November Education Reading

Without inclusive education in schools, we can’t build inclusive workplaces. — Ari Ne’eman

My Writing

• When Grit Isn’t Enough
• Math Homework, Notepad Calculators, Toolbelt Theory, and 1:1 Laptops
• Contributor Covenants and Codes of Conducts
• A Thanksgiving for Public Education: Free, Life-changing, and Available to Everyone

Twitter Threads

• On the social model of disability and education. “Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason; our differences are the genius – & the conscience – of our species.” https://t.co/8ol6wFtCCi
• On behaviorism and shame. “Defenders of behaviorism & public behavior charts are stuck in an authoritarian stick and carrot mindset. Shame is destructive & counterproductive… https://t.co/bfOsLfBhID”
• On ableism and laptop bans. “Today in thoughtless ableism: – banning laptops in higher ed – banning accessibly packaged food Food and education access bear more consideration than this. https://t.co/GMm9pIHk5w”
• On Identify First Language. “When we are abused, and murdered, the perpetrators don’t think we are “much more than autism”. They use Person First Language and forget our humanity. https://t.co/EipX47OpjQ”
• Another on IFL. “This thread sparked a debate on identity-first language vs. person-first. I agree with the OP’s use of “disabled women” as I–& almost every other disabled and neurodivergent person I know–uses IFL. Stop correcting those who use IFL. Here’s a primer: https://t.co/x83XUDuJ6f”
• On ABA, CBT, PBS, and behaviorism. ”Thread on ABA, CBT, and behavioral therapies. I’ll throw in PB[I]S, which is the latest flavor of behaviorism to gain popularity in schools. They all drill kids into self-gaslighting. Get behaviorism—and gaslighting—out of schools. https://t.co/IquEki3YoD”
• More on CBT and behaviorism. ”Thread with critiques of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and mindfulness from autistic perspectives. I don’t have personal experience with CBT. Seems to share pathologies of behaviorism & mindset marketing. https://t.co/L1bnd3kR95″

• On Thanksgiving, colonialism, and anti-racist education. “Thread on the ethnocentric origin myth of Thanksgiving using “Lies My Teacher Told Me” as the primary source. Warnings: racism, cannibalism… https://t.co/RHsPk2U7AU”

• On ethnocentric archaeology and anthropology.  “Let’s talk anthropology, turkey, Thanksgiving, and US colonialism (with a dash of nuclear science). #PhDLife 1/n https://t.co/Rf3W7aVFYx”
• On a Thanksgiving massacre. Mari, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) Writer オタク on Twitter: “In 1637 near present day  Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered.”
• On little bugs, big bugs, justice, and equity. “We think it’s time that a new generation of coders tries to tackle this even more important set of issues around access, equality, equity and basic fairness. And the clearest way we can state it is very simple: Software matters. https://t.co/dNvrYMRaZ4”
• On studies of laptops in classrooms by a Guggenheim-winning professor of both writing and disability studies. Catherine Prendergast on Twitter: “Let’s take a look at the original study that said that pen and paper note-takers learned more than those taking notes with a laptop. (Thread… https://t.co/FOyE4QN7p7”
• More on laptops in classrooms. Catherine Prendergast on Twitter: “Here’s the other study cited as “unequivocal” evidence that laptops impede student learning. The word “disability” is not even in it.… https://t.co/uvjaeEOA6R”
• And more. Catherine Prendergast on Twitter: “The third study that we are told “unequivocally” proves that laptop use in the classroom harms student learning also doesn’t mention disabil… https://t.co/BmKrEOSOiM”

Hashtags

• Ask questions of #ActuallyAutistic people, the experts on autism. https://twitter.com/hashtag/AskingAutistics
• On the ableism, gaslighting, sexism, and racism experienced by disabled and chronically ill people while navigating the medical model. https://twitter.com/hashtag/MedTraumaChat

