn’t have the resources to get another one. A day in the life of a child without good language power is a day of frustration and topsy turvy misunderstanding and misinterpretation and lots and lots of emotion and tension. And exhaustion. So my class is very sincere and whiny and quick to push and as one very lovely helpful EO teaching peer stated so eloquently to them yesterday, “A pack of animals.” Yes a lot are…..I suppose on first look, especially if you are segregated away from ever getting to know them, or their issues or have understanding of why they are being made to look more animal like by the way we are developing their interface with school. But that takes “a lot” of sophistication…a lot.

My son came to language very late. His sisters talked by nine months knowing hundreds of nursery rhymes and generally more English than my 6 year olds this year…at nine months they were in rapid brain growth periods when acquisition of vocabulary was an expansive impressive journey. It took place for them in a fashion that was full of play and experimentation, fun, free of frustration and negative emoting …it was a way to dance a dance with me. Rhymes and singing song filled our spaces.
Not so with my son Luca. He had lost a great deal of hearing to infections that kept him on antibiotics until age three with continual issues of pain. He could say no and initial letter sounds of words. His sisters interpreted for him. He acted on the world climbing on things. At nine months he scaled the fridge and pulled out the mixer, beaters and cord and plugged it in. He was able to open a door, run down the street, he threw a ball against the wall thousands of times in a couple hours every day… which I thought was unusual in a one year old-playing catch with yourself into a glove came by fifteen months. He was very emotional, often had a fit when not understood. Luca was usually not able to explain unfairness, depended on me or the girls to both be fair, understand and to help him navigate the world. What I recall best was how badly he wanted to sing and how he could not do it. Now he is a singer. When he did start speaking at age three he rarely dominated a conversation, rarely was speaking, deferred to others and was clearly a ball player. In 7th grade he has acting talents, he can play a guitar like a second skin but he has internalized beliefs and fears I know come from what his particular relationship to language and power taught him early on. He is what happened to him- both the good of that and the bad. And what I notice in school is his vulnerability when a teacher or student is unfair or puts him in a difficult spot, he is extremely hard pressed to use his verbal skills to navigate and help himself. He is almost dumb.

I once long ago walked in those same shoes as a child as my son….I know to some degree what he faces. It is difficult for me now as an adult to navigate with someone who twists meanings to suit their goals, I depend on others to help me seek fairness, I get used. I cry out in my frustration for a just God. I need a universe with a force for good. I find I’m inarticulate when I most need it. I failed to develop critical personal language skills others seem to have so readily at hand….I can’t be brief and to a point. I am circular.

Language is power. And as a teacher I have been examining how I can offset and assist students from poverty and second languages into some level of equity. I’ve had to give up notions of “silence’. I’ve had to articulate “big picture” understandings. In my teaching I’ve had to frame things for them, provide additional literature and real life connections. I’ve had to find ways to give students opportunities to practice language in more carefully designed ways and more natural ways to allow a broader sharing of language power; I’ve had to empower students with language. I can and I will take some time at a later date to look at some of those ways of designing experience. But in the main, I’ve grasped that my classes will be better off if I use language very well, am well-read, if I am chatty, filtering experiences, modeling, singing (a great deal of singing) if I’m maximizing our time as my nine month olds did long ago in play feeling experiences like my Nursery Rhyme Theater…so that the vocabulary and the language feel, tone are all back dropped into the environment. It’s richness over a poverty.

Into this comes a layer called Underperformance, NCLB, Explicit Directed Instruction, Standards based Instruction, workbooks and same days and same pages and focus walls and good intentions which intend horrible political realities and the rain of a loss of teacher autonomy and judgment and tension of the site, increase in student performance demands, increased neglect of arts, music, PE, factors of restriction of time on things like being a friend, or helping, sharing, caring and being about a “you” and into this the language power gets consolidated into to fewer children's hands and fewer until eventually even the school becomes a microcosm of the bigger society….some with their pictures up for months on the Principal wall of FAME for passing with Advanced or Proficient scores and then… everybody else with no photo for effort or good try….with a head down, upset, more aware than ever of what they can’t say, doing the wrong thing, getting more inclined to do more of the wrong thing, teacher not as friend or ally but as jailer or at best palpable resistance to teacher, and it goes on and on until power clearly goes to those who either speak very well to manipulate and consolidate for themselves(teacher pet types) or those willing to do anything…..And thus I see our school putting into place the ultimate “lot” of all time. A “lot” of nonsense…a dead end “lot”.
It’s really a “lot” where no one knows what anything really means or how to speak to anything, because someone is speaking for you or you are lying to get something you don’t deserve because you developed your capacities AT THE EXPENSE of another.

And this RIGHT NOW , is LANGUAGE TO ME.





JP(husband and Superintendent):
Classrooms and schools are all about language and languages. Here in California, USA it's all about English on the political level and a lot about Spanish on the practical level, and also about a vast diversity of languages due to the multi-cultural and immigrant nature of the society. Classrooms and schools are also about the language of school; educationalese you might say. Recently, they have become all about the language of “accountability” and testing. Schools and classrooms are all about teacher talk and student talk, they are all about break room gossip, memos, email, and newsletters. They are all about language.

Some classroom research, of the sort I have done and do (ethnography), is about language and constructing meaning through language. It utilizes observations and interviews, and transcriptions of audio and video to ask big questions like: What is going on here? Who says what? Who takes up what others say in the stuff they say?

