I’ve been in my placement this entire year at a special admit public high school in Philadelphia, which is great, as it has allowed me to watch and grow with the students in the two classes I work with. The school is highly-regarded, in Philadelphia and beyond, for its progressive, student-centered approach to teaching and learning. Specifically, I’ve been participating in two 9th grade African American history courses that have been covering an enormous amount of interesting material from present-day stereotypes of the African continent to the way cultural perceptions of race influenced and were influenced by laws relating to slavery to ways of making sense in and across societies.

This semester, my mentor teacher is using a special grant that she applied for and received to engage with her students in a special “Semester of Service.” The two classes are both in the process of learning, designing, and carrying out semester long service projects in the Philadelphia community and are striving to tie the work they do to Philadelphia history. I am extremely excited about this project because asset-based, meaningful service-learning is a big interest of mine and a great way, I think, for students to engage in conversations about race, class, privilege, and what it means to “help” people versus “collaborate and co-create” with them.

ECON 136:  Week 6 Tasks

Monday:  Taxing Market Outcomes

Preparing for class:

Read Taylor ch. 4, p. 71 (if unclear, read pp. 64-71) and pp, 74-81

Now watch this short video             http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uMQfMVDYB0

Listen to the Planet Money podcast

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/07/273060341/episode-516-why-paying-192-for-a-5-mile-car-ride-may-be-rational

As you do so, try to visualize the shifts in supply and demand that motivate Uber’s strategy

Before you retire Tuesday night (or by 3am  Wednesday)

            Complete the Taxing Market Outcomes problem set in Sapling Learnin

Wednesday:  Midterm Review        

            Preparing for Class

http://iwastesomuchtime.com/on/?i=87801

Besides the fact that I really enjoyed reading the dialogue that Shor and Freire had, I felt that the idea of implementing a ‘Dialogical Method’ of teaching is an effective way to show students that they’re indeed at the center of their own education. Freire explains that dialogue is essential for development. Humans, are different than other intelligent organisms because we have the ability to communicate and assure each other and ourselves in our knowledge; “we are able to know that we know.” (99). A theme in the reading that really stuck out to me was the idea of empowerment and who is the center of knowledge. In lecture-based environment’s, teachers are seen as the center of knowledge where the educator is to teach the educatee. In a dialogue based pedagogy, though the teacher is knowledgeable about the subject that they’re teaching and engaging their student with, they actively engage with their students and “relearn” the subject while studying it again with their students. The teacher is able to always find out new things and rediscover the material they’re already familiar with through working with their students closely; this turns learning into a JOINT act, rather than a solitary act.  By allowing their students to “exercise their own powers of reconstruction,” the teacher allows their students to practice personal responsibility and expression.

Levinson's introduction to No Citizen Left Behind as left me with a number of exciting ideas about what a truly civic education might look like. I am especially struck by her argument that those things which require change are not simply educational content--although that is obviously crucial, and she valuably points to histories of ordinary people making change as powerful alternatives to traditional histories of "great men"--but also are the very structure of the learning environment. I sense that Levinson's idea that the entire school community, at least, or perhaps especially, among "students from historically marginalized communities should be taught both codeswitching and solidaristic collective action as means of exercising civic and political power both within and outside the system" (55) is both radical and entirely accurate. I think we might want to trouble or think deeply about what solidarity means--but in general teaching through doing, through the doing of something like community organizing, among students--combined with lessons and a culture of discussion (dialogues, to mention Freire & Shor)--seems to me like a much more winning strategy than something more conservative (although still progressive in its own of) such as writing the subaltern into history textbooks that, through their presentation and the larger arc of their history, fail to challenge the structures of action, politics, and civic feeling that in part produce the situations of inequality with which many people must live.

A theme among the two readings that has resonated with me is empowerment.

Freire makes the argument that empowerment is not an individual feeling but a social act, and that “if you are not able to use your recent freedom to help others to be free by transforming the totality of society, then you are exercising only an individualist attitude towards empowerment or freedom”. My peers and I constantly throw around the word empowerment as more of an individualist feeling than an actual social act, especially in terms of online videos like the ones on Upworthy. One of the downsides of Upworthy videos is that they can make you feel extremely inspired, empowered, hope for change, and make you feel really good, and then you can just walk away from the video and continue on with your day without doing anything with those feelings... or just waiting until the next Upworthy video shows up on the dashboard. Upworthy can most definitely be a tool for Freire's definition of empowerment as it can spread messages virally. How can we get all these people who have been inspired to come together and act for change?