A-Z: Learning and Teaching

Desire based Empowerment in the Classroom

Of course, being an education class, many of us were interested in how teachers can utilize a desire based approach in order to foster empowerment in classrooms. We began to think of a school as a network of relationships and communities (rather than an enclosed and rigid institution). By expanding the idea of school to include things like the student's home, community, family members, family culture, and family history, we arrived at a definition of school that had more room for student agency and possibilities for empowerment. This more holistic definition of school created new possibilities for how teachers might interact with students (for example, home visits where a teacher visits and learns from a student's home). We also thought about (and saw real life examples of) how teachers can foster empowerment in classrooms through mindfulness exercises. Through physical and mental activities that promote sensory exploration and awareness, teachers can harness his or her students' energies and channel those energies through mindfulness. This idea of expanding the idea of "classroom" to incorporate kinesthetic and sensory learning in order to empower students to succeed will be explored at Puentes de Salud's after school tutoring program this coming semester! 

 

Education

Deficit-Based:

• being taught the information you need to know; absorbing the content knowledge that you need to prove your intelligence. Administering knowledge to children/people who are passive recipients of pre-determined information in which they have nothing to add, and their problems are irrelevant or disruptive.
• attainable knowledge that schools or institutions provide.  St Leger states, “this traditional top-down approach to health education resulted in few sustainable behavior changes and did not address the gap in health status” (199).

Desire-Based:

• acting as both the teacher and the learner, seeing knowledge as contingent and always partial; using the knowledge that is innately in your body as a starting point to expand and deepen and challenge and understand; to make sense of the world around you through the knowledge you innately have and that which you come in contact with through your lived experiences
• An experience of learning in which ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ are both learners and teachers; an exchange occurs and students are respected, and their experiences are relevant to and important in the classroom.
• The capacity to build on existing knowledge as well as expand knowledge horizons.
• The process through which people make meaningful sense of their lived experience …. or the process through which people develop the ability to make continually increasing meaning from their personal experiences .. something about how ‘learning’ happens every minute, every where, every day .. and about it looping back on itself, an interplay with experience and more ‘formal’ learning … like dewey’s concept of a spiral

 

• knowledge that can be gained from any human interactions in different environments.  Don Nutbeam believes “education has been an essential component of action to promote health and prevent disease” (259).  This demonstrates that education is something that can be attained outside of a school and will affect you throughout your life.  Without the proper health education and opportunity to increase health literacy, there is a greater chance in developing disease from the lack of “healthy lifestyles”.  Nutbeam believes these healthy lifestyles are the “intermediate outcomes represent the determinants of these health and social outcomes…personal behaviors may increase or decrease the risk of ill health” (261).

  

Implementation

Deficit: 

• Setting in place a reform or theory of change in an institutional setting, perhaps shifting pedagogies, curriculum or values.

Desire: 

• Realizing that “schools and education systems change slowly, and are under constant pressure from competing societal demands,”  implementation in this model takes into q

 

Interview:

From “When are you coming to visit? Home visits and seeing our students” Photographer: Bec Young

 

Deficit:

• A unidirectional research model that supposes one person as the questioner, the person who guides the transfer of knowledge as it supports their own needs. This model understands the interviewer as a source of knowledge, but only as it supports the research agenda of the interviewer. It also presupposes a hierarchical relationship of power, in which the interviewee is subjugated to the interviewer.
•  “Interviewers define the role of interviewees as subordinates: extracting information is more to be valued than yielding it: the convention of interviewer-interviewee hierarchy is a rationalisation of inequality: what is good for interviewers is not necessarily good for interviewees.” - Ann Oakley

 Desire:

• An unstructured, conversational model that gives agency to the interviewee, allowing him or her to guide the dialogue in a way that supports and legitimates his or her lived experience, opinions, and funds of knowledge. The unstructured form of the desire-based interview begins to challenge the power hierarchy so often implicit in research, thus equalizing the interviewer and interviewee rather than positioning the interviewer as the superior.

 

Learning

Deficit

•  the systematic process of educating
• To be given certain information to understand and present

Desire

• a comprehensive and wholesome process of integrated learning that takes place within the school, community and the family
• Lifelong process
• A process of change in an individual’s or collective’s apprehension of what is and might be possible.

 

Literacy

• Nutbeam and St. Leger emphasize literacy as a high educational priority because of the relationship between literacy and one’s ability to maintain health.

Deficit based approach:

• Literacy is one’s ability to read and write numbers and words. Literacy is a concept that can be measured through testing and institutional education.
• The ability to read and write in a certain language in order to understand concepts and comprehend information.
• possessing the ability to read and write
• someone who can read, speak, and write within the discourse chosen by the culture of power. Literacy taken from a deficit approach focuses on the inability or ability of one to participate in the culture of power or designated discourse. This creates an environment for those that are not apt at participating to fail. Tuck uses an interesting quote, which connects to how society seems to silence the voices of those who do not work within the functions of the culture of power: “Isolate the seers. Make their dream seem like a nightmare. Fix their tongues so they can’t get their story straight. Sekou Sundiate, Space: A Monologue” (Tuck 412).

