Tag: education

…find a love for identity politics…so that we can draw battle lines between those who want shame to grow on trees and those who want to overcome it.

Source: Video Episode 310: Live from the New York Comedy Festival 2018 @58:30 | Harmontown

Insightful monologue on shame and vulnerability starting @51:00.

Shame is not a weapon. Behaviorism too often forgets that. Drawing lines against behaviorism in education draws lines against shame and for equity literacy.

More on shame:

Shame is toxic. It is the difference between “sorry I did” and “sorry I am.”

Source: Shame is not a Weapon. – Love Learning….

Guilt is feeling bad about something you did, something you can fix. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.

Shame cuts off connection and thrives on hiding.

Dyslexia is a particularly powerful form of shame, and it involves a lot of vulnerability.

Vulnerability can be defined as true courage.

Shame is a very lonely moment.

Reading disabilities often match in intensity the level of shame associated with incest.

Dyslexia is a perfect storm of shame.

  1. Arrives at the time you are first being evaluated.
  2. Made harsher by lack of explanation. Fail without context.
  3. Reinforced by peers and institutions

Source: Ben Foss on Dyslexia and Shame

The closet can only stop you from being seen. It is not shame-proof.

And that is what happens when you soak one child in shame and give permission to another to hate.

Source: Hannah Gadsby: Nanette – Netflix

See also: Hannah Gadsby on Shame, Power, and Comedy

We should spend more time talking about how we change the environment that surrounds people and not the people themselves.

Source: The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed

“Any authority within the space must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of the community. And this depends on a recognition of the power dynamics and hierarchies that this kind of learning environment must actively and continuously work against. There is no place for shame in the work of education.”

Source: Dear Student

Along with phrases appropriated directly from the so-called alt-right, a small group of neotraditionalist educators have invented the concept of ‘school shaming’ to make their reactionary politics seem, well, less reactionary. Criticize a school for how it treats students, and you’re ‘school shaming’. Talk about structural racism and curriculum, and you’re playing ‘identity politics’. Oppose calls to shore up the authority of teachers in the face of supposedly out-of-control youth, and you’re ‘virtue-signalling’.

‘Slut shaming’ is an attack on women and their identity in a patriarchal society; it’s part of a power dynamics meant to keep women in their place. By extension, we might imagine that the phrase ‘school shaming’ similarly works to expose a harmful power dynamic where schools who publicly advocate for ‘zero tolerance’ policies towards students are somehow oppressed by people who criticize those policies on social media. However, the concept of ‘school shaming’ gets the power dynamics exactly backwards: schools that shame students through authoritarian discipline policies should be open to criticism. Ironically, those who use the phrase ‘school shaming’ are looking for a nuanced and sympathetic treatment of ‘zero tolerance’ schools that the students who attend those schools are denied. Unlike the empty concept of ‘school shaming’ which seems to have been invented by Andrew Smith (@oldandrewuk), ‘student shaming’ functions as a critical concept to name what has long been called ‘deficit thinking’ about students. When a school looks for teachers who “know how to act appalled over the little stuff”, that’s in effect asking for teachers who know how to shame students.

Source: ‘School shaming’ and the reactionary politics of neotrads – Long View on Education

Along with phrases appropriated directly from the so-called alt-right, a small group of neotraditionalist educators have invented the concept of ‘school shaming’ to make their reactionary politics seem, well, less reactionary. Criticize a school for how it treats students, and you’re ‘school shaming’. Talk about structural racism and curriculum, and you’re playing ‘identity politics’. Oppose calls to shore up the authority of teachers in the face of supposedly out-of-control youth, and you’re ‘virtue-signalling’.

‘Slut shaming’ is an attack on women and their identity in a patriarchal society; it’s part of a power dynamics meant to keep women in their place. By extension, we might imagine that the phrase ‘school shaming’ similarly works to expose a harmful power dynamic where schools who publicly advocate for ‘zero tolerance’ policies towards students are somehow oppressed by people who criticize those policies on social media. However, the concept of ‘school shaming’ gets the power dynamics exactly backwards: schools that shame students through authoritarian discipline policies should be open to criticism. Ironically, those who use the phrase ‘school shaming’ are looking for a nuanced and sympathetic treatment of ‘zero tolerance’ schools that the students who attend those schools are denied. Unlike the empty concept of ‘school shaming’ which seems to have been invented by Andrew Smith (@oldandrewuk), ‘student shaming’ functions as a critical concept to name what has long been called ‘deficit thinking’ about students. When a school looks for teachers who “know how to act appalled over the little stuff”, that’s in effect asking for teachers who know how to shame students.

Source: ‘School shaming’ and the reactionary politics of neotrads – Long View on Education

“Any authority within the space must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of the community. And this depends on a recognition of the power dynamics and hierarchies that this kind of learning environment must actively and continuously work against. There is no place for shame in the work of education.”

Source: Dear Student

A great example of how to check that you are accommodating diverse learners was shared in the Panel at the end of the conference: Walk through your learning environment as different personas (think different ethnicities, students in wheelchairs, someone with ASD etc.) and see how inclusive it is. Do the spaces allow for you to move easily through, have a sense of belonging, provoke great thinking?

Source: Learning Spaces Aotearoa – Steve Mouldey

Even better, instead of just adopting a persona, find neurodivergent and disabled people to patrol flow.

