Last week, the meeting was really interesting because they
showed us different ways of dealing with urban education issues. Both of them
shared something: activism. I think that this part is very important to make an
impact in our societies, professionals with a great heart full of compassion
for others, giving them a voice, the most unprotected people in our society:
poor, immigrant and refugees. In relation to this point I want to share with
you this article:
Pakistani Nobel Laureate Malala visited
Mexico, she was invited by the Mexican university to talk about review the
importance of education and culture in the development of the society. Malala
also referred to the educational issue, stating that "without education we
can not move forward" and showing outrage at the treatment of some nations
in this basic human right. "I do not understand why some world leaders do
not understand yet how important it is to invest in education," said the
Pakistani activist. "When you educate a child you give him resources, you
help him grow", she concluded.
In recent decades, interpretations of disparities in
education have changed from a one-dimensional approach to a multidimensional
and interactive one. It is widely observed that the social and cultural
differences of the students condition their educational progress and the
results they obtain. The OECD report (1995) on students at risk points out seven
predictors of low-academically-performance schools that are closely related to
social disadvantage: poverty, belonging to an ethnic minority, immigrant
families or without adequate housing, ignorance of the majority language, type
of school, geographical place in which they live and lack of social support. However,
the report states that there is no strict correspondence between social and
educational disparities. There are other factors, such as the family, the education
system and the school itself that can increase or decrease these inequalities.
Then, according to the Education that was set by the
industrial era the educational model created responded to the needs of society.
In the industrial era, schools were designed as economic engines to supply professionals
to an industrial society, based on production and mass consumption. The
educational system assumed the typical values of industrial organization:
hierarchy, planning, control and standardization. In essence, students were
trained to do what they were told to do. They spent several years memorizing
the greatest possible body of knowledge to exploit it later, throughout their
professional stage.
There were many attempts to change the ‘industrial’ concept
of education but there are many other factors in education that prevent the
change. The stability in the school structure, that is the roles of students
and teachers, and families of course; others factors of stability are the
contents of the curriculum (in 100 years they have not changed) they added some
new tools like technology but there are no great changes because they are
reinforced by the textbooks and the standardized tests. According to Eisner in
his article “Who decides what schools teach?” he analyzed all those factors and
they reflected the conservatism and the need of stability that most part of
society expects of education.
UNESCO published The fight
against exclusion in education that is a guidance for teachers to deal with
inclusion and attending diversity in classrooms. There are some important
factors that help us understand the inclusive education:
- - Attention to diversity. Each student is “diverse” and has specific and individual characteristics and needs that are to be attended from an educational perspective. Diversity is understood as the opportunity to learn, as a mutual benefit to all the members of the educational community.
- - Flexibility: diversity leads us to personalized or individualized learning which focuses on the individual characteristics of the students (their weaknesses and strengths). Their learning must be open and flexible to give them opportunities for learning.
- - Support: providing the resources and tools that each student needs to learn. The support has to come from the classroom with the students and teachers as well as from the school community with the help of other professionals.
- - Teachers: their role is like a guide or facilitator of knowledge, opportunities, supporter, bridge between student-family-school, who enhances values like tolerance, respect,…
- - Participation and collaboration: a pro-active participation of all the members of the community is necessary to be successful in education. It is very important to create a sense of belonging and commitment.
To get a good participation I faced
lots of “obstacles”. There are some obstacles coming from the school staff,
other teachers and bureaucracy of the district: some of the teachers couldn’t
understand how social media could use for engaging families and improving the
participation in the school, the administrators were more focused on numbers
and they didn’t want to know anything but results, many times the school staff
didn’t provide the information so it was difficult to provide exact and precise
information.
Other obstacles came from the
families, many of them thought about social media like something bad because
they were convinced by the news on TV about the risks of social media and its
exposure. For some parents, as well as for school staff and administrators, to
deliver information through digital devices were not enough, they needed a hard
copy of the same information. Most of parents were not familiar with
educational apps. To find some solutions I invited them to an open house
session where I trained them how to use “Facebook” app for educational purposes
and showed them all the possibilities of improvement in communication: easy and
fast communication, photos and videos,…
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