#pedagogy tag

[hierarchyproblem]

The children are willing to accept all kinds of mathematical shorthand if I tell them that I am too lazy to write things out the long way. In the first place, this is true. In the second place, it gives them a chance to make fun of my laziness, and to feel (which is also true) that in accepting my shorthand they are doing me a kind of favor. They do not like to be told that a certain symbol “means” something. This seems arbitrary and mysterious. But if you express a relationship or an operation in terms with which they are familiar, they will soon be perfectly willing to let you use some kind of shorthand to express it.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[pinkcupboardwitch]

genuine question, where would you recommend someone start with improving media literacy and critical thinking skills? :o

I love this question! Thank you - it really pushed me to figure out how to distill my own process, so it was very helpful for me too.

“Media literacy” is such a big topic that it can very easily get overwhelming, so I would recommend finding a specific type of media you want to practice these skills in first. This is handy because 1) it breaks the learning process up into a much more manageable goal 2) a lot of the mindsets you acquire here will be helpful once you start branching out into different media types, even if the specifics of that genre might be different.

For example, I’m a historian; I’m trained to read both historical documents and texts produced by other professional historians with an eye for particular characteristics. My personal specialty is the study of historical gender and medicine, which means that even when I’m reading texts from periods outside my own, or even modern media, I can pick up synergies of gender and/or medicine more intuitively than others. A really fun example of this is when I watched Blue Eye Samurai with a friend who is also a historian of the same period as I am, but with a focus on religion. A very obvious flag to me that Mizu is queer in some way is that they only realized they were attracted to [censored for spoilers] when they witnessed two men kissing. When I brought that up to my friend, he said he had completely missed that thread. He is, however, continually able to bring in sociological arguments that I miss, because he’s trained to see those patterns and I’m not.

A less intimidating way to approach these skills then, which are often very vaguely defined and have a reflexive anxiety about them because they feature so often in grading rubrics without being clearly defined, is pattern matching. Are you able to identify the patterns the authors are drawing on? And are you able to draw new connections between these texts that are unique to you?

Examples of specific specialties you might be interested as a way to get started could include political journalism, scientific reports, historical texts, or romance novels, to give you an example of the balance between specificity and generalization I usually find helpful. Once you have your set, start reading as many examples of that as you can. It’s more helpful to consume this material consistently, rather than amass a huge source base in a very short period of time. The goal here is to start picking up on patterns between the various examples you’re reading. Patterns of shared values, of similar ways of constructing an argument or a message, of different conversations going in between the authors of this shared space.

“Active reading” tends to get a bad rap because I think a lot of us have bad memories of being told simply to do it without ever being explained what it actually is or how to tell if we’re doing it. But it is a very useful tool. Instead of simply taking in information (that is, “passive” reading), we engage in a conversation with the information as we read. I find that the following is a handy checklist for me when I read material that’s new to me:

- What is the author’s message? How can I tell?

- Why are they presenting this message? Do their stated goals match their implicit goals, or is there a mismatch? How can I tell?

- Who is the message for? How can I tell?

- Do I agree with this message completely? With some parts of this message but not others? Not at all? Why? And how can I tell?

- If I don’t agree in part or entirely, what is my stance on the issue? (“I need more information to know my stance” is a perfectly good one to have)

(Note: this is biased towards my training as a historian. Someone trained in a different field, or even in a different method of doing history than I am, would likely have a different answer. But I find that this set is flexible enough to be used in many different contexts, not just academic ones.)

That “how can I tell” is, for me, the crux of the matter. Being able to answer that question pushes us to really pick apart the different strands of a text and helps us see the overall meaning of that text as something that is constructed, not inherent.

At first, you might need to consciously have this list next to you as a reminder whenever you’re reading your text of choice. You might even need to read a particular text multiple times, each time focusing on a single question from the list instead of juggling all five parts at the same time because it’s so hard to find those answers. That is totally fine! More than fine, it’s normal.

Eventually, as you get more and more comfortable with practicing this kind of thinking and reading, you’ll be able to do it in a way that’s less conscious and more like muscle memory. This also means that over time, it will get less tiring. Which is to say - at the start of this practice, it will be tiring, mentally and physically so. That doesn’t mean you’re lazy or stupid. It just means this is a part of your brain that’s starting a new exercise routine and is slowly building up endurance. “Learning things” is a skill in itself, and something that we can also practice and get better at. I know some very smart people who are terrible at learning new things and being beginners, because they’re so used to excelling at a very narrow sphere of activities.

This is such a long response already, but I hope it is helpful and makes sense! Just two more points for now, and please also feel free to jump back into my inbox or DMs if you have more questions about this.