Recommended Reading

• Autism in the Schools — A Personal Narrative – An Intense World “I saw and interacted with autistic children in elementary, middle, and high school. And I saw how nobody — not a single special education teacher, not a single teacher’s aide, let alone any of the regular teachers in which some of these students have “inclusion” — has the foggiest idea what to do with these children.”
• A Mismatch of Salience | Pavilion Publishing and Media “A Mismatch of Salience explores the communication challenges between people on the autism spectrum and neurotypical people and seeks to rebalance and celebrate this diversity.”
• bell hooks on the Roots of Male Violence Against Women | NewBlackMan (in Exile) “The primary form of child abuse is really shaming.”
• Shame is not a Weapon. – Love Learning…. “Rank ordering pupils, hanging signs around their necks, having lists of wrongdoers – these are all acts of shaming. There’s no justification for it. None at all.”
• OER is catalyst for national conversation about public higher education “OER is a larger social justice issue, foundationally related to the question of who should have access to knowledge, knowledge creation and education. That led me to this question: How can we reframe OER advocacy in a larger landscape of social justice?”
• Software Matters in the World – Fog Creek Software – Medium “We think it’s time that a new generation of coders tries to tackle this even more important set of issues around access, equality, equity and basic fairness. And the clearest way we can state it is very simple: Software matters.”
• Adjusting the Prescription: The School of Medicine overhauls its century-old educational approach | VIRGINIA Magazine On moving away from the lecture model and traditional top-down approaches. “Studies also show that individual grades improve when working within a team. The first-year students have embraced it.”
• Of Little Faith: A Troubling Trend with Blindness Professionals “It was very bleak for “them,” but how wonderful it was that there were saviors like us! We were the Very Special People who were going to come in and intervene and improve the lives of this poor lot. They were to be pitied, and we were to perform “interventions” to improve them.” / “He was not cognitively disabled; he was very intelligent and well read using talking books. I taught him how to read and write Braille in six months and how to tie his shoes in 15 minutes. No one had ever taught him before, he said. This was when I learned to be critical of every single thing I learned in college.”
• The Whole Child – Philip Mott ”What are the needs of my child? I can sum them up in William Glasser’s 5 words: survival, love, power, freedom, and fun.” / “What do you see when you walk into your child’s school? Do you observe children who are loved, empowered, joyful, and free? If you don’t, then what structures do you currently have in place that might be creating these behaviors.”
• A public university like the University of Michigan needs, as a matter of service to its students, to drop the lecture hall for a YouTube channel “But I just want to add that banning laptops is illegal if it interferes with the learning needs of students diagnosed with disabilities and is critically unfair to students with issues who lack the resources necessary to be diagnosed.”
• SpeEdChange: Humiliation and the Modern Professor “The issue here is that laptops in the classroom represent the first real chance at Universal Design for Learning”
• No laptops in the lecture hall – Seth Godin – Medium “Why offer a handmade, real-time oration for a small audience of students—students who are expected to slow down their clock speed, listen attentively and take good notes at the very same rate as all the other students?” / “In the Marketing Seminar, we’ve discovered that a focused 8-minute lecture, delivered by video, can lead to hours of useful interaction and discussion, enough to change the way professionals do their work.”
• As debate over banning laptops resurfaces, academics seek more nuanced discussion “Your classroom is your lab. I’ve been teaching college now for more than 20 years … I’m still learning from my students, I’m still learning about the classroom,” Prendergast said. “We have to remain curious, not defensive.”
• When You Talk About Banning Laptops, You Throw Disabled Students Under the Bus | HuffPost “Mistrust of students and shaky studies are not a good enough reason to hurt disabled students.”
