Journal_Lachney

4/23/14 At the public discussion last night I really like the conversation about grades. I think the students said things that adults did not expect, such as the need for grades. Some may look at this as false consciousness in the marxist sense (and they may be right), but I also think the grades conversation revealed tactics on the part of the students to gage their own academic success. I also imagine that other students would respond differently.

4/15/14 What would a sustainable themed FIRST competition? I know the FLL leagues have had sustainability themes, but they tend to be shallow and not connected to the robotic competition  part - the robot game. What would an interventionist approach to forming an FLL team that is based on ECO Literaceis, what is specified as such on this wiki? Would it even be possible to compete with such goal? How can we work with these robotics outside of cultures of competition?

4/7/14 In my mentor/mentee group the students are starting to talk about the fact that some studies need to be done and are questioning why they are not done. I used this as an opportunity to talk about Hess' idea of undone science. I wonder how else we can scale STS into our lessons in directly through vocabulary... what would it be like to have an STS vocabulary test - yes I know banking... but still imagine the possibilities.

4/5/14 One of the major problems with Piagetian learning theory is it is biologically deterministic and internally based: assimilation and accommodation are biological processes that are not about changing the  outside world   but changing the internal world of the student. Tuning provides a means to scaffold material agency and external structure into a view of development. With tuning, it is not only that students must change their own understandings of themselves and the external world, but are actively engaged in changing the external world based on individual and/or community goals. This is part of the development and growing process. Development is a dialect between the human and the material. This view allows the development of computational thinking to be cultural rather than merely biological; the temporal emergence of computational literacies is situated among teachers, learners, developers, communities, and machines.

3/30/14 I am still fascinated by the idea of  green computing   and how we can relate this to praxis. I want to know how we can foster students reflective-action while using electronics. But is action-reflection enough, how can they make, create, produce on/with technology while also fighting against the production of that technology. One way that I think is really useful is Ellen's E-waste to Makerspace: http://e-wastetomakerspace.wikispaces.com/. Where students re-use e-waste in creative and technologically sophisticated ways while working to understand environmental issues. But what  about computer   use? How can we combine sustainability with everyday computer use in schools? What can students do change their schools?

3/22/14 What was awesome about working one on one with Lucy and Louis last week was the way I could frame sustainability and environmental activism based on their own interests. I found out they both "love" the fantasy genre. Which at first does not see like a fruitful direction for thinking about eco-literacies. But we talked about how we need to use our imagination, just like in fantasy, to think about futures that may seem "impossible" now, but that we need to work towards. Based on their homework we talked about imagining futures with different types of cities and imaginative ways to think about population growth. I think we should work more with our students to connect to their interests. We should think about this in terms of Freirean "generative themes."

3/19/14 It was not until I had students start thinking about who there audiences (I said their friends in other grades in the school) that they really got what they were doing. I think that having students think about audience is a really nice way to help them think about themselves as authors. This puts them in a privileged position as a speaker and even the speaker for others. I noted in my journal (4/18), allowing the scaffolding for learners speak for others or be a representative for others is an important part of empowerment. I want to try to make this empowerment apparent with the stories. It would be great if we can have students think about their 3rd grade friends as the audience. Can our third grade friends come on presentation day?

I found that that drawing out the storyboard helped the students conceptualize the story and I kind of drew from what they were saying while they drew to form sentences. I wonder, how did the other mentors do this: How did you create sentences from what the students were saying; how "true" to their words did you stay?

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I did notice that it was hard to have full participation drawing, even with such a big board, I tried to get students to share the drawing but they quickly took ownership and even blocked others from drawing where they were. I made it clear that we share the responsibility but this did not seem to change their idea of "ownership."