This ethnographic lens provides me an opportunity to consider and analyze different points of view, angles of vision for common experiences. Sometimes, or perhaps all the time, one person, say a teacher, might talk some activity into being with an intention that those other people in the room, students, will hear what she is saying, do what he/she is asking, and learn/understand what she intended. An ethnographic perspective lends itself to a constructivist notion of how people understand and learn (simply put, they take their existing conceptions and cognitive structures and connect them to new experiences and knowledge and reconstruct their understandings/knowledge/skills). It does not lend itself well to the open up the empty head and dump the knowledge/skills in theory that is also prevalent in many classrooms and schools.

Anyway, when you get to know kids well, and when you let them build a trust, they often freely express themselves and respond to questions and experiences, they provide you a window (through their language… facial expressions and body language etc…) to how they are constructing meaning. This meaning may be the same stuff we want them to be learning as “on task” students or it may be something very different.

Its not only children, though, who use and produce language to make meaning in different ways, adults are even less predictable in this sense. In my work as a school/district leader, I have to use language in oral and written form to provide context for group activity, group leaning, community making and decision making. Sometimes, though, no matter how well I have crafted or think I have crafted the message or series of messages, it seems that some groups of folks will be in the room and I have trained their brains through their language processors to see the enormous elephant in the room, and just like the Sufi story we all know, when I ask them to make conclusions in order to later make a collective decision, sometimes different people only see part of the elephant and others see no elephant at all.

I had this experience once during a committee activity that was interviewing principal candidates for a school. My choice for the job, one of only several voices in the process, I thought was so clearly ahead of the other candidates that the decision-making would take little time and would develop a consensus quite easily. In addition, I thought, the language that emerged during the interviews would clearly separate one of the candidates, (an internal candidate) from the others as clearly lacking in a variety of the experiences and thought processes required for the job. As the interviews ended and the committee commenced to talk their choices into being, I was bowled over by the contrasting perspectives on the interviews that had just taken place a few minutes and hours before. Were they in the same room as I was? I thought. What kind of filters must they be processing through in order to come to the conclusions they did and how could they possibly have ignored the elephant in the room?

In the end, I was able to use my language and other skills to persuade committee members to consider different perspectives, and in the end we hired the best candidate, or who I thought was the best candidate, but it took days… not minutes and took a great deal of language and progressive meaning making.

I know that the language of school and its culture is a language that most successful students understand well and many non-successful students do not. I know that many successful teachers learn to listen to the language of students and student groups and to their own languages as they endeavor in the 180 days they have to create a classroom culture that achieves the goals they haves established for both individuals and the class culture itself. I also know that great teachers collect this language data either formally or informally and analyze trends and patterns and they act on what they learn from the process and they carry that 180 days’ learning to the next class culture and so on and so on. I also know that some teachers, unconsciously or intentionally attempt to create the exact same classroom and classroom culture year after year, class after class and that in many of these classes student language is regarded only in it’s behavior/response sense.

I’m very interested in helping all students, and in particular, underdog students, develop explicit understandings of the ways that the language of schools and classrooms impact and influence their learning and their lives. I am equally interested in finding ways for these same students to develop language that influences the classroom and school culture such that they do better at helping these students learn and become engaged in learning.

Steven Clark who I've worked with for 22 years adds this to our thinking...

I don't think I have anything much to add, except the McCrackens "Read to understand, write to communicate" and how sad that is not the basis of all education. All human beings come to us with such massive agendas which we are forced to almost completely ignore in the name of "accountability", when it all depends on what you're counting. Your phonics story reminded of the Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49, in which the reader is kept in the dark throughout the novel, what in the world is a Lot 49 and why would one Cry it. Just in case you read the novel, I won't reveal it, except to say that within two years of reading the novel I attended a Crying of Lot 49 at the San Mateo County Fair with my friend Rick who fell asleep at the heavy metal concert. It's a big word lot, just look at the bible. Metaphysical meaning-wrapt up, hidden, covered, myrh, resin. The story of Lot, most disturbing and confusing. A lot indeed.
I just feel so bad for you Sarah, I think that people were just scared enough of me that they left me alone more than you. Maybe you should buy a pit bull that hates principals and reading specialists. We are all reading specialists because reading is perhaps the most individual, maybe idiosyncratic thing we do, and so much in need of all the personality and charisma that can be brought to bear. I read this in the last month and forget the source, only that its not mine, maybe I wrote it last time, but its worth repeating, "Education in one fourth preparation and three fourths show business." I never was much on preparation but the show was almost always on.
Your kids sound great, just hearing about them makes me miss the classroom. If you run out of gas, just follow them I bet you got some real survivors in there who'd love to be your Best Friend forever.

Steve
P.S. I saw your quote at the bottom about the immensity of the sea, I ran into an old student of mine, from 1987 in king city, and this was 2005 in Greeenfield, 18 years later, she was 30 married with kids. I knew her immediately and she me. The first question out of her mouth was , "You still going to Mars Mr. Clark?" "You bet"I responded. Let's go Sarah, I bet Mars is beautiful. I think I really need to revive that in my life.. Have you read any Freeman Dyson. He wants the little people to go to space. just sayin.

Are YOU White?