• TG²Cast Episode 2 – Why I Don’t Grade with Jesse Stommel – Teachers Going Gradeless On grading, intrinsic motivation, LMS, platforms, tech bias, Domain of One’s Own, privilege, disruption, bell hooks.
• An “Active Learning” Kit: Rationale, Methods, Models, Research, Bibliography | HASTAC “You cannot counter structural inequality with good will. You have to structure equality.”
• Implicit bias may help explain high preschool expulsion rates for black children | YaleNews
• Disruptive Innovation? More Like Destructive Innovation. | Just Visiting
• Psychologist Explains How Restorative Justice Works in D.C. High School for Young Men of Color – YouTube
• The GOP Tax Bill Is Designed to Bully Graduate Students – Pacific Standard “The GOP tax plan won’t just shift wealth upward—it’ll also remove the educational tools that make it possible for people to shift their own class status.”
• Disrupt the Preschool-to-Prison-Pipeline with Equitable Practices – NWLC “Every year 50,000 preschoolers are suspended from public preschool programs.” / “This is consequential because suspending a student during this important developmental period creates a negative relationship with school that is more likely to last throughout the child’s education.”
• Inclusion Is All About Supports | Think Inclusive “If you are not willing to differentiate instruction for the wide range of learners that you have, including students with autism, then you are in the wrong profession.”
• Big Money Rules | by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books How big money is taking over our schools.
• The Independent Project – YouTube The Independent Project: costs nothing, runs inside a public high school.
• On the Wildness of Children — Carol Black “we speak of our familiar school experience almost as though it were an integral part of nature itself, a natural and essential part of human childhood, rather than the vast and extremely recent experiment in social engineering that it actually is.”
• The Tyranny of Canonical Texts | radical eyes for equity
• Risk is essential to childhood – as are scrapes, grazes, falls and panic | Kate Blincoe | Opinion | The Guardian ”Risk is an essential component of a balanced childhood. Exposure to healthy risk, particularly physical, enables children to experience fear, and learn the strengths and limitations of their own body.”
• Don’t Lecture Me! – Alfie Kohn “Why on earth would we think this arrangement — teacher in front of the room talking, students sitting silently and (ostensibly) listening — ought to play a central role in an institution whose goal is to promote learning?”
• Limits Not Included: Two Posts You Need To Read | Think Inclusive On inclusion in the classroom.
• Teaching and Learning With Disabilities: Rationing Time “Listen very carefully to the voices of non-speaking self-advocates. Their intelligence was realized by others after someone taught them how to use a communication system” / “we have to recognize that our number one priority has to be communication”
• Unschooling: The Educational Movement More Black Parents Are Joining — mater mea “Similarly to the race-based workplace microaggressions adults face, kids can be subject to upsetting (and at times dangerous) encounters with classmates and teachers. Black children are more likely to be disciplined—and face harsher punishments—than their white classmates for the same or lesser infractions. And even in spaces that support Black children, Eurocentric curriculums can leave something to be desired. That’s why more Black families are turning to homeschooling.”
• A Journey from Public Education to Self-Directed Education | Alliance for Self-Directed Education “And that, for our family, is what agile learning and Self-Directed Education are all about; adjusting to the needs of the learner and their community, instead of trying to fit ourselves into rigid ideas that do not help our children to thrive.”
• Ancestral Schooling: Unschoolers No More Unschooling is not new. Many cultures have been doing it for millennia. ’The next time another Mom from the dominant culture approaches me wanting to learn about the ways in which we “unschool”… I will proudly correct her and say…”We are not unschoolers. We are ancestral schoolers. What do you want to know? I will gladly share”’
• Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden on Vimeo
• Learning To Code Will Eventually Be As Useful As Learning Ancient Greek | LinkedIn
• The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding | WIRED