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3/18/14 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I am extremely excited about the intergenerational Para-Sites that Pedro and I are working to facilitate for Earth Week. In a sense and based off of our conversation today, which ended up brining a number of productive tensions, these para-sites (public discussions about intergenerational ethics) are experiments. But as the BCIS becomes a field site this amplifies responsibility for me as a facilitator to work/experiment with over work/experiment on I draw this distinction from Myles Horton. In a conversation with Paulo Freire, Horton explains, "Not on people but with people. You experiment with people not on people. There's a big difference. They're in on the experiment. They're in on the process." This is what I want the para-site to be an experiment about public engagement with tough issues: The education and the environmental crisis; sustainability and habitus; fracking and the temporal emergence of human being! In considering how it is that we can work with people, I have been thinking about the idea of "representatives.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Out of a discussion with Kim, Brandon, and Pedro came an idea "representatives" speak for a group. I like this idea for two reasons: First, this means that people must take responsibility for themselves and their community. This type of responsibility often scaffolds to leadership and hopefully action. This brings me to my second point, positioning people within an empowered role to speak for others. I know this is contentious (speaking for, that is) with postmodern folks but I think that speaking for can be, like our class conversation today, can be a productive tension. When people speak for others they enjoy a certain cultural ownership over who and what they speak for. I assume this is part of some developmental theory, but speaking for situates people within their cultural grid, their multi-D navigation of emergent "cognition" (Lave and Wagner ___) or "literacies" (Roth and Barton 2004). I think that building this type of scaffolding to leadership we will enact experimenting with over experimenting on.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2/27/14 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I have been searching for research a while on how ecology education can motivate underrepresented students' interest in STEM education. I was particularly interested in CS education in K-12. While there is a bunch of literature on how "culture" can motivate STEM education, and CS specifically (Eglash et al 2006), I have not found anything about motivating CS with sustainability. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that CS and sustainability overlap either in antagonistic or shallow ways. Issues about rare earth metals and computers seems to create tension and the shallowness comes out of video games. For example the Edutopia blog " [|Sustaniability-Tehemed Computer Games Come to the Classroom"]connects computer gaming to sustainability, but not directly to CS education. Is it possible to motivate CS education with sustainability? I guess on example is the[| Feral Robotics Dogs] project that uses appropriated toy dogs to "sniff" out toxins in students neighborhood, but the research that says this supported deep understanding of STEM/sustainability.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2/15/14 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">What is the role of celebrities in ecology education? I ask this after watching a Jackie Chan, on Ecology News on the Science Daily website - <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/661223.htm - come out against the purchase and sale of illegal animal products. At one time Chan is using is celebrity for good, yet most of what he says is quite shallow compared to other reports and sources of information. Not to mention Chan is implicated, perhaps more than others, in a global media industry that is responsible for many environmental harms. How can we use Chan to help students understand that need to fight against harm to animals, while also using the event as a moment to reflect on media, sustainability, and the idea of celebrity through a type of critical media literacy?

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2/11/14 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">ML: I often find that reflection on the "in the moment" of educating is difficult. There is so much going on with so many different little people seeking attention that my already easily distractible mind blurs many of the events together. This is especially difficult if on is trying to take field note on the experience. But what was extremely helpful was the mentor to student ratio. I think it was a great idea for use to have small 4-5 student groups with one mentor. I found that these small groups made it easier to reiterate information in the introduction and mini-lesson. All together I think Michelle's project was a success. I had students hypothesize what was going to happen when we put all of the different pollutants together. All the students predicted a rainbow, and to their surprise it turned a brownish-red, one student even said it looked like blood, which, I imagine, is a bit visceral for little people to see so much liquid that looks like blood. I think the SUTS model worked well, the students, once prompted with the question were able to answer it. Can we make the questions more visual? I mean can we figure out a way for the students to be more connected to the model instead of it being mediated through a mentor? I also think we need to figure out a way to spend time on words they did not know (environment for instance). These unknown words should motivate us to think about points of intervention, how can we build a "hybrid" (Haraway 1991; Latour 1993) view of the word/notion/meaning of environment? This is the only word that stuck out to me that they did not know, but I am sure there are others. We should do some early childhood reading before we go in again! for example: <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[]

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2/6/14

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">While the commercialization of education is serious problem in and of itself (as pointed out in the previous blog post), the branding of tests also points to the values and position of CC content producers. Surely teachers are highly involved in the creation of tests and standards that will be administered - this is not the case? Why? How do you know? I have two points (one based on empirical evidence and the other more speculative and based on my knowledge and research on commercial culture in schools) that help us understand why this is not case:

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">1) going back to "The Problem's with the Common Core," the article quotes teacher educator Nancy Carlson-Paige: "In all, there, were 135 people on the review panel for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was K-3 classroom reacher or early childhood professional." The article continues: "parents were entirely missing. K-12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards - and led legitimacy to the results." Clearly there the lack of involvement from those who most directly work with students signifies the silencing of not only the teacher and parent voice, but the voice of advocacy for the students. This brings me to my second point.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2) School and commercial culture have, historically existed uncomfortably next to one another. I suspect that commercial influence over the content of the CC would have been more scrutinized given more teacher and parent involvement in its production. Even though popular culture has gained significant traction as an area of study in many university programs since the late 1950s, its presence in K-12 is still limited. This appears for many reasons, but major themes that runs throughout studies on popular culture in schools are issues of adult accessibility (“I just don’t get comic books” a teacher once told me) and fears and anxieties over its negative impact on youth development. Jackie Marsh and Elaine Millard clarify that many teachers found, “The products of popular culture to be unsuitable for their lesson planning because they are usually more transient than the literary forms of high culture and have only a short-term appeal to their users” (2000, 2). David Buckingham has argued that education and popular culture is often defined in opposition to each other, in that “children’s media has increasingly sought to undermine ‘education’ values of seriousness and authority” (2003, 157). In her ethnographic work on an urban media-focused high school, Allison Butler explains, “when a new technology is introduced into a society, it is accompanied by simulations fear and fascination, especially by adults regarding the impact of young people” (2011, 23). And, I have detailed a case where administrative control over in-school website access created “disconnects between the actions and rationale of teachers to discipline students for their inappropriate and public actions on Facebook and the students who felt an invasion of privacy” (2012, 203).

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Buckingham, David. Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture. Malden: Polity Press, 2009.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Butler, Allison. Media Education Goes to School: Young People Make Meaning of Media and Urban Education. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Lachney, Michael. "Students as Fans: Student Fandom as a Means to Facilitate New Media Literacy in Public Middle Schools." In Fan Culture: Theory/Practice. Ed, Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Marsh, Jackie, and Elaine Millard. Literacy and popular culture: Using children's culture1in the classroom. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications Limited, 2000.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2/4/14

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The Common Core is more than common debate among educators, policy makers, education researchers and activities on improving the quality of education for the 21st century. The CC is a well mobilized attack on public education that has its roots in the Reagan era of the 1980s. The CC is bolstered by the failed No Child Left behind experiment, proponents test-based teacher evaluations, waves of privatization that break onto the public sector, and the top-down management of education systems by global organizations. The Gates Foundation, for example, has been a major financial asset to the R&D of the CC itself, which is computer administered and, according to the Re-thinking Education (Vol 28.2) article, "The Problems with the Common Core," is laced with content branded by corporate entities - just imagine: "your Samsung Galaxy has 46% battery life, with 1% depletion of every 5 minutes..." - you get the point: along with the CC comes the commercialization of education; reinforcing education as a "basin of attraction" for commercial culture. The Gates Foundation has quite a bit to gain from state standardization - and federal RTTT grant requirements based on CC standards. Standards create a new market niche for companies to pump out resources and PD that align with the CC. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For example, consider Melinda Gates’ speech at the Foundation for Excellence in Education Summit on the usefulness of the Common Core Standards for educational technology,

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">…fragmented standards make it hard for technology companies to sell into the education market. Let’s say a software genius with a passion for education develops an amazing tool… but every buyer is a small buyer with a different standard. In the end, it just doesn’t pay… So one of the greatest strengths of American society – our agile, innovative capitalist system – is not able to generate new tools that can serve our public schools.[1]

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Here, Gates makes a clear argument for why standardization is compatible with commercialization. Profit cannot be gained from the educational market since technology and such are "not able” to enter the arena of public schools. Within this view it is not teachers, software developers, etc. who control the implementation of technology but the market itself and its products of innovation. This deterministic mystification of technology proves problematic in that there is a clear conflation of technological innovation with educational innovation, two areas that are not mutually exclusive or dependent. As education lags technologically behind due to its nonstandard relationship to the free market, outsiders such as the Gates Foundation find motivation for intervention at the cost of flexible and creative education from the bottom-up (teachers and students as co-producers of pedagogy - see cultural studies of science education folks for more on this).