Desire based approach:

• Literacy is one’s ability to process information whether that’s through numbers, words, pictures, facial expressions, body language, or verbal understanding. Hospitals and doctors can accommodate multiple forms of literacy (for example, translating prescription instructions into pictures) in order to accommodate as many people as possible.
• The capacity to communicate effectively through reading and writing which, in application, can enable individuals to develop interpersonal relationships necessary in making positive health behavior choices. Desired-based literacy allows for greater autonomy and personal empowerment.
• the means of obtaining personal autonomy through the ability to analyze and discuss the world in an academic, political and social sense
• The ability to empower individuals/communities to share their thoughts through a chosen discourse of reading and writing. The ability one has to express ideas without constraint and control. This framework is one greater concerned with “understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck 416). Desire- based literacy acknowledges the complexities to personhood, which impact how we choose to be literate (Tuck 420).

 

Literacy, Functional

Desire-based:

• An acquired ability for reading comprehension and writing.

Deficit-based:

• An ability that can only be obtained through proper reading and writing instruction

 

 

Literacy

Deficit-based :

• Someone who can read, speak, and write within the discourse chosen by the culture of power. Literacy taken from a deficit approach focuses on the inability or ability of one to participate in the culture of power or designated discourse. This creates an environment for those that are not apt at participating to fail. Tuck uses an interesting quote, which connects to how society seems to silence the voices of those who do not work within the functions of the culture of power: “Isolate the seers. Make their dream seem like a nightmare. Fix their tongues so they can’t get their story straight. Sekou Sundiate, Space: A Monologue” (Tuck 412).

Desire-based:

• The ability to empower individuals/communities to share their thoughts through a chosen discourse of reading and writing. The ability one has to express ideas without constraint and control. This framework is one greater concerned with “understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck 416). Desire- based literacy acknowledges the complexities to personhood, which impact how we choose to be literate (Tuck 420). 
•  interesting image of literacy: http://sites.uci.edu/theredhairedteacher/my-mission-statement/bloom1/

 

Research

Desire-Based Definition:

• A generalized capacity in pursuit of hopes, desires and goals, that are universal to any citizen and builds on diverse modalities of learning, pre-existing knowledge, and further enriches understanding (within a society) through disciplined inquiries.
  • Pg 2. Appadurai:
• “Research is a specialized name for a generalised capacity, the capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know, but do not know yet. All human beings, make decisions that require them to make systematic forays beyond their current knowledge horizons”
• Pg 11. Appadurai:
• “It is important to deparochialise the idea of research and make it more widely available to young people with a wide range of interests and aspirations”
• “It is the capacity to systematically increase the horizons of one’s current knowledge, in relation to some task, goal or aspiration”
• "‘The capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2004), the social and cultural capacity to plan, hope, desire and achieve socially valuable goals.”

Deficit-Based Definition:

• A scholarly methodological approach supported by empirical evidence that helps support or refute a question or fills in gaps on  the unknown.
•  Pg 2. Appadurai: “Research is normally seen as a high-end technical activity, available by training and class background to specialists in education, the sciences and related professional fields”

 

School

Deficit: 

• regulated institution where learning (English, Math, etc.) takes place.
• 4 walls
• An institution where students are taught the appropriate skills and knowledge to become upstanding and educated citizens. Recognizing one’s areas of weakness and making them stronger according to a prescribed set of standards.

Desire:

• daily life
• comprehensive body composed of parents, students, teachers and administration whose goal is to educate and provide a culturally relevant, healthy and encouraging learning environment in which its students are empowered to succeed and achieve their goals. and to discover/develop their unique potential within
• A socially and culturally aware and sensitive place where students use their pre-existing strengths to learn about new ways of thinking and express themselves in new and creative ways. “Listen when you have wandered.” –Seiffertt
• Check out relevant chapters of Selwyn’s book, “Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates,” (ebook available through tripod) in which he re-imagines what ‘school’ could look like …
• School is not just confined to a building. School also involves the home and the student’s social/physical environment.
• Education is not preparation for life.  Education is life itself.  --Dewey.

 

Teach

Desire-based:

• To pass knowledge onto another while also equally gaining knowledge from those to whom you are passing knowledge.  To learn as well as inform.
• To use previous knowledge in order to mutually (both teacher and student) think more critically and comprehensively about a given subject or situation.
• To create a means to provide opportunities to learn? to an individual
• To create conditions for others’ explorations of the known and the unknown

 Deficit-based:

• To pass information to one who does not have knowledge; to educate.
• To instuct someone in how to do something
• to pass on tools to the next generation with the purpose of expanidng their knowledge and ability to think critically.