#pedagogy theories

[the-creepy-guy-around-the-corner]

High school teacher but these are how I detect AI writing/ prevent it: One: Make a prompt that requires in class knowledge. Something along the lines of: "Explain how authors demonstrate character development using three examples from the short stories we read in class this week." Now- could the kids just look up what those stories were and edit the prompt? Yes. But it still weeds out a few. Two: Just like on a math test I make the kids show me their work. I break my essays up into paragraphs (I teach ninth grade so many of my students are learning how paragraphs are structured anyways so its good practice) I try not to teach cookie cutter five paragraph essays, but we will discuss in general and start off by writing our intro paragraphs together and even that process often gets broken down sentence by sentence. I wont grade essays until I see and grade the paragraph assignments, and its a big tip off to me that they had AI write the final essay if I cant find any correlation of their ideas from their brainistorming/chunked assignments to their final essays. Again, kids could get around this, but by this point ive weeded out most AI. What's more common is kids just copynig and pasting from these assignments onto their final essays and ignoring the editing phase lol. Three: Trojan horses. Hide a trojan horse in the prompt, search for it in the essay, pretty big give away. Just make sure the trojan horse is something not likely to show up organically in an essay. I usually use words like "banana" or unrelated nouns. This is the most common way I catch AI essays tbh. Four: Integrate AI into the lesson. One thing me and my kids did was use AI to write topic sentences, then we would rank, compare them to topic sentences from articles weve read and so on. For grammar once I had kids correct AI body paragraphs they generated and grade the AI on its use of syntax. It demystifies them, shows that often even if they do use AI and I dont catch it they probably arent going to be getting a great grade since more often then not we find these AI generated pieces to be mid at best. Five: Draftback. It's a google docs extension that lets me view a document being written in real time. Honestly this is the most full proof way, and its funny to watch kids make the typos then go back and erase them. I also catch a lot of plagiarism this way since I can see kids copying and pasting sentences then editing them to try and hide it. Six: I'll be honest, AI writing tends to just be kind of obvious. Most kids that I've caught with AI didn't even bother to change the font size/style so that tends to be a give away. And AI likes to write a lot of nonsense that means nothing and gets very repetitive. Sure a kid could hide this by reading the paper it produced and making corrections before sending it through the AI again, but at that point they are being critical enough of writing that I don't really care and most AI cheaters are frankly not that motivated. Seven: Just talk to the damn kid about their essay. If they can explain their thoughts, ideas, quotes, and so on then yeah they probably wrote it themselves. If a kid can get through al that and STILL I don't catch it, fuck it you get the grade you get. Congrats you made cheating harder than just writing the actual essay itself I hope you enjoyed it. So yes, teachers CAN catch AI, but using AI detectors isn't the way to go. And a good teacher uses these more comprehensive methods not just to catch AI, but it also safeguards kids from being falsely accused. For example I have english language learners that often use googel translate for help, or will copy and paste things that might trigger things like Draftback for example, but then if I can go back and be like "Oh I see they did the worksheets, hmm theres no trojan horses in here, and if I look at their brainstorming I can see their ideas developing from there to this final essay" then it also protects the student from being falsely accused and facing consequence's they dont deserve. Finally, for us teachers, it's important to accept we wont catch them all. You can lead a horse to water but they dont have to drink. We can give all the kids the tools to learn but if they still refuse then that's their choice. It is our duty to try, it is our duty to provide them all the accommodations and opportunities we can, but you cant control every factor of your classroom. And up until recently we actually had virtually no way to know if a kid was just cheating or copying. As my mother used to say: "Back in the 70s if I had an essay about Abe Lincoln I'd just go to the library, find a biography, and copy whole paragraphs. How as the teacher ever going to know they couldn't check against every book in the library." The era of us being 1000% a student wrote their work was an anomaly not the norm. Do I go through these factors every time? No. Usually you can get a pretty good idea when its time to start digging (like for example a kid who refused to do all the pre work for an essay suddenly turns in a ten page paper using the word acquiescence correctly in a sentence. Or if when I'm looking at an essay and draftback says that during the writing process the keyboard only was used for 170 keystrokes on a 1000 word essay. It's important we look for AI cheating in our students work, because AI writing (while its means are unethical thanks to scraping from works with out authors permission) is a tool. It's not going away anytime soon, and if were going to accuse kids of using it we need to have robust methods of detecting it that are HUMAN. Simply using an AI tool (which is what AI checkers are) to detect AI writing is hyprocasy. The most accurate AI checker is old fashioned human investigation.

