COE Exchange

Posts Tagged ‘education’

Many teachers in my professional learning  community are participating in what is called a 365 Challenge. A 365 Challenge is a commitment of a blogger to post daily on his or her blog. The most common approach involves taking a picture everyday for an entire year and uploading it to a blog, Flickr, or similar photo sharing website.  Weekly photography challenges are also popular ways to meet one’s goals. The Daily Shoot offers daily assignments and the blog Written, Inc. offers weekly themes. Seeing how cool and awesome other people’s 365 challenges turned out, I decided to start one. As…

I had planned a trip back to this summer after various queries to friends and family about mostly safety, as well as how radical change had been over the past seven years. I was eager to recharge my batteries with a dip into my recollections of authentic conversations and genuine people. In an email, Professor Davis directed my attention to a New York Times article on South African education.1 This unexpected development forced me to journey back to South Africa rather unexpectedly. Having just read ’s comment that, “Nostalgia, at least in the light, is an attempt to exercise sovereignty…

The continent of Africa has yet to experience the economic explosion which has enabled many Asian nations to create a large middle class. Aside from South Africa, and to a lesser extent Nigeria, vast areas of Africa are still dependent on agriculture and natural resources for wealth. However, those children who succeed in schools have opportunities to enter government service or business and technical services and thus enter the middle class. It is not surprising that for many students success in school is critically vital to their success in future life. Alhalji Haruna Danjuma, head of Nigeria’s parent-teacher organization stated…

Charles Murray, author and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and educational psychologist David Berliner debated their contrary views of school reform today in an event sponsored by the College of Education and the F.A. Hayek Professorship of Economic History at UMSL. Entitled “The Great Debate:the failure of school reform-whose fault is it, anyway?” featured the opposing views of these two scholars followed by a brief Q & A by the audience. Kiara Breland, staff writer with UM Saint Louis’ The Current Online framed the debate in her article: [Berliner] suggests public school problems are caused by societal and economic…

The politics of knowledge and issues of epistemology are central to understanding the way power operates in educational institutions to perpetuate privilege and to subjugate the marginalized – “validated” scientific knowledge can often be used as a basis of oppression as it is produced without an appreciation of how dominant power and culture shape it. Joe Kincheloe – from the book, Critical Pedagogy The existence of a gap in academic outcomes between black and white students has been established as fact for a number of years. What has been less certain and more open to debate is the source of…