Eisner Response

 My first 'stop' in this reading is when Eisner says "it is possible to create a school environment in which the taking of initiative becomes an increasingly important expectation..." (pp. 88). I am reminded of my experience as a summer camp leader, training new staff members. The most oft-mentioned buzzword in performance reviews is "initiative." It's an extremely difficult skill to teach, requiring a learner to make bold and occasionally wrong choices. In school, those wrong choices are harshly punished, either socially or by grading. Our current system is not well designed to foster initiative, at least by my own estimation. A shift towards inquiry-based learning will certainly help provide opportunities for more students to take initiative and I would also like to see more focus on building initiative on areas of education that are less content-based. For example, I remember having a math teacher in high school who asked for student input on when assignments should be due based on how much content they contained. That was revolutionary to me as a student and hugely increased my buy-in to the class.

My second 'stop' was when Eisner discussed the work of Lepper et al. (1978) on the perils of a rewards-based system. I stopped here because another of the classes I am currently enrolled in was just discussing the educational approach of behaviourism. As far as I can tell, the course took an uncritical view of behaviourism, provided it was approached in a humane fashion. In my own experience, though, the perils that Lepper describes are very real. I think that we do a disservice to the very enjoyable and meaningful activity of learning when we assume that students will require a reward in order to participate. I am not so naive as to believe that all students will joyfully participate immediately upon being given an activity, but I think that a systematized reward schema will lead to system-motivated students. That is to say: when we give students a framework for what to expect and what is valued, we should not be surprised when they adhere rigidly to this framework and do not creatively strain against its limitations.

Another stop (albeit brief) was at the mention of curved grading systems. I find the idea of a curved grading system immensely frustrating, both from the perspective of an educator and a student. If the quality of work/understanding is at an A level, it shouldn't matter what the understanding of the other students in the class is. Grade curving can lead to some truly illogical behaviours: I remember my mother telling me a story about a teacher she had who would give a student a 98% if they got very question right because they needed to learn that "nobody's perfect." The great irony is that students would then try to drop only a single mark on large tests so that they could get 99% - a better score than if they'd gotten the question correct. Obviously this is a wild example, but it also illustrates what I spoke to above about students living within the provided framework.

As another minor stop, I want to just note how much I love the term "convivial" in this context. Overall, I really resonated with this reading and its critiques of industrialized schooling! And what a powerful couplet to end the poem! I myself am something of a poet and found that a phenomenal mantra for educators.

Finally, with reference to current curriculum, I always find curriculum documents a bit of a paradox. If everything they aspired to were to happen, then our schools would be much better, I think. The problem is that they are often vaguely aspirational but lack the will to change our null curriculum. In another of my classes, we talked about the three (often conflicting) goals of school: Traditional, Progressive, and Socializing. We simply cannot meet all of these goals at once, which is something that curriculum tries to do. In my mind, the factory school system is not root cause but a victim of a culture which both venerates and sublimates the individual. I don't have a solution for that, but I am glad to read other people with more experience than myself thinking about similar things.