I hate so much that professors who still can't figure out how to send messages on Zoom think they're capable of spotting AI writing. Professors are just feeding essays into AI detectors with massive fail rates with absolutely zero critical thought about the tools they're using. I moved across state lines. I've spent years of my life trying to get this degree. But at any moment I could be expelled because I got a false positive from a detector that tells you ChatGPT wrote Anna Karenina.

[odinsblog]

In the darkest chapter of German history, during a time when incited mobs threw stones into the windows of innocent shop owners and women and children were cruelly humiliated in the open; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young pastor, began to speak publicly against the atrocities.

After years of trying to change people’s minds, Bonhoeffer came home one evening and his own father had to tell him that two men were waiting in his room to take him away.

In prison, Bonhoeffer began to reflect on how his country of poets and thinkers had turned into a collective of cowards, crooks and criminals. Eventually he concluded that the root of the problem was not malice, but stupidity.

In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while “one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.”

Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when they are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person is self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.

This much is certain, stupidity is in essence not an intellectual defect but a moral one. There are human beings who are remarkably agile intellectually yet stupid, and others who are intellectually dull yet anything but stupid.

The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or rather, they allow this to happen to them.

People who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals in groups. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up an autonomous position.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us from the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and is abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil – incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then, we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.

Bonhoeffer died due to his involvement in a plot against Adolf Hitler, at dawn on 9 April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp - just two weeks before soldiers from the United States liberated the camp.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity

[morepeachyogurt]

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

pedagogy of the oppressed by paulo freire

[wutheringheights78]

officially registered for my first doctoral classes yippee!!

[fatehbaz]

On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in a complex of new brick buildings on the bank of the Elb. The buildings were designed by Fritz Schumacher, who had become the Head of Hamburg’s building department (Leiter des Hochbauamtes) in 1909 after a “flood of architectural projects” accumulated following the industrialization of the harbor in the 1880s and the “new housing and working conditions” that followed. The ISTK was one of these projects, connected to the port by its [...] mission: to research and heal tropical illnesses; [...] to support the Hamburg Port [...]; and to support endeavors of the German Empire overseas.

First established in 1900 by Bernhard Nocht, chief of the Port Medical Service, the ISTK originally operated out of an existing building, but by 1909, when the Hamburg Colonial Institute became its parent organization (and Schumacher was hired by the Hamburg Senate), the operations of the ISTK had outgrown [...]. [I]ts commission by the city was an opportunity for Schumacher to show how he could contribute to guiding the city’s economic and architectural growth in tandem, and for Nocht, an opportunity to establish an unprecedented spatial paradigm for the field of Tropical Medicine that anchored the new frontier of science in the German Empire. [...]

[There was a] shared drive to contribute to the [...] wealth of Hamburg within the context of its expanding global network [...]. [E]ach discipline [...] architecture and medicine were participating in a shared [...] discursive operation. [...]

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The brick used on the ISTK façades was key to Schumacher’s larger Städtebau plan for Hamburg, which envisioned the city as a vehicle for a “harmonious” synthesis between aesthetics and economy. [...] For Schumacher, brick [was significantly preferable] [...]. Used by [...] Hamburg architects [over the past few decades], who acquired their penchant for neo-gothic brickwork at the Hanover school, brick had both a historical presence and aesthetic pedigree in Hamburg [...]. [T]his material had already been used in Die Speicherstadt, a warehouse district in Hamburg where unequal social conditions had only grown more exacerbated [...]. Die Speicherstadt was constructed in three phases [beginning] in 1883 [...]. By serving the port, the warehouses facilitated the expansion and security of Hamburg’s wealth. [...] Yet the collective profits accrued to the city by these buildings [...] did not increase economic prosperity and social equity for all. [...] [A] residential area for harbor workers was demolished to make way for the warehouses. After the contract for the port expansion was negotiated in 1881, over 20,000 people were pushed out of their homes and into adjacent areas of the city, which soon became overcrowded [...]. In turn, these [...] areas of the city [...] were the worst hit by the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, the most devastating in Europe that year. The 1892 cholera epidemic [...] articulated the growing inability of the Hamburg Senate, comprising the city’s elite, to manage class relationships [...] [in such] a city that was explicitly run by and for the merchant class [...].

In Hamburg, the response to such an ugly disease of the masses was the enforcement of quarantine methods that pushed the working class into the suburbs, isolated immigrants on an island, and separated the sick according to racial identity.