When you are white and you go to teach in South Central Los Angeles in 1983 in a neighborhood that is mostly black (with some few Hispanic students) it might be better and certainly easier to not talk about their race, or your race, or gangs or really many things.
Seems hard to say something so that another within their context can take it at least in the way you mean it. At least be upset for what you intended.

Certainly I cringed as a family friend at Christmas that year gave me a global talk on genetic material I never expected in response to my talking about how school was going for me back in South Central. I wanted to talk about the disparity in where I was working and back home in West Virginia and a very big dichotomy that was hitting me round his Christmas tree. Perhaps I was picturing the Christmases of the children I met in LA, many of whom in my husband’s room raised a hand when asked if a family member was in jail. Our family friend Will, who is older than my mom and whose deceased wife was a community activist my daughter is named for, wanted to talk about it in this gene based way. In the guise of understanding through accepting the premise that some “can”, some “cannot”. I thought then he just wanted to be certain that he was not collectively called upon to assume any responsibility or fault. (I was young and not in his context, I heard it that way.) If he could rest assured of the premise there are different racially inherent genetic capacities then one could be far more comfortable with it somehow. I interpreted. To be fairer maybe I can’t just understand his point well enough to present it. Still it shocks me to argue that groups of people have capacity in their genes. I hadn’t intended to solicit anything like this, but I was testifying to what I saw.

I just felt I was a witness. And I still am trying to testify to the truths I learned then.

I thought if I just told people then maybe we could get some guys and go fix this world. The kind of response he gave to me is the river underground that rides through the consciousness of many I encounter in different realities when discussing what a fair public education needs to mean. I always want to talk about that. Try it, you are immediately confronted with a difficulty of another kind. As a white girl teaching in my school in South Central I had a lot to learn. And still it is a very difficult issue to “talk about” for it hits every nerve every person has in every reality I encounter. It has many contexts. Then too there is a world of emotion involved when some “have” and some “have not”. Just by how I look I convey “meanings”, often those not intended. You can mean well and offend just about everyone.And you can never write well enough to create a place where we can allcome together and find commonality, or so it seems.

From my field notes at the time, writen by a 27 year old....... "Working in my room one day......long ago in 1983....waiting for Phyllis to get back from RSP, a pullout program, a teen entered my room yelling gang things and talking in Lavon’s face in a language I could not understand. (Phyllis had evidentially left the locked door a bit ajar so she could come back in when she went to her class. She went with my never knowing really where it was held or her teacher for it.) It was a fast, loud, guttural and threatening rant from our huge intruder. I knew what a knife meant and he was lunging out at my student. The rooms did not have phones and cell phones were not yet so universal, no walkie-talkies, and the lousy intercom was a button by the door he was blocking. I told the kids to get behind me and go in Mr. U.’s room through the connecting door at the back of the room. Some did. No one managed to get the other teacher who could have been a real help or tell him the problem. Kids were running back and forth rather gleefully. Most gathered in a circle to watch. And I was completely irrelevant. For a few seconds, and it was only seconds, I discerned this had connection to Lavon’s older brothers, he continued to furiously rant at Lavon down right in his face. Suddenly Phyllis flew the door open, pushed by the teen literally moving him over, greeted him with some response using a name like “Peewee”, which was again inaudible to me, and sort of scolding him took her seat. Miraculously he left. Using the back doors I told the several of us teachers on the floor, called on the intercom to the office and hoped, expected, they’d use their ability to get to a phone and call the police. We fled to my husband’s room down the hall via the back of the room connecting doors. Somehow I learned he’d also been to their room prior to my event. Lavon was supposed to be in Jack’s room, so I suppose he looked there first for him. My husband said Chris, a student, probably answered the door and sent him our way. No one ever sent the police, Mrs. W. the AP played her usual intercom games, “What?”, “Where?” ,”Who is this?” and so forth and kept asking me if he was still on the campus. Locked up in my room I certainly could not know where the teen was at now. I kept asking her to go look outside if she wanted that answered and to call the police. I made the error of saying a “gang kid” when she asked what he looked like due to his dress, language, knife, flashing hand signs and so on. She did come through loud and clear to tell me there were, “No gangs in the area or at the school”. I really needed at that particular frighteningly real moment to be lectured in her take on her own parasitical relationship with the neighborhood. No gangs there my behind. To care so little you cannot follow through on a knife stands for me for how little she really thought about what these kids deserved from school. At times kids need to know where adults stand exactly. They had reached something like equilibrium working here. It depended on not taking any action or stand on anything. It wasn’t going to work for me not to tell the kids plainly gangs equal death or jail. Period. I still can’t shake that mantra. Even if it does cause “cognitive dissonance” with the neighborhood, get real. To be reminded that if I were laying on the ground right now wounded there was a pretty good chance she wouldn’t mind taking her sweet old time bothering to get any medical help was more than I can process, still."

"But that is how it was. For essentially it was years of poor, ineffective leadership combined with outrageous socital decay that neither educated nor helped children in a situation so dangerous any moment in a classroom could and did escalate into a murderous act. We weren’t just at this place in times where the danger was only from white racists who held you in contempt. These two leaders had the skin color but not the will and focus to change the climate of that school. And they didn’t exist in a vacuum. They got by. To talk about Los Angeles Unified in 1983 one has to understand that entity gave rise to the degredated public ed. situation too by employing and maintaining leadership that was parasitical in some schools. LA Unified was many things; it’s huge, including a place whereby some existed as feeders on the system. You can’t blame these particular women really, it evolved, and they evolved. Or perhaps it devolved. The kind of fixative leadership to try to change this school has come much later after our leaving, through reform movements, monetary investment, political will and additionally two women leaving their kingdom. And one fine teacher within the school currently becoming their leader. You can wish it away but fundamentally when you can hear bullets, all hell really is breaking loose."