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[1] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Speeches/2011/10/Melinda-Gates-Foundation-for-Excellence-in-Education-Summit

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">1/31/14 Now I am not suggesting an individualist view of what sense making is, surely modes of sense making is best understood in relational terms. So how do we move into these relations and intervene. This is a complicated question that we are seeking to answer, but I want to propose a better theoretical model, similar to assimilation, but different in that is comes out of STS lit. and, I think, allows for a more expansive view of students affective and cognitive models. Based on Andrew Pickerings concept Mangle, I want to describe the Mangle of Pedagogy through a sub-concept of Pickering's tuning: Pickering’s concept of “tuning,” as a process of resistance and accommodation between a mangled triad of human, material, and disciplinary agencies, provides a pragmatic means for science and technology studies to theorize and carry out campaigns in the realm of STEM education for/as social justice. Tuning configures a performative framework for understanding teaching and learning as an open-ended goal oriented process, as opposed to dominant schooling practices that rely on close-ended inscription-based assessments. Tuning as a pedagogical metaphor at this moment in time is particularly relevant to a new ontological vision of STEM education for three reasons: 1) Tuning as an open-ended goal oriented process of becoming must account for student agency, and therefore, students’ own conceptual frames, heritages, and popular knowledge as part of a dialectic with the disciplinary agencies of schooling. 2) With computers and digital technologies becoming a staple in educational practices the mechanic fields in school buildings are increasing and diversifying. Tuning provides a framework for understanding students’ interactions with these technologies as a dance of human and material agencies in real time. 3) Tuning implies that learning outcomes are never known in advance and therefore encourages pedagogues and students to engage in trial-and-error processes that can be as diverse as the outcomes themselves. Ultimately, tuning creates a vision of schooling that accounts for and fosters the diversity of learning styles that teachers encounter. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">1/30/14

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I want to respond to a through-line that I have noticed in the EcoEd class thus far. This is summed up in question about social reproduction theory from Kim's example journal posts: "could we not also see the reproduction of particular modes of sense making -- that actually undercut students’ ability to understand some things." I like this question because it places us within economy of students' affective/cognitive structures and forces us to think about the process that Piaget may describe as "assimilation" - the incorporation of new ideas into pre-exiting personal knowledge and beliefs. Though, to use Piaget is controversial. His operative stages of development are teleological and, according to Carol Gilligan, were revived in the 1960s to provide a strong rational for projects to incubate competition through the development and implementation of science and math education in the post-Sputnik era (a great example of individual psychology (not in the Adlerian sense) . This said, to understand how to produce new types of sense making assimilation is a necessary concept, we must scale, scaffold, and such students own senses of being, culture, family, world, etc. if we want to have a lasting impact on sense making.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">1/28/14 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Where is Green Computing in K-12 Education?

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Computer science education in K-12 is in its infancy. I do not mean to say that there has not been significant theorization (Papert 1980, 1993; Resnick 1994; deSessa 2001; Jenkins 2009) or empirical research (Cuban 1986; Margolis et al. 2008; Ito 2009) on computational thinking, computer use, literacies in k-12, but that CS (and engineering) education has not been standardized in K-12 state curricula like other STEM subjects - though through ACM's Computer Science Teacher Association there is a push for standardization.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">While some may frown at this current state of affairs, I believe that like the plasticity of the infant in the developmental sense, "infancy" of a pedagogical subjects signifies an opportunity to more easily mold and shape something in the early stages. These current developmental conditions suggest CS education as a point of intervention for social justice educators to support critical eco-pedagogies of sustainability and consumption (in addition to our EcoEd Literacy Goals, see Sandlin and McLaren eds. 2009). With this said, there is, in a brief Google search Green Computing K-12 initiatives, little that is easily accessible to K-12 educators. [|Wikipedia's entry under Green Computing lists a number of certification programs]in higher education. And, the website for [|Cornell's Institute for Computational Sustainability] includes pictures of community and K-12 science fair outreach, but does not provide any materials for repeating their activities.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">references:

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Cuban, Larry. The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1986. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">DiSessa, Andrea A. Changing minds: Computers, learning and literacy. The MIT Press, 2001. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ito, Mizuko. Engineering play: A cultural history of children's software. The MIT Press, 2009. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The MIT Press, 2009. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Margolis, Jane, Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode, Jennifer Jellison Holme, and Kimberly Nao. "Stuck in the shallow end." (2008). <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Papert, Seymour. "Children's Machines: Rethinking Education in the Age of the Computer." (1993). <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books, Inc., 1980. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Resnick, Mitchel. Turtles, termites, and traffic jams: Explorations in massively parallel microworlds. Mit Press, 1994. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sandlin, Jennifer A., and Peter McLaren, eds. Critical Pedagogies of Consumption: Living and Learning in the Shadow of the" shopocalypse". Routledge, 2009.