Even better than designing for is designing with. Neurodivergent & disabled students are great flow testers. They’ll thoroughly dogfood your school UX. There are great opportunities for project & passion-based learning in giving students agency to audit their context and design something better.

Source: Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism – Ryan Boren

Parallel to the topic of who designs for children lies a bigger question: Do children need design at all? Or, rather, how might they be enabled to design the toys they need and experiences they desire for themselves? The act of making that designers find so satisfying is built into early childhood education, but as they grow, many children lose opportunities to create their own environment, bounded by a text-centric view of education and concerns for safety. Despite adults’ desire to create a safer, softer child-centric world, something got lost in translation. Jane Jacobs said, of the child in the designed-for-childhood environment: “Their homes and playgrounds, so orderly looking, so buffered from the muddled, messy intrusions of the great world, may accidentally be ideally planned for children to concentrate on television, but for too little else their hungry brains require.” Our built environment is making kids less healthy, less independent, and less imaginative. What those hungry brains require is freedom. Treating children as citizens, rather than as consumers, can break that pattern, creating a shared spatial economy centered on public education, recreation, and transportation safe and open for all. Tracing the design of childhood back to its nineteenth-century origins shows how we came to this place, but it also reveals the building blocks of resistance to fenced-in fun.

Source: Lange, Alexandra (2018-06-11T23:58:59). The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids (Kindle Locations 185-196). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

We cannot build an effective, an empathetic, a working User Experience unless we build a User Interface that kids won’t turn away from. And our schools are User Interfaces. Our schools are the “how” our children interact with education. Every door, wall, room, teacher, rule, chair, desk, window, digital device, book, hall pass are part of the User Interface, and that User Interface defines the User Experience.

And we cannot begin to understand the User Experience we need until we get fully into the heads of our users. That’s true in web and programming design, its true in retail and restaurant design, and its absolutely true as we design our schools. This understanding can have complex analytical paths – and those are important, and it has a committed caring component – but it also has an essential empathetic underpinning, and maybe you can begin working on that underpinning in a serious way before this next school year begins.

Source: SpeEdChange: Writing for Empathy

As his mom, I know there would have been telltale signs throughout the day. But they’re small clues that can be easily missed, as he would have been largely compliant, so therefore no one would have realized there was any problem. But I know as the day progressed, his complexion would have become paler as the energy sapped out of him with each passing hour.

He may have struggled to eat his lunch due to high anxiety. A nervous giggle would have squeaked out when his teachers tried to speak to him. He would have put his head down on the table during lessons or possibly rocked back and forward on his chair to calm himself down. And as the pressure mounted and the clock ticked toward home time, there may have even been some finger picking and sleeve chewing.

My son shows these signs of stress through his body language and gestures. He can’t always communicate his needs verbally, so they can get missed.

The can be a common challenge facing many children on the autism spectrum. Some children are able to contain their feelings all day at school, with the teacher blissfully unaware there’s a problem. However, the stress hormones are slowly building and building inside. This creates a situation that can put incredible pressure on families— especially if teachers don’t understand or believe what the parents are telling them. So let’s think about it this way for a minute…

Source: ‘Delayed Effect’: Child With Autism Melts Down at Home, Not at School | The Mighty

Rising autism diagnoses lead to the growth of an autism industry that caters more for the cultural expectations of parents than the needs and well-being of autistic people on the margins of society.

Source: Taking ownership of the label – Autistic Collaboration

I am watching the US education system not very subtly invite punishment back into the mainstream classroom. This appears to be driven by the field of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA).

Source: Defining Reinforcement and Punishment for Educators – Why Haven’t They Done That Yet?

Autism therapy is attracting significant attention from private equity firms, a trend that could fund rapid expansion of clinics, but is also raising concerns about quality of care.

Source: As Demand For ABA Therapy Increases, Investors Buy In — Disability Scoop

Like EdSurge, Disability Scoop uncritically promotes marketing. A great many autistic people reject ABA as abuse. Private equity doesn’t care. We are commodities.

Behaviorism, particularly ABA, is primitive moral development used to commodify people. Reject it from our schools and companies.

Plenty of policies and programs limit our ability to do right by children. But perhaps the most restrictive virtual straitjacket that educators face is behaviorism – a psychological theory that would have us focus exclusively on what can be seen and measured, that ignores or dismisses inner experience and reduces wholes to parts. It also suggests that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement – and, by implication, that we can control others by rewarding them selectively.

Allow me, then, to propose this rule of thumb: The value of any book, article, or presentation intended for teachers (or parents) is inversely related to the number of times the word “behavior” appears in it. The more our attention is fixed on the surface, the more we slight students’ underlying motives, values, and needs.

It’s been decades since academic psychology took seriously the orthodox behaviorism of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, which by now has shrunk to a cult-like clan of “behavior analysts.” But, alas, its reductionist influence lives on – in classroom (and schoolwide) management programs like PBIS and Class Dojo, in scripted curricula and the reduction of children’s learning to “data,” in grades and rubrics, in “competency”- and “proficiency”-based approaches to instruction, in standardized assessments, in reading incentives and merit pay for teachers.

It’s time we outgrew this limited and limiting psychological theory. That means attending less to students’ behaviors and more to the students themselves.

Source: It’s Not About Behavior – Alfie Kohn