Back to field notes..."Daily terror for some is not acceptable to me as an American standard. Someone stepping up to the plate to deal with it requires a good deal, all they are goes on the line too. Not an easy job to accept doing. To do it well requires a force of will of mountainous proportion. South Central was a place that demanded greatness. Mrs. W. liked to say to me, “See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.” On that point she was always consistent. Always referring to gangs she said, “Those white kids up in the valley were the ones doing that kind of thing. “ Coincidentally I got in the middle of a student fight on the recess yard and had been slightly hurt. How was I to know we were not suppose to separate them, they’d punch you down driven by their fury and not pull back because you were a teacher? Jack’s eye had a pencil plunged into it in a similar incident and he had been lucky it just hit the white part. Mrs.W. had visited my room for a screaming reminder I was not to say anything about the gangs that didn’t “exist” anyway. She wasn’t going to “hear tell” of anymore of it. One of my kids, Tiandra with Sickle-cell, ratted me out for a particularly impassioned death or jail talk I gave in response to gang signals flashing during the knife visit in my students. It had been a month of more than a few safety issues, after the Spring Break return of Mrs. S.the Principal and the return of a very awesome sub to another part of the District. And Mrs. W. her right hand woman was riding high again.
My husband decided to raise the issue of school safety at the staff meeting. What a mistake. Our tables for the meeting were arranged in a kind of rectangle with open middle with Dr. S, once she returned and her Sargent, on one end and the faculty sitting around the other three sides. We were as far from her as possible. He asked if there could not be more done to protect teachers and children given several safety incidents we both had experienced in the months we were there. He suggested the possibility of a security guard or system to be able to keep the campus safer. After all, we had thought at home, why not ask for some safety as his predecessor was supposedly stabbed. But his tone that day was calm asking if we couldn’t seek a more secure campus. He didn’t talk about race, gangs, competence of administrators, or anything else. But he might as well have for what blew back to us at the far end of the table. What erupted was amazing. It was instantaneous, loud, and angry. In a few seconds a group of teachers called us “racists”, talked about the lousy parenting and kids in the valley. I’d never really even seen “the valley”. Jack tried to contextualize his comments but there was no point. He wasn’t attacking. We were under siege. I was shocked, shocked because the deepest need I saw in that room was the need these many black women had to insist there was no gang culture there. Perhaps they saw us as two young liberal interlopers butting in to tell them their business. Certainly they dealt there everyday and had long careers in the school. Maybe we were talking out of turn to them. They thought clearly that we had not earned a right to comment. Not the last time I’ve seen that organizationally in teaching. I cannot entirely represent what was happening in their mind, certainly Dr. S.'s response gave the go ahead to let a poltergeist out of the bag our way. And her good soldiers voiced the collective “shut up”. This denial in a neighborhood where I heard bullets. This in a place coated in graffiti. I couldn’t get it really then. I didn’t yell back, I restrained myself from talking. Clearly it was out of context for us. Dr. S. called my husband in the next morning to her office to inform us we two could leave and she’d, “help us go. “ That was not good. He knew that we’d end up in different schools probably widely separated with our one car and I was sick as a dog with a virus that eventually put me out of school in May and June. And we’d be “red tagged”. It was quite the moment. He held his ground. I knew by then oddly they thought we had some kind of connection to the “central office”. They did think we had a little power. He said he wasn’t being reassigned anywhere. And he wasn’t. She backed off. Later, privately one of the worst screamers, completely unseen by her peers apologized and told my husband she knew he wasn’t really “a racist”. What was let loose that day I do not know exactly. Rage I think."

And now reflecting a bit more.....

I had an experience that might further encapsulate this, how I felt being called “white” in South Central. The girls in my class loved to come up to me as I sat at my desk in front of them and touch my hair. Then they liked to comb my hair. And as I didn’t react too much to that, other than perhaps try a few times to work on spelling “hair”, they liked to try and do something to fix up my hair and give me a better combing out. Conversely I rather liked to look at their elaborate braiding too. They liked to be close to you. My hair was so close to my head it was probably like combing out a crew cut. I was very thin then, emaciated at 100 pounds, now so fat I wallow, but then looking rather sticklike. Extremely white, blond, sallow with the cytomeglia virus. One day Shawn H. a new student, who eventually I sent to my husband’s room, because he was so hard to work with, asked me if he could ask me a question. I remember looking up and he said, “Are you white?” Every child in a fairly chatty social room fell silent. He liked to do that, to hold court. I answered something like, “ Well Shawn, if I’m not white I just don’t know who is.” And the sound that came back to me was an exhale across the room of such real heartfelt disappointment. Shawn sensing this went on to say, “Because my dad says you eat your babies.” That was quite a mouthful. Shawn’s dad was, to my understanding, a pastor and actually I think Shawn was just being provoking. He would do that. But it erupted through the room and the kids came up to feel my skin and give me a pretty careful going over. And this after months together. That I suppose is what really said it all to me. They had to ask where I fit, what color I was. They had to have an adult give them the bottom line. My husband, they said, was definitely “not white”, they told me that. He is actually Italian. They felt he was black, but not Mexican, then they said he was “Rambo”. I said to them that I’d like to know what “whiteness” meant to them. And the answer was quite clear. They were all very sad for me and it was a time in my life when at least thirty-five nine-year-olds held me in their greatest pity. That was quite a moment.

