Religion and Education
The Toolbelt and Universal Design - Education For Everyone
Published July 17, 2009 @ 04:00AM PT
Education may be understood in one of two broad ways. Either it is about teaching people a discrete set of facts they will be able to repeat – multiplication tables and The Lord’s Prayer are two examples – or it is about helping people learn how to function in the world – crossing the street, using the Dewey Decimal System, reading a map all fit into this category.
The first understanding is not without value. It is important to know an alphabet, basic math facts, or what “President” means. But the second is crucial to survival. Humans, from the very start, needed to know how to hunt, how to recognize safe plants from poisonous ones, how to find their way back home.
And almost as soon as humans began to function as “humans” – this process of learning to function in the world began to revolve around tools. Humans are tool makers and tool users. It truly is our most significant distinction among the species on the planet. Sure, many animals use a few basic tools, but no other creature uses as many tools, or constantly refines those tools, or continuously invents new tools. It is almost a definition of “humanity.”
Our societies are defined by our tools. Our first complex tool is our language, which allows us a huge communicative advantage over most species with which we compete. And our languages significantly define who we are and what we know. The rest of our tools tend to define where we fall in social evolution. We describe much of our history by our tool sets: The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, The Iron Age, The Age of Steam, The Information Age.
This progress explains an important idea to educators. If you are teaching your students the tools of yesterday, you are preventing society from moving forward. Rather, we must be teaching our students to use the tools of this moment, and teaching them how to learn the next set.
Toolbelt Theory
For the past four years I have talked about something I call “Toolbelt Theory.” This began as an idea for allowing students with “disabilities” to learn and choose their own Assistive Technologies. But it very quickly expanded to all students, because every human on earth needs some kind of technologies which assist them in their interactions.
It is impossible for most to climb to the second floor of a building without stairs. It is very difficult for most to get to a meeting on the 25th floor without an elevator. And it is perhaps even more difficult for most to get to work each day if work is 30 miles from home, unless we use a car.
Because we are not whales, we need some form of “assistive technology” if we are to talk to someone 3,000 miles away. We call this a telephone. Because we are not birds or Monarch Butterflies, we need other “assistive technologies” if we are to cross from one continent to another. We call these planes and boats. And because we are not Socrates, we struggle to remember everything we have ever been taught without “assistive technologies.” We call these books and paper, pens and ink.
So we create toolbelts for ourselves. We not only collect hammers, saws, screwdrivers, we load up on books or television, typewriters and newspapers.
A toolbelt for everyone
I began to discuss Toolbelt Theory in my field – for students with special educational needs. I was frustrated when some “school-based team” would pick a single technological solution for a student’s “disability” which the student was expected to use no matter the task, no matter the environment, no matter how the student was feeling that day.
For example, a student with a reading problem might be given complex, expensive literacy software for his computer but not be able to read a menu at a restaurant or a sign on a school door. Or a student without verbal communication might be given a speech-generating device too large to use on the bus as she traveled home. Or lots of students might be given tools based on their “worst day” needs – rather than allow them to use “just” the help they needed.
It was the equivalent of breaking out a chain saw every time you needed to cut wood – even if you were trying to build furniture.
But once I began to see Toolbelt Theory work, I saw that every student needs this. There’s not a human on the planet that doesn’t need to reach for a tool sometime – and knowing how to pick the right tool for the job and moment, how to use that tool well, and how to find new tools, is an essential survival skill.
Universal Design
We don’t call someone “disabled” because they can not saw 100 sheets of plywood in half by hand. We get them a table saw. We don’t call someone “disabled” because they need a power screwdriver or they’ll be exhausted after an hour of putting down deck boards. We put a bit in our drill. And we don’t call people “disabled” because they can’t walk five miles to work every morning. They take a car or a bus or a train.
This is the idea behind Universal Design Technology, and behind Toolbelt Theory. We, as humans, differ. Our tasks differ. Our environments differ. Our circumstances differ. And we pick the appropriate tool.