In partnership with the German Empire, Hamburg established new hygiene institutions in the city, including the Port Medical Service (a progenitor of the ISTK). [...] [T]he discourse of [creating the school for tropical medicine] centered around city building and nation building, brick by brick, mark by mark.

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Just as the exterior condition of the building was, for Schumacher, part of a much larger plan for the city, the program of the building and its interior were part of the German Empire and Tropical Medicine’s much larger interest in controlling the health and wealth of its nation and colonies. [...]

Yet the establishment of the ISTK marked a critical shift in medical thinking [...]. And while the ISTK was not the only institution in Europe to form around the conception and perceived threat of tropical diseases, it was the first to build a facility specifically to support their “exploration and combat” in lockstep, as Nocht described it.

The field of Tropical Medicine had been established in Germany by the very same journal Nocht published his overview of the ISTK. The Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie was first published in 1897, the same year that the German Empire claimed Kiaochow (northeast China) and about two years after it claimed Southwest Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda), New Guinea (today the northern part of Papua New Guinea), and the Marshall Islands; two years later, it would also claim the Caroline Islands, Palau, Mariana Islands (today Micronesia), and Samoa (today Western Samoa).

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The inaugural journal [...] marked a paradigm shift [...]. In his opening letter, the editor stated that the aim of Tropical Medicine is to “provide the white race with a home in the tropics.” [...]

As part of the institute’s agenda to support the expansion of the Empire through teaching and development [...], members of the ISTK contributed to the Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, a three-volume series completed in 1914 (in the same year as the new ISTK buildings) and published in 1920. The three volumes contained maps of the colonies coded to show the areas that were considered “healthy” for Europeans, along with recommended building guidelines for hospitals in the tropics. [...] "Natives" were given separate facilities [...]. The hospital at the ISTK was similarly divided according to identity. An essentializing belief in “intrinsic factors” determined by skin color, constitutive to Tropical Medicine, materialized in the building’s circulation. Potential patients were assessed in the main building to determine their next destination in the hospital. A room labeled “Farbige” (colored) - visible in both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications - shows that the hospital segregated people of color from whites. [...]

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Despite belonging to two different disciplines [medicine and architecture], both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications articulate an understanding of health [...] that is linked to concepts of identity separating white upper-class German Europeans from others. [In] Hamburg [...] recent growth of the shipping industry and overt engagement of the German Empire in colonialism brought even more distant global connections to its port. For Schumacher, Hamburg’s presence in a global network meant it needed to strengthen its local identity and economy [by purposefully seeking to showcase "traditional" northern German neo-gothic brickwork while elevating local brick industry] lest it grow too far from its roots. In the case of Tropical Medicine at the ISTK, the “tropics” seemed to act as a foil for the European identity - a constructed category through which the European identity could redescribe itself by exclusion [...].

What it meant to be sick or healthy was taken up by both medicine and architecture - [...] neither in a vacuum.

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All text above by: Carrie Bly. "Mediums of Medicine: The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg". Sick Architecture series published by e-flux Architecture. November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[agirlnamedbone]

The act of imaginative writing (and the act of imaginative reading) is, I assure you, at one and the same time, rational, irrational, intuitive, exploratory, exciting, enlightening, seldom comforting, often dangerous, always adventurous, and absolutely nuts. It makes you leap up from your chair, ruffling your hair, a divine frenzy whirling in your eyes, and it possesses you of an extraordinary calm that is beyond mere understanding.

R.H.W Dillard, “Going Out Into the Crazy” at Blackbird Review

[maggiecheungs]

—M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 2005

On Living the Privileges of Empire

I did not awake this morning to the deafening noise of sirens or the rocketing sound of nonstop bombs. I did not awake to the missiles that fall like rain from the sky, exploding on contact with land, staking out huge craters within the earth, collapsing people into buildings, trees into rubble, men into women, hands into feet, children into dust.' Two thousand tons of ammunition in three hours. Forty-two air raids in one day. Twenty-seven thousand air raids in a decade. I did not awake this morning to the taste of desolation, nor to the crusts of anger piled high from decades of neglect. I did not awake to the familiar smell of charred flesh, which sand storms use to announce the morning raid. I did not awaken in Basra to the familiar smell of hunger, or of grief for that matter, residual grief from the last twelve years that now has settled as a thick band of air everywhere. Breathing grief for a lifetime can be toxic. Breathing only grief simply kills. I did not awake in Falluja, symbol of the post-election settlement wager: votes in exchange for bombs. I awoke this morning from a comfortable bed, avoiding the interminable queues for rations of fuel or food, because I have the privilege to choose to live, unlike many who have lost their lives in the insatiable service of imperialism.