In time I’ve taught since then in many different situations. California exposes you to a wide variety of people, in many situations I have felt pitiable because I was not a member of a culture or community. Or rather I have felt an onus of responsibility to earn the respect of a community to become an educator there that was respected. It has been invaluable and difficult. It has made me see advantage, money, effort, and situational dynamics for what they are. We are born here, unto this earth, with great differences of circumstance. It is just that we so often fail to see that for what it is. An advantage, a disadvantage, a great house, a little couch in a room with ten kids. It is beyond our shaping when we arrive, we arrive. Maybe even into a stable. But we are born all of us with our capacity. And this I know, our capacity to become human, to learn, to love, and to be able to rise above and beyond circumstance to find our meaning. And we are born needing to look out for each other, needing to be looked out for. We are born with the potential to do great harm as well. We are all pitiable for that alone. We are all both “accepted” and “unaccepted”. Two selves united. We have only our shifts in perception to consider when we consider what we do in education. At least that’s what a group of children taught me in South Central when they learned and accepted that sadly I was white.

"Constructivism is a theory of learning, not a teaching method or approach."
from a comment on Borderland by Marco Polo.....

And yet I think it really is really deep down ..."an approach, method, life style, art, way to be"....and constructing my meaning again to reassure myself of what I've been doing and thinking...going through these readings today I'm not at all convinced that one need to distinguish theory , philosophy, methodology, pedagogy quite this way....hey i'm pretty sure my Principal and 3/4th the staff could not give you definition nor two theorists in the model it is so far from NCLB realities for me........But just for a world and personal FYI...Looking i found....(tried to put sources and I hope I can do this this way)

and I loved this quote...."The best way for you to really understand what constructivism is and what it means in your classroom is by seeing examples of it at work, speaking with others about it, and trying it yourself."

And that's what I did in my career thus far, trying to address the needs of childrenin poverty when the models I saw being used in public school missed making connections for every child.....

Constructivism

Definition
Constructivism is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. Each of us generates our own "rules" and "mental models," which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences.

Discussion
There are several guiding principles of constructivism:

1. Learning is a search for meaning. Therefore, learning must start with the issues around which students are actively trying to construct meaning.

2. Meaning requires understanding wholes as well as parts. And parts must be understood in the context of wholes. Therefore, the learning process focuses on primary concepts, not isolated facts.

3. In order to teach well, we must understand the mental models that students use to perceive the world and the assumptions they make to support those models.

4. The purpose of learning is for an individual to construct his or her own meaning, not just memorize the "right" answers and regurgitate someone else's meaning. Since education is inherently interdisciplinary, the only valuable way to measure learning is to make the assessment part of the learning process, ensuring it provides students with information on the quality of their learning.

How Constructivism Impacts Learning
Curriculum--Constructivism calls for the elimination of a standardized curriculum. Instead, it promotes using curricula customized to the students' prior knowledge. Also, it emphasizes hands-on problem solving.

Instruction--Under the theory of constructivism, educators focus on making connections between facts and fostering new understanding in students. Instructors tailor their teaching strategies to student responses and encourage students to analyze, interpret, and predict information. Teachers also rely heavily on open-ended questions and promote extensive dialogue among students.

Assessment--Constructivism calls for the elimination of grades and standardized testing. Instead, assessment becomes part of the learning process so that students play a larger role in judging their own progress.

Reading
Jacqueline and Martin Brooks, The Case for Constructivist Classrooms.

The content on this page was written by On Purpose Associates.

What is constructivism?

Constructivism is basically a theory -- based on observation and scientific study -- about how people learn. It says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences. When we encounter something new, we have to reconcile it with our previous ideas and experience, maybe changing what we believe, or maybe discarding the new information as irrelevant. In any case, we are active creators of our own knowledge. To do this, we must ask questions, explore, and assess what we know.

In the classroom, the constructivist view of learning can point towards a number of different teaching practices. In the most general sense, it usually means encouraging students to use active techniques (experiments, real-world problem solving) to create more knowledge and then to reflect on and talk about what they are doing and how their understanding is changing. The teacher makes sure she understands the students' preexisting conceptions, and guides the activity to address them and then build on them.



Constructivist teachers encourage students to constantly assess how the activity is helping them gain understanding. By questioning themselves and their strategies, students in the constructivist classroom ideally become "expert learners." This gives them ever-broadening tools to keep learning. With a well-planned classroom environment, the students learn HOW TO LEARN.

You might look at it as a spiral. When they continuously reflect on their experiences, students find their ideas gaining in complexity and power, and they develop increasingly strong abilities to integrate new information. One of the teacher's main roles becomes to encourage this learning and reflection process.