This Wednesday I could walk much further, cane and all, in the 64 F degree weather in San Francisco than in the 98 F degree weather just south of there in Mountain View. I could decide if I wanted to drive between those two cities, or take the train. Get off early and take BART to my destination, or ride to the station by AT&T Park and walk to the streetcar – What’s the weather? Is time an urgent factor? How does my leg feel?
But without education, I can’t make these choices. I need to know how to know the temperatures. I need to know what transit options are open to me. I need to know how to drive and how to read a timetable. How to operate parking and train ticket machines. I need to know which way the streetcars run, and how to ask for help.
When I read I need to make similar choices. I read really slowly, really badly. But for short things I just tough it out with “ink-on-paper” (or paint-on-signs), though I have a Reading Pen with me if I’m having a very bad day - a day when no alphabetical system connects correctly in my brain. But I also use Click-Speak in Firefox for reading web pages. I use WYNN for big academic reading, and Read-and-Write-Gold – all of which convert text to audio (WYNN and Read-and-Write both highlight each word visually as it is being read aloud). Sometimes I use audiobooks – especially for novels, poetry, or great historical stuff, or I let WYNN, Read-and-Write, or WordTalk convert the text to an mp3 I can listen to in my car.
Without education I could not make these choices either. I need to know how to use those different tools. I need to know how to work with them – say, how to take notes effectively. I need to understand what the purpose of my reading is. And yes, I need to know about these tools, and where to get them.
Are you teaching your students those things?
Suppose your wealthy, white, typically-abled child is heading off to Europe. Can they read maps effectively? Can they read maps on their iPhone or Blackberry so they aren’t “screaming” “I’m an unfamiliar tourist” as they walk down the street? Can they translate information quickly from unfamiliar languages? Can they use Google to convert currency? Or to know if they’re being ripped off? Are they able to figure out the transit system maps when they arrive in a city?
Oh yeah, they’ll probably need all of those tools simply to start college in a new place or to go to that first big job interview in New York or Chicago or San Francisco.
Can they get through that last hundred pages of reading when their eyes hurt? When they need to finish as they drive to work? Can they dictate a text message or email to their boss while driving a 50 mph on the Eisenhower Expressway toward Chicago’s Loop? Can they switch their Firefox spellcheck when they communicate with that job possibility in London? Do they know if it will be better for them to buy the print version of that textbook or the digital?
Or have you left them clueless in the tool store via an education continuously committed to one way of doing things?
T.E.S.T.
Toolbelt Theory, and Universal Design, means there aren’t “disability solutions” and there aren’t “normal ways to do things.” There are just humans and the tools they need. And so we don’t write IEPs for some and insist on conformity for others, but we make the tools of the world available to all, and teach them to evaluate on their own.
We do this because we know, we know, that across everyone’s lives their tasks will change, their environments will change, their skills and capabilities will change, and the available tools will change. Or quick, grab your fountain pen, fill it with ink, look up the number you need in your Manhattan White Pages directory, and dial it via your rotary phone.
So: Task – Environment – Skills – Tools (a specifically ordered re-design of Joy Zabala’s SETT Framework for those educators playing along at home). When students begin a task they need to consider what that task really is – the essential purpose. They need to know where, when, for whom that task must be completed. They must understand their own skill set and capability position (which might vary throughout even the day as they tire). And they must know the range of tools available to them – and how to use those tools.
None of this is automatic. Don’t give me your “digital native” nonsense. People even need to learn to properly hold a hammer – tool skills are not natural. Nor is tool knowledge. Every day I go into schools where students struggling with reading are left in the dark – as if we denied wheelchairs to students who couldn’t walk on the theory that being left on the floor would motivate their legs to work. Every day I go into schools where the vast majority of students struggle – and often give up – as they are forced to use antiquated tools which fit their needs badly.