What do lives of privilege look like in the midst of war and the inevitable violence that accompanies the building of empire? We live the privilege of believing the official story that the state owns and can therefore dispense security, that war is over, that silence is a legitimate trade for consent in the dangerous rhetoric of wartime economy; the mistaken belief that we can be against the war yet continue to brand this earth with a set of ecological footprints so large and out of proportion with the rest of life on the planet that war is needed to underwrite our distorted needs; to consume an education that sanctions the academy's complicity in the exercise and normativization of State terror; to continue to believe in American democracy in the midst of an entanglement of state and corporate power that more resembles the practices of fascism than the practices of democracy; to believe that no matter how bad things are here they are worse elsewhere, so much so that undermining the promises of American democracy is an eminently more noble and therefore legitimate undertaking, more so than the undermining of democracy in any other place in the world; to assume that the machineries of enemy production pertain to an elsewhere, not operating within the geographic borders of the United States of North America. One of the habits of privilege is that it spawns superiority, beckoning its owners to don a veil of false protection so that they never see themselves, the devastation they wreak or their accountability to it. Privilege and superiority blunt the loss that issues from enforced alienation and segregations of different kinds.

[nando161mando]

High school teacher and students sue over Arkansas' ban on critical race theory

A high school teacher and two students are suing Arkansas over the state's ban on critical race theory in public schools #press

[hesitationss]

um my internet friend designed a poster for an event that jasbir puar would be speaking at i'm actually kind of star struck I didn't even see the name at my first look at the poster. sorry they're not famous or anything they just wrote terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times and the right to maim: debility, capacity, and disability which i think is necessary theory for the white gays and trans to read they would infinitely less annoying

[ofallthingsnasty]

Btw your girl is FINALLY getting her driving license and the 3 hour theory lessons are the most boring shit I have been subjugated since internal medicine my brain is burning

[hometownrockstar]

Not to be this guy but irt your post about people blaming social issues on whatever thing they don't like. It is a tenet of fascism to designate certain kinds of art as being something that degrades culture and intellectually softens the masses while deriding them ass effortless, shallow, and immoral despite the fact that what they are deriding is not the idea of immoral art but entire genres and mediums. This was a huge thing with modern art in particular. Not saying disliking AI art or booktok is fascist or anything just that I would think people would be more careful about saying entire categories of art are in some way innately shallow or degenerative

ya exactly what i was thinking when i made the post. abt saying ppl arent fascist for not liking ai/booktok, I prefer to say that people can still be reactionary or fall into reactionary thinking without meaning to or without being fascists. bc plenty of leftists i will see say things in a reactionary manner, just thinking of it thru a non-critical leftist lens, u know. also another aspect of it is the "intelligence" part, which like intelligence isnt something that can be meaningfully measured, nor is it some static thing that can "degrade", talking abt it like that makes me think of IQ nonsense.

[her-moth]

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, ‘We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know’, 2016

[whatsupwalnut]

Me when other teachers tell their students there are cameras in the classroom as a method of "classroom management"

me when i see someone censor the word kill in real life / a website where it’s allowed

[captaingimpy]

The Myth of Adult Education: Why the Andragogy vs. Pedagogy Divide Fails

One of the most pervasive myths in education today is that adults and children require fundamentally different approaches to learning. This belief has fueled an entire industry dedicated to “andragogy,” a concept coined to define the supposed unique ways adults learn. But is this dichotomy—adult education versus child education—real? I argue it is not. Instead, this divide reflects social…

[darrenwalleyconsultancy]

What is Constructivism?

Photo by Annie Spratt Constructivism is a theory of learning and knowledge that posits that individuals construct their understanding and knowledge of the world through experiences and reflecting on those experiences. This theory has profound implications in various fields, including education, psychology, and epistemology. Let’s delve into the key aspects of constructivism, its historical…

[richardtheteacher]

What is Dual Coding?

A blog post by Richard James Rogers (Award-Winning Author of The Quick Guide to Classroom Management and The Power of Praise: Empowering Students Through Positive Feedback). This blog post has been beautifully illustrated by Pop Sutthiya Lertyongphati. As educators, we’re always on the lookout for strategies that can enhance our students’ understanding and retention of information. One such…