For example: Groups of students in a science class are discussing a problem in physics. Though the teacher knows the "answer" to the problem, she focuses on helping students restate their questions in useful ways. She prompts each student to reflect on and examine his or her current knowledge. When one of the students comes up with the relevant concept, the teacher seizes upon it, and indicates to the group that this might be a fruitful avenue for them to explore. They design and perform relevant experiments. Afterward, the students and teacher talk about what they have learned, and how their observations and experiments helped (or did not help) them to better understand the concept.

Contrary to criticisms by some (conservative/traditional) educators, constructivism does not dismiss the active role of the teacher or the value of expert knowledge. Constructivism modifies that role, so that teachers help students to construct knowledge rather than to reproduce a series of facts. The constructivist teacher provides tools such as problem-solving and inquiry-based learning activities with which students formulate and test their ideas, draw conclusions and inferences, and pool and convey their knowledge in a collaborative learning environment. Constructivism transforms the student from a passive recipient of information to an active participant in the learning process. Always guided by the teacher, students construct their knowledge actively rather than just mechanically ingesting knowledge from the teacher or the textbook.

Constructivism is also often misconstrued as a learning theory that compels students to "reinvent the wheel." In fact, constructivism taps into and triggers the student's innate curiosity about the world and how things work. Students do not reinvent the wheel but, rather, attempt to understand how it turns, how it functions. They become engaged by applying their existing knowledge and real-world experience, learning to hypothesize, testing their theories, and ultimately drawing conclusions from their findings.

The best way for you to really understand what constructivism is and what it means in your classroom is by seeing examples of it at work, speaking with others about it, and trying it yourself. As you progress through each segment of this workshop, keep in mind questions or ideas to share with your colleagues.

How does this theory differ from traditional ideas about teaching and learning?

As with many of the methods addressed in this series of workshops, in the constructivist classroom, the focus tends to shift from the teacher to the students. The classroom is no longer a place where the teacher ("expert") pours knowledge into passive students, who wait like empty vessels to be filled. In the constructivist model, the students are urged to be actively involved in their own process of learning. The teacher functions more as a facilitator who coaches, mediates, prompts, and helps students develop and assess their understanding, and thereby their learning. One of the teacher's biggest jobs becomes ASKING GOOD QUESTIONS.

And, in the constructivist classroom, both teacher and students think of knowledge not as inert factoids to be memorized, but as a dynamic, ever-changing view of the world we live in and the ability to successfully stretch and explore that view.

The chart below compares the traditional classroom to the constructivist one. You can see significant differences in basic assumptions about knowledge, students, and learning. (It's important, however, to bear in mind that constructivists acknowledge that students are constructing knowledge in traditional classrooms, too. It's really a matter of the emphasis being on the student, not on the instructor.)

Curriculum begins with the parts of the whole. Emphasizes basic skills.	Curriculum emphasizes big concepts, beginning with the whole and expanding to include the parts.
Strict adherence to fixed curriculum is highly valued.	Pursuit of student questions and interests is valued.
Materials are primarily textbooks and workbooks.	Materials include primary sources of material and manipulative materials.
Learning is based on repetition.	Learning is interactive, building on what the student already knows.
Teachers disseminate information to students; students are recipients of knowledge.	Teachers have a dialogue with students, helping students construct their own knowledge.
Teacher's role is directive, rooted in authority.	Teacher's role is interactive, rooted in negotiation.
Assessment is through testing, correct answers.	Assessment includes student works, observations, and points of view, as well as tests. Process is as important as product.
Knowledge is seen as inert.	Knowledge is seen as dynamic, ever changing with our experiences.
Students work primarily alone.	Students work primarily in groups.

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: A lot of people try to look at constructivism as a program, or a methodology, or as a series of techniques. But it's really a life view. It's really a philosophy, it's an epistemology, it's a way of looking at teaching and learning, it's a way of looking at how people construct understandings of our world.

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: I have had teachers with whom I worked tell me that once they have adopted, studied and adopted this new viewpoint , that they can't go back again. They can not go back to their original teaching, that once they have experienced the energy of their classroom and their students, forging together new understanding, and once they talk about how much they have learned about the concepts themselves, through collaborating with their students, that the traditional method simply doesn't hold the value it used to.

What are some critical perspectives?

Constructivism has been criticized on various grounds. Some of the charges that critics level against it are:

. It's elitist. Critics say that constructivism and other "progressive" educational theories have been most successful with children from privileged backgrounds who are fortunate in having outstanding teachers, committed parents, and rich home environments. They argue that disadvantaged children, lacking such resources, benefit more from more explicit instruction.

. Social constructivism leads to "group think." Critics say the collaborative aspects of constructivist classrooms tend to produce a "tyranny of the majority," in which a few students' voices or interpretations dominate the group's conclusions, and dissenting students are forced to conform to the emerging consensus.

. There is little hard evidence that constructivist methods work. Critics say that constructivists, by rejecting evaluation through testing and other external criteria, have made themselves unaccountable for their students' progress. Critics also say that studies of various kinds of instruction -- in particular Project Follow Through ¹, a long-term government initiative -- have found that students in constructivist classrooms lag behind those in more traditional classrooms in basic skills.

1.

Constructivists counter that in studies where children were compared on higher-order thinking skills, constructivist students seemed to outperform their peers.

What are the benefits of constructivism?

. Benefit

Children learn more, and enjoy learning more when they are actively involved, rather than passive listeners.

