Posts

Harper High School and the Role of Education

For this blog post, I chose to listen to a podcast from This American Life on how one high school dealt with gun violence (part one here , part two here ). The reporters for this story embedded themselves in the school for a full semester, recording the perspectives of staff and students, documenting everyday conversations and meetings, and charting the events that unfolded over the course of the year. I would really recommend listening to it if you get the chance—hearing individual people’s stories, often through their own voices, grounds these abstract concepts in a really moving way, and because they were offered so much access to the day-to-day happenings of the school, the reporters picked up on a lot really important and interesting nuances that a more typical news story might not have. The story of this school is important in its own right, but it also highlights some really central concepts in education justice as a whole.  Harper High School, located on the South Side of C...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Knowledge is Understood and Valued in Education

What qualifies as knowledge can be a difficult idea to define and pin down. It can take endless different forms, and it’s deeply interwoven with our everyday worlds. I think that pretty much everyone, when asked, would come up with a different idea for what knowledge really is, but I would personally think of it as any kind of understanding of how the world (including the people within it!) operates, as well as how to move through it. Individuals can gain knowledge through their personal experiences or through exploration or investigation of the world, but a lot of the knowledge we absorb and use on a daily basis is passed along from others. The question of what kinds of knowledge are valuable, and merit passing on to a new generation of learners, is one that’s at the center of any kind of education. But there’s also no one correct answer to this question, because education should never be one-size-fits-all. Nobody has the exact same set of knowledge as anyone else, and nobody can poss...
Post a Comment
Read more

Labels of Ability in Education

The labels assigned to different groups in the context of education absolutely have the power to influence how kids are perceived by their educators and peers, and maybe even more importantly, how they perceive themselves. Some of the most fraught labels in the classroom are those that categorize students on the basis of ability. One of the most widespread ways this labelling occurs is through the tracking of students into gifted programs. This is a case where the language surrounding these institutions—deeming some kids as “gifted” and the rest, by extension, as ungifted—reflects the central idea that it’s founded on: that high-achieving students’ success is the result of some innate gift that they have, and that other students simply lack. “Giftedness” isn’t framed as a goal for students to work towards, or as something affected by the myriad factors outside a student’s control—it’s just understood as a trait that you either have, or you don’t. This black-and-white labelling misrepre...
Post a Comment
Read more