Quotes

To be defined as abnormal in society is often conflated with being perceived as ‘pathological’ in some way and to be socially stigmatised, shunned and sanctioned. Then, if there is a breakdown in interaction, or indeed a failed attempt to align toward expressions of meaning, a person who sees their interactions as ‘normal’ and ‘correct’ can denigrate those who act or are perceived as ‘different’ (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). If one can apply a label on the ‘other’ location the problem in them, it also resolves the applier of the label’s ‘natural attitude’ of responsibility in their own perceptions and the breach is healed perceptually, but not for the person who has been ‘othered’ (Said, 1978).

Source: A Mismatch of Salience | Pavilion Publishing and Media

Software didn’t eat the world: it bent the world to fit the values of people who make software.

Little bugs were mistakes in the software. Big Bugs are when we exacerbate (or cause!) major problems in society.

Software that exacerbates racial biases in the criminal justice system is a big bug. Security policies that put sensitive data from hundreds of millions of people at risk are a big bug. Apps that secretly spy on users (including, yes, Beyoncé) have big bugs. Undermining trust in legitimate journalism and exacerbating fake news? Yep, that’s a big, big bug.

We think it’s time that a new generation of coders tries to tackle this even more important set of issues around access, equality, equity and basic fairness. And the clearest way we can state it is very simple: Software matters.

Software Matters in the World – Fog Creek Software – Medium

The issue here is that laptops in the classroom represent the first real chance at Universal Design for Learning – the first real chance to allow every student to choose the media format most appropriate for their own needs – the first real chance for students who are different to be accommodated without labels, and I’ll be damned if I’m willing to give that up for the vanity of a few faculty who cannot figure out how to teach with the greatest information and communication tool humans have ever developed.

SpeEdChange: Humiliation and the Modern Professor

But I just want to add that banning laptops is illegal if it interferes with the learning needs of students diagnosed with disabilities and is critically unfair to students with issues who lack the resources necessary to be diagnosed.

A public university like the University of Michigan needs, as a matter of service to its students…

You cannot counter structural inequality with good will. You have to structure equality.

The classroom is one of the least egalitarian spaces on the planet. Freire and hooks insist that it is in the traditional classroom that students “learn their place.”

An “Active Learning” Kit: Rationale, Methods, Models, Research, Bibliography | HASTAC

Findings suggested that when the preschool teacher and child were of the same race, knowing about family stressors led to increased teacher empathy for the preschooler and decreased how severe the behaviors appeared to the teacher. But, when the teacher and child were of a different race, the same family information seemed to overwhelm the teachers and the behaviors were perceived as being more severe.

Implicit bias may help explain high preschool expulsion rates for black children | YaleNews

But even if this comes to pass, this is not an example of innovative disruption. It is instead the endpoint of a process that seeks to substitute credentialing for learning.

There’s nothing innovative about such a radical shift in values working in combination with simple neglect to destroy something we once felt important and enduring.

Disruptive Innovation? More Like Destructive Innovation. | Just Visiting

But they did not count on the power of children’s instinct for dissent. The wild mind strives to protect itself the way a horse under saddle does, with a thousand strategies of resistance, withdrawal, inattention, forgetting; the children won’t do what the authorities say they should do, they won’t learn what the experts say they must learn, and for every diligent STEM-trained worker-bee we create there are ten bored, resistant, apathetic young people who are alienated from both nature and their own chained hearts.

Source: On the Wildness of Children — Carol Black

The primary form of child abuse is really shaming.

Patriarchy has no gender.

Parenting is political.

Think about how much more common the abuse of boys is than people want to believe.

Source: bell hooks on the Roots of Male Violence Against Women | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Now I, personally, had a keen interest in the content of this presentation, but almost immediately I found my focus shifting to how it was being taught. I’ve been critical of an over-reliance on lecturing — along with other features of traditional instruction — for years. But that afternoon infused my long-standing skepticism with a fresh intensity. Why on earth would we think this arrangement — teacher in front of the room talking, students sitting silently and (ostensibly) listening — ought to play a central role in an institution whose goal is to promote learning?

To question the effectiveness of lectures is not to deny that teachers know more than students do, a common straw-man objection offered defensively by traditionalists. Rather, it suggests that having someone with more information talk at those who have less doesn’t necessarily lead to that information’s being retained by the latter. And the more ambitious one’s goal, cognitively speaking, the less likely one is to reach it by having students sit and listen. This is true because we are not empty receptacles into which knowledge is poured; we are active meaning makers.

Reading the research about lecturing is one way to realize the current system doesn’t make any sense. Another is to sit in the back of a college auditorium and watch rows of students updating their Facebook pages or shopping for shoes while a professor plows through a slide deck. In any case, if an hour or two of sitting still while someone pours words in your ears rarely produces lasting intellectual benefit, how can we justify a system of higher education whose uncritically accepted premise is that it does?

Source: Don’t Lecture Me! – Alfie Kohn

Twitter Moments

Collections of tweets on education and ed-tech and the forces acting upon them.

• Education and Ed-tech – November 2017
• Diversity, Inclusion, Representation, Accessibility – November 2017
• Humane Tech & Tech Ethics – November 2017
• Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, Christofascism – November 2017 – Part 1
• Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, Christofascism – November 2017 – Part 2
• Voter Suppression – November 2017
• Ban Laptop Bans