. Benefit

Education works best when it concentrates on thinking and understanding, rather than on rote memorization. Constructivism concentrates on learning how to think and understand.

. Benefit

Constructivist learning is transferable. In constructivist classrooms, students create organizing principles that they can take with them to other learning settings.

. Benefit

Constructivism gives students ownership of what they learn, since learning is based on students' questions and explorations, and often the students have a hand in designing the assessments as well. Constructivist assessment engages the students' initiatives and personal investments in their journals, research reports, physical models, and artistic representations. Engaging the creative instincts develops students' abilities to express knowledge through a variety of ways. The students are also more likely to retain and transfer the new knowledge to real life.

. Benefit

By grounding learning activities in an authentic, real-world context, constructivism stimulates and engages students. Students in constructivist classrooms learn to question things and to apply their natural curiousity to the world.

. Benefit

Constructivism promotes social and communication skills by creating a classroom environment that emphasizes collaboration and exchange of ideas. Students must learn how to articulate their ideas clearly as well as to collaborate on tasks effectively by sharing in group projects. Students must therefore exchange ideas and so must learn to "negotiate" with others and to evaluate their contributions in a socially acceptable manner. This is essential to success in the real world, since they will always be exposed to a variety of experiences in which they will have to cooperate and navigate among the ideas of others.

Workshop: Constructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning
Explanation | Demonstration | Exploration | Implementation | Get Credit

Concept to Classroom | About the Series | Resources | Sitemap | Credits

Thirteen | Thirteen Ed Online

© 2004 Educational Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.

Definitions:

• What is Constructivism? (Bill Huitt)
• What is Constructivism? (Michael Mahoney)
• What is Constructivism? (Jy Wana Daphne Lin Hsiao)
• Constructivism (Tarso Bonilha Mazzotti)
• Constructivism (Maureen Epstein)
• Constructivism (PsyBox.com)
• Constructivism (Irene Chen)
• Constructivism (Andy Carvin)
• Social Constructivism (Beaumie Kim)
• Social Constructivism (Berkeley GSI Teaching Resource Center)
• Constructivist Theories (Sólrún B. Kristinsdóttir)
• Constructivist Learning (Dimitrios Thanasoulas)
• Constructivist Learning Theory (J.L. Bencze)
• Classroom Compass Volume 1, Number 3: Constructivism (Southwest Education Development Lab)
• Constructivism in the Classroom (Math Forum)
• Cognitive Approach (Judith Conway)

Readings

• Albert Bandura
• Fredric Bartlett
• Carl Bereiter
  • Bereiter Home Page
  • Bereiter publications
  • Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age
• Boudourides (1998) Constructivism and Education: A Shopper's Guide
• Jerome Bruner
• Buckman and Resnick (1995) The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and the professional community
• Burbules (1997) Aporia: Webs, Passages, Getting Lost, and Learning to Go On
• William Clancey
• John Dewey
• Dillenbourg, et.al. (1995) Intelligent Learning Environments
• Eisner (1999) The Uses and Limits of Performance Assessment
• Ernest Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics: Radical Constructivism Rehabilitated?
• Kenneth Gergen
• Nelson Goodman (1906-1998)
  • Goodman profile (Foldop)
  • Goodman profile (Scott Harrison)
  • Goodman profile (Project Zero, Harvard)
  • Goodman profile (High Beam Research)
  • Goodman obituary
  • Goodman and Quine: Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism (courtesy, Jud Evans)
  • Ways of Worldmaking (1978)
  • notes (by Wilhelmiina Hämäläinen) mirror
• Heylighen (1995) Epistemological Constructivism
• Jaworski (1993) Constructivism and Teaching - The socio-cultural context
• Klemm (1994) Using a Formal Collaborative Learning Paradigm
• Johnson (2005) Using Hardware Devices to Enhance Learning in a University Classroom
• David Jonassen
  • Jonassen Home Page
  • Jonassen profile (Sebastian Foti)
• Immanuel Kant
• Matthews (1992) Old Wine in New Bottles: Problems with constructivist epistemology
• Matthews (1998) Constructivism in Science and Mathematics Education
• Humberto Maturana
• George Herbert Mead Mind Self and Society
• Maria Montessori
• Elizabeth Murphy (1997) Constructivism from Philosophy to Practice
  Constructivist Epistemology
  Characteristics of Constructivist Learning & Teaching
  Constructivist Learning Theory
  Summary
• Seymore Papert
• Gordon Pask
• Jean Piaget
• Raskin (2002) Constructivism in Psychology: Personal Construct Psychology, Radical Constructivism, and Social Constructionism
• Carl Rogers
  • Rogers profile (Eugene Gendlin)
  • Rogers profile (Martin Briner)
  • Rogers profile (George Boeree)
  • Rogers profile (Mark Smith)
  • Rogers profile (C. George Boeree)
  • Experiential Learning (Greg Kearsley)
  • Rogers (1946) Significant Aspects of Client-Centered Therapy (Courtesy, Christopher Green)
  • Rogers (1947) Some Observations on the Organization of Personality (Courtesy, Christopher Green)
  • Person-Centered Approach
    • On Becoming a Person (1961) exerpts
    • Schmid (2001) The ongoing challenge of becoming person-centered
• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762) Emile, ou l'education
• Ryder (1994) Augmentation of the intellect: Network instruments, environments and strategies for learning
• Donald Schön (Mark Smith)
• Soefijanto (2000) The Implementation of The Ideas of Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey in American Elementary Education
• Thompson Constructivist Curriculum Design
• Brent Wilson
  • Reflections on Constructivism and Instructional Design (1997)
• Jaan Valsiner
• Vanderstraeten and Biesta (1998) Constructivism, Educational Research, and John Dewey
• Francisco Verela
• Heinz von Foerster
• Ernst von Glasersfeld
  • An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical (1989)
  • Learning as Constructive Activity (1983)
  • An Introduction to Radical Constructivism (1981)
  • Cognition, Construction of Knowledge, and Teaching (1989)
  • Aspects of Radical Constructivism and its Educational Recommendations (1992)
  • How Do We Mean? A Constructivist Sketch of Semantics (1992)
  • Radical Constructivism and Teaching (2000)
• Lev Vygotsky:
  • Vygotsky and Social Development Theory (Greg Kearsley)
  • Vygotsky archive (Marxists.org)
  • Vygotsky resources (Siobhan Kolar and Lisa D'Ambrosio)
  • see Cognitive Science, Socio-Cultural Theory and Activity Theory (Martin Ryder)
• Wasson (1996) Instructional Planning and Contemporary Theories of Learning: Is this a Self-Contradiction?