Firstly, a very useful strategy I have found for getting more literate in genres and ways of thinking I am not familiar with is to ask an expert in that field to “check your work”. For me, this is scientific articles and @dr-dendritic-trees. Again, I’m a historian, I wasn’t trained to read science reports in any field, but I still want to parse the interesting science that comes my way. In the early stages of getting familiar with science writing, “checking my work” usually looked like me sending an article her way, asking her to translate it into layman’s terms, and then, armed with that prior explanation, reading the article myself to see if I could understand how she’d gotten there. As I got more familiar with the particular kinds of thinking that scientists are trained to do, I started reading the articles first, reaching a tentative conclusion, and then asking her if she agreed (example: “Their conclusion feels fishy to me but I can’t fully say why. Would you say that’s right?”). The goal here is not simply to acquire new scientific information. The goal is to practice thinking like a scientist.

(Incidentally, this approach is also why I encourage my students to use SparkNotes or Wikipedia if they’re really struggling with a particular text so they can get a summary of what’s happening. Once you know what’s happening, you can focus on the much more interesting and critical aspect: how the argument is constructed and how you can tell).

Secondly, Toulmin’s Method is another handy checklist for breaking down arguments that you can use as an alternative to or in conjunction with the checklist I provided above. I’ve taught it in my own classes and a particularly handy exercise I like to do with them is to practice going, “I agree with your X because ABC, and I disagree with your Y because DEF.” [example: “I agree with your claim because my own experience backs that up, but I disagree with your warrant because you’re falsely connecting these two elements.”]

This is so long! Thank you for asking the question and for reading all this! It’s probably pretty obvious that I care deeply about this topic*. This is a hard skill to pick up, especially if you haven’t consciously worked these mental muscles out in a while, but it’s also a profoundly valuable one, and one that greatly enriches our lives as people in a shared and communal world. I wish you the best of luck on your journey of practice!!

*for extra credit: how can you tell? ;)

EDIT: I said I only had two points left, posted this, and then immediately thought of two other exercises that are very helpful for practicing these skills! One, learn to write a précis, which is a very formal, four-sentence summary that is extremely helpful for organizing your thoughts. Two, learn to identify logical fallacies. A really central part of critical thinking is being able to recognize when others are not thinking critically and explain why.

[chicago-geniza]

Today instead of doing anything productive I am thinking about a preliminary lesson plan where this essay would function as a "critical frame" for us to read Prus's "The Waistcoat/Kamizelka" and Peretz's "Bontshe Shvayg" and discuss:

November + January Uprisings

Positivism as an intellectual-historical response to the violent repression of the Uprisings, the Romantic literature & philosophy associated with them (including idealism!), & harsh state reaction in the Russian partition especially

Jewish vs. Catholic theology on worldly suffering (important)

Nietzsche

Polish & Yiddish print culture

Rhetorical vs. nonrhetorical speech, how each can be misconstrued as the other, willfully or otherwise (DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, BABY) - connect to Current Events as per

[ednyfedfychan]

Marina Instone, Moving forwards while looking back: historical consciousness in sixth-form students

[hierarchyproblem]

The distinction [between apparent knowledge — the ability to reproduce solutions by following a “recipe” — and real knowledge] is vital, yet many teachers do not seem to know that it exists. They think, if a child doesn't know how to multiply, you show him how, and give him practice and drill. If he still makes mistakes, you show him how again, and give more practice. If after you have done this about a dozen times he still makes mistakes, you assume that he is either unable or unwilling to learn — as one teacher put it, either stupid, lazy, disorganized, or emotionally disturbed. It's the same old school rule, all the way from our most hopeless inner-city schools to the graduate schools of our most famous universities: when learning happens, the school and teachers take the credit; when it doesn't, the students get the blame.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

Many people [...] are drawing the wrong conclusion that we can now set out to “teach” intelligence as we used to try to “teach” math or English or history. But it is just as true of intelligence as it is of school subjects that teaching ��� “I know something you should know and I'm going to make you learn it” — is above all else what prevents learning. We don't have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

I am horrified to realize how much I myself use fear and anxiety as instruments of control. I think, or at least hope, that kids in my class are somewhat more free of fear than they have been in previous classes, or than most children are in most classes. I try to use a minimum of controls and pressures. Still, the work must be done — mustn't it? — and there must be some limits to what they can't be allowed to do in class, and the methods I use for getting the work done and controlling the behaviour rest ultimately on fear, fear of getting in wrong with me, or the school, or their parents. Here is [a particular pupil], whose fears make him almost incapable of most kinds of constructive thinking and working. On the one hand, I try to dissipate those fears. But on the other, I have to do something to get him to do the work he so hates doing. What I do boils down to a series of penalties, which are effective in exactly the proportion that they rouse the kind of fears that I have been trying to dispel. Also, when children feel a little relieved of the yoke of anxiety that they are so used to bearing, they behave just like other people freed from yokes, like prisoners released, like victors in a revolution, like small-town businessmen on American Legion conventions. They cut up; they get bold and sassy; they may for a while try to give a hard time to those adults who for so long have been giving them a hard time. So, to keep him in his place, to please the school and his parents, I have to make him fearful again. The freedom from fear that I try to give with one hand I almost instantly take away with the other. What sense does this make?