Teach your children well
We are humans. We are tool users. We are defined as humans by our constantly changing tools. Those tools, in turn, actually change who we are, as they alter our capabilities.
Your school must be a tool shop, where tools are demonstrated, taught, considered, respected, used, and deliberately chosen. Because we can not afford to send our students out without the toolbelts they need to function in their future world.
- Ira Socol
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange . You can find my books on Amazon.com.
Curriculum Watch: Abstinence-Only and Clean Coal Ideologues in Your Classroom?
Published June 24, 2009 @ 05:41PM PT
Just a couple of alerts about ideologues trying to sell their schtick to your children under "re-branded" packages:
1.The National Abstinence Education Association (source):
At an April 29 Capitol Hill briefing, Huber told the room that abstinence-only education is "not a 'just say no' message." "This is not abstinence only, this is a holistic message that prepares and gives students all of the information they need to make healthy decisions," Huber said. In fact, the NAEA isn't even calling its programs "abstinence only" anymore -- now they're "abstinence centered."
Similarly, WhyKnow -- a major provider of abstinence-only education curriculums -- recently changed its name to On Point, its tag line to "Direction for Life" and hired PR company Maycreate Idea Group to help recast its image. Lesley Scearce, executive director of On Point, said in an article for the Chattanoogan that the organization is trying to "get teens involved in new, positive directions that lead to a healthier, more fulfilling life. Without a re-naming, re-branding and re-positioning, this new direction wouldn't have been possible...."
Huber...assured her audience that "abstinence education talks about STDs and the medically accurate information regarding that" and that "abstinence education talks about contraception." But of course, the only time abstinence-only classes will talk about contraception is when they discuss failure rates -- often exaggerating those rates or spreading misinformation about the dangers of contraception. In the past, this tactic has been taken to extremes. In Montana's Bozeman High School, for example, teens in 2005 were taught that condoms cause cancer.
2. The American Coal Foundation (source):
An elementary school curriculum designed by the American Coal Foundation suggests that students learn about the costs and benefits of coal mining by using toothpicks and paper clips to "mine" chocolate chips out of cookies. They also go about "reclaiming" the "land" damaged in the process by tracing the cookies’ outline on graph paper. Costs are to be calculated by the amount of time spent per chip and the expanse of graph paper that needs to be reclaimed.
One of the discussion questions to follow the lesson is: "What do you think are some of the costs associated with mining coal?" (Read the rest...)
Things to keep an eye on....
Teaching Lolita
Published June 09, 2009 @ 03:08PM PT
[Note: Shipped the furniture to Singapore yesterday, cleaning apartment and moving out today. Backache from hell from waist-high Korean broom. Until normal comes back, have some Lolita. Written 10 April 2008. See this intro post for more. - Clay]
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Fear-Based Curriculum: A Language Arts Tragedy
In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, then marries and impregnates his mother: we teach this parricidal, incestuous, antique “classic” to 14-year-olds.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s uncle murders his brother and marries that brother’s wife, enjoying her in “incestuous sheets“: again, we teach this 400-year-old Renaissance “classic” to 15-year-olds.
And let’s not forget the sentimental favorite about a 12-year-old whose father is trying to marry her off to a prize bachelor of at least 25, and in which instead the 12-year-old heroine elopes with her maybe 14-year-old lover, and spends a night of tender love-making a few paces away from her iconic balcony. Their pillow-talk the morning after their love-making is something we have 13-year-olds recite by the millions in our annual, usually painful, front-of-the-classroom recital days. Yes, I’m talking about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet would be a middle-schooler today - and her father would be in jail for pandering her to his cellmate Paris, the noble pedophile.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 40-year-old pedophiliac professor of literature marries an over-sexed 12-year-old’s mother, who shortly thereafter dies in a freak accident, plunging the professor and the 12-year-old in a morbid love affair that ruins both their lives. Often brutal, as often tender, more often laugh-out-loud funny, but never vulgar or graphic, this acknowledged masterpiece and “classic” of modern, 20th century literature - “the only convincing love story of our [20th] century,” according to Vanity Fair - sends educators running for the hills.