Happily I can look at all these suggested readings and find I only missed three which I'll get.....

I just stole this outright from my daughter, Sylvia, finding it on her myspace...and I thought it was pretty cute and as I fell down at Back to School night and bustedknee, pride and ankle...I'm too tired to talk about things.

Myspace existentialism.

I've been doing lots of philosophizing lately (like other essentially useless activities, this mostly happens in the summer) and in particular I have been agonizing over the following question, phrased Shakespearean-ly for your amusement:

Myspace: to delete, or not to delete? That is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The pomp and flash of outrageous advertising
Or to take up arms against a sea of whackos
And by so opposing end them. To delete my account--
No more to check my bulletins--and by delete to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand useless ads
That Myspace is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To stop, to delete--
To delete--perchance to write: ay, there's the rub
For without a Myspace what writing may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal blog,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of such a blog.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of chain letters,
The occasional weird message, the dramatic fits,
The pangs of teenage love again and again
The ineffectiveness of moderators, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With one double-click? Who would spam bear,
To sigh and delete under a useless account
But that the dread of lack of Myspace,
The end of social circles, after which
No highschooler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather suffer through those ills we have
Than change to other social networking sites?
Thus Myspace does make cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of disgust
Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,
And this enterprise of deletion
With this regard their currents turn awry
And chicken out of deleting--Soft you now,
My dearest friends--Top Eight, in the orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

* * *

Hamlet, if I remember right, kills himself following this--or just dies, probably.

I, however, am a bit more indecisive, and thus shall hold on deleting my myspace for the moment. ;) Although keeping it does seem like something of an exercise in futility.

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In LA when I was school teaching in South Central 20 years ago after a very bad week, my then boyfriend and I would hop over to see films where Westwood blended with Beverly Hills.It was a very extreme time in my living... This film was one I so enjoyed. It is a quirky love of life story about a woman (Glenda Jackson who is a marvelous actress) with a terrible haircut, her joyous affection for turtles and a friendship formed with a used bookshop owner, a fellow lover of turtles and literature, and centers on a plot they develop to save some turtles. It is small and intimate and I believe a film my brother in law calls "a nothing really happened" piece. Recently thought of it clearly again sitting at a long horrible funeral for a friend who was a gentle lady, with a bad haircut, and a deep abiding love and kinship with turtles and a special bond with my husband. I realized this film had foreshadowed a bit of my ordinary "nothing happened" existence to me 20 years ago. In life we form friendships and find compassion and connection with people in seemingly random and precious moments. My turtle friend, who worked for my husband for a time, as a secretary in his school-then my school, took care of him , my kids, myself and was very private-revealed something of herself in this love of the turtles she had around her from time to time one of the few things you really knew about her. Real turtles and those collectible. She treated them like cats actually(in the film you are seeing giant sea turtles) , these pet turtles responded back as bonded as you can imagine. It was a very unique thing to see a person so vibrantly connected to turtles. I felt that in the film , in the love these individuals had for the species...it seemed to relate to the privacy, shyness, fragility of feeling and yet strength of character, the primitive dignity of my friend, she easily could have been placed into the movies' internal spaces. For me now there she lives freed of earthly connection. So I watched it again this evening after 20 years and grieved deeply losing someone who was very shy and private and who suffered a terrible end of life to cancer spread through her system. To me I see the touching beauty of the friendship between the characters in the movie as so valuable and so meaningful on a personal level-I'm aging with such an awareness of how gentle simpatico with another , how the shared love of turtle, of literature , of something understood really about life , brings a kind of lightening of heart. For my friend her shared relating to my husband was so meaningful/personal to her in ways I could not entirely understand.. and her to him.This was movie core message. It was a lesson to me. I recommend this film to those who value friendship. You know I was also thinking of a film with Anne Bancroft(in New York) and her friend in London in the bookshop-anyway a very similar piece. Maybe it is a phenomonological relationship(whatever that is no?)....but for me a tender film and now I'll always think of Terri Truxler and my love for her, turtles and dear warm moments I hold in my heart with friends of the spirit.