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

The following paragraph is preceded by an account of a depiction in a war film of a PTSD-induced breakdown:

It seems to me [...] that [children's] fumbling incompetence is in many ways comparable to the psycho-neurotic reactions of men who have been under too great a stress for too long. Many will reject this comparison [to a soldier's trauma] as being wildly exaggerated and inappropriate. They are mistaken. There are very few children who do not feel, during most of the time they are in school, an amount of fear, anxiety, and tension that most adults would find intolerable. It is no coincidence at all that in many of their worst nightmares adults find themselves back in school. I was a successful student, yet now and then I have such nightmares myself. [...] To feel that you are helping to make children less intelligent is bad enough, without having to wonder if you may be making them neurotic as well.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

The idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviourists, “positive and negative reinforcements,” usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, “If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything.” Even worse, they say, “If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything.” It is the creed of a slave. When people say that terrible thing about themselves, I say, “You may believe that, but I don't believe it. You didn't feel that way about yourself when you were little. Who taught you to feel that way?” To a large degree, it was school. Do the schools teach this message by accident, or on purpose? I don't know, and I don't think they know. They teach it because, believing it, they can't help acting as though it were true.

— John Holt, How Children Fail (italics in original)

[hierarchyproblem]

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, “because they're scared.” [...] Why is so little said about it? Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear [...] but the subtler signs of fear escape them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. [...] The adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity... the scared learner is always a poor learner.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

I have heard many children, most of them “bright” children in “good” schools, call themselves stupid. By this they mean ignorant — but they also mean unintelligent and beyond that generally worthless, untrustworthy, sure to do the wrong thing. Why did these children believe this of themselves? Because generally adults treated them as if it were so.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

The following paragraph from How Children Fail would be somewhat depressing to read on its own merits, but the kicker is that this was written in 1959:

How is it possible for children of only ten to have such strongly developed concepts of themselves, and these unfavorable almost to the point of self-contempt and self-hatred? We expect this of older children; but that it should have gone so far, so soon...

I'm reading the revised edition of the book which includes some asides from the author twenty years on. He adds,

I feel this now much more strongly than before.

You don't say! Sitting here in the 2020s, you start to wonder how any pupil at all makes it out of school even approximately intact.

[hierarchyproblem]

Most homework, when it is not pure busywork to fill up the children's time, is designed to convince the teacher, not the children, that they know something. And so it rarely does good, and usually does harm.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

The point I now want to make is that “success,” as much as “failure,” are adult ideas which we impose on children. The two ideas go together, are opposite sides of the same coin. It is nonsense to think we can give children a love of “succeeding” without at the same time giving them an equal dread of “failing.” [...] Children who undertake to do things [...] do not think in terms of success and failure but of effort and adventure. It is only when pleasing adults becomes important that the sharp line between success and failure appears.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

The ideas of order of all too many schools are that order should, must, can only rest on fear, threat, punishment. They would rather have systems of order based on fear, even when they don't work, than systems of order based on the children's cooperation — that work.

— John Holt, How Children Fail

[hierarchyproblem]

[...] when the school year began, the children, eager to put themselves one up with me and their classmates one down, were great tattletales, always running up to me saying, “Mr. Holt, so-and-so said or did such-and-such.” I hated this, couldn't stand it. So when children ran up with these stories I would look them in the eye and say in a kind but firm voice, “Mind your own business.” They were astonished. Their mouths fell open. I often had to say it twice: “Mind your own business.” [...] The children would walk away puzzled. What kind of class was this? But they learned the lesson quite fast — it didn't take more than a few weeks for the tattling to stop. [...] I did not then have a theory in mind that if I could make a cooperative class the children would learn a great deal from each other. If someone had suggested this to me I might even have been skeptical. I simply wanted to stop, as far as I could, the pettiness, meanness, and cruelty, just because it spoiled my pleasure in the classroom and my work. [...] They then created the cooperative class, and they then taught me how much in such a class they could help and teach and learn from each other. My part in this was that I allowed it to happen...

— John Holt, How Children Fail