It’s a tragic irony and a very telling double standard: teach controversy from old, safely removed times? No problem. (Well, maybe just skim over Paris’ age, Juliet’s loss of virginity, Oedipus’ and Gertrude’s incest.) But teach the same issues about modern schoolgirls? No, no, no. That hits too close to the real world. Let them learn about that, if at all, from their sensationalistic prime-time TV’s at home: To Catch a Predator, anyone? School is not the place for unsafe subjects. We only think critically about safe ones here.
That we should think about these subjects in our classrooms - our young females, in particular, but our young males too, as is shown below - can be supported by a few statistics (USA only): (Click "read more" below...)
A Commencement Speech of Terror and Beauty
Published June 07, 2009 @ 09:44AM PT
I hate to sound all gloom and doom, but as the speaker below says, "If you look at the science ... and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data." More and more, as I study ancient Near Eastern religions of Babylonia, and especially Israel and Roman Christianity - Near Eastern in mind if not in space - I find myself noticing that science has taken the mantle of prophecy from religion, and that its jeremiads seem to have as little effect on society as those of its pre-modern predecessors. Today's Cassandra wears a lab coat.
If there's any hope at all, it's in education. For the sake of the world, I can only hope Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Eli Broad stop talking about education as a set of skills to dumbly read a "no insurance" contract at WalMart and to make change at its cash registers, and start talking about it in the more momentous terms the times demand.
But with businessmen leading our education policy, I can't say I'm too hopeful that will happen.
Call that a preface to the following. Thanks to Anand Thakker on Twitter for tweeting me this University of Portland commencement speech - "Healing or Stealing?" - by Paul Hawken, co-author of Natural Capitalism. It speaks of things we tend not to speak of to our young, when our only hope seems to be that they do hear these things, and make the changes in the near future that our own and previous generations were too weak to make.
Here's the beginning. Click through for the whole thing - and show it to the young.
Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. (Read the rest....)
photo of Malaysia by Shutterhack
New Yorker Podcasts, Profiting from Poverty, and Casting Stones at Gays
Published June 03, 2009 @ 12:12AM PT
Some good links from around the web this week.
Dana Goldstein at The Nation: "Selling School Reform." -- How Obama, Duncan, and Democrats for Education Reform are giving education to the Wall Street types. (After all, there's good money to be made in the poverty trade.) Ohanion seems unnecessarily harsh on Goldstein in her prefatory comments.
Fiction podcasts from the New Yorker. Great short stories read by great authors. I can see a million classroom uses, beyond the pure pleasure.
Betty Bowers is without sin, so she casts stones freely: See her latest video explaining traditional marriage to everyone else. (Not educational, beyond the critical reading of an authoritative text and the fine example of satire - call her a female Stephen Colbert, maybe.)
Arne Duncan's Tall Chicago Tales: Education Policy Blog gives "A look at Chicago schools under Duncan." Coming soon to a blighted and soon-to-be-outsourced neighborhood near you. (More de-mythologizing Duncan's turnaround "successes" here.)
CBS radio coverage of Tiananmen Square is one of hundreds of rich a/v resources at Crooks and Liars growing "Newstalgia" archives. History, politics, media studies teachers will love it.
War-gaming North Korea: Wired's link-rich feature on the possible consequences of a U.S. war with North Korea. (I arrived in Seoul the very week that Pyongyang detonated its first nuke three summers ago. I'm leaving now as it's getting even more batsh!t - and not without reason, frankly, though you won't hear that on CNN. Provoking renewed conflict could bloody this place up bad. It's an ugly situation - and the readings would be great for current events teachers.)
It's moving week, folks. Packing up the stuff for shipment to Singapore, preparing for a month of couch-surfing until we fly out - unless the commies invade first.
Texas Evolves, Ousts Creationist from Ed Board Chair
Published June 01, 2009 @ 08:44AM PT
Steve Schafersman of the Texas Freedom Network spreads the Good News:
On Thursday the Texas Senate failed to confirm Don McLeroy as Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Rejection of a governor's nomination is rare. McLeroy lost confirmation in a close party-line 19-11 vote. One Democratic senator, Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr. was present but abstained. A two-thirds majority (21 votes among the 31 senators) was needed for confirmation. McLeroy will remain on the SBOE as a member.
News reports about this topic can be found in the Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and San Antonio Express-News.
As is widely known, Don McLeroy, a Bryan Republican, is a Young Earth Creationist who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, that the Earth and the entire universe were created in six 24-hour days, and that all species were specially created in their present form by God. Organisms now represented by fossils were all killed and deposited in sediments of Noah's Flood.
But don't shout "Amen" yet. The Devil, Schafersman adds, is in these details, which may damn Texas to a McLeroy clone for two more years:
Since McLeroy's nomination was unconfirmed, after June 1 the SBOE will have no chair and Governor Rick Perry will be obliged to appoint a new chair. The next confirmation hearing for SBOE Chair will be in two years, so if Gov. Perry appoints Radical Religious Right and Young Earth Creationist Cynthia Dunbar, Terri Leo, David Bradley, Ken Mercer, Barbara Cargill, or Gail Lowe to be the next SBOE chair, he or she will be able to serve for at least two years before facing Senate confirmation.
Schafersman thinks the governor will indeed appoint another creationist for the interim.
Anyway, kudos to Texas' Democratic senators, all of whom voted against McLeroy, and a big *sigh* to the Republicans who all voted for him. A special thanks to Sen. Rodney Ellis of Houston, who already received over 1,500 "Thank You's" from our petition here on Change.org for standing, ahem, upright against the primates fossilized in pre-scientific worldviews.
I don't know why the idea that we're animals is so terrifying. We're the only animal able to unriddle the great mysteries of life - the genome, the tree of life (lower case, mind you), the wonder of Google, and so much more. Sure, we're also historically the most destructive animal the world has ever seen, but that's been true before science as well as after it.
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Bonus video: Here's the good dentist McLeroy setting the scientific "experts" straight in the Texas science standards hearings at the State BoE:
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Attend Yale in Your Underwear - with Open Courseware
Published May 26, 2009 @ 02:17PM PT
A refreshing take on Bible study.
I'm halfway through the first of 24 lectures from Yale's Religious Studies: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) course from 2006. Click on that link and you can download all the lectures as videos, plus transcripts of them, and course reading assignments (unfortunately, the readings themselves aren't included, so you're stuck with either buying the texts yourself, or playing the classic college student game of skipping the reading altogether and relying wholly on the lectures to understand the content).
It beats the hell out of American Idol.
She's a good lecturer, though I'm tempted to quibble with some of her characterizations of the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian culture and religion already. But I'll wait until she gets into it more deeply in future lectures.
Religious Studies not your bag? The world of Open Courseware surely can fill it with something to your tastes. Check out Open Yale's full online (and again, free) course offerings to see for yourself.
It doesn't end with Yale, of course. I'm also following UC Berkeley's Modern European History course. Check here for all of Berkeley's courses that offer video lectures in all their departments.
Finally, there's iTunes University. You can download podcasts on many subjects there as well. (And read this little piece of research showing students learned better watching lectures on their iPods than they did sitting in the lecture hall.)
Search Google for "Open Courseware" for more.
High school, maybe even middle school, teachers should consider showing some Yale lectures to their students. The level of language and concepts seems entirely appropriate for teens, at least in the introductory courses. It might demystify the realities of college for these students, and lower their anxieties about what college demands. And you can certainly do worse than a Yale professor for a "guest lecturer" in your classrooms.
