REFLECTIONS OF IEARN MOMENTS IN THE CLASSROOM

 (International Educational And Resource Network)

For over a decade I utilized educational resources, provided by iEARN, to help develop groundbreaking curriculum initiatives in science class.  This effort motivated students to want to learn and it planted the seed of inquiry into their mindset.

iEARN is the link to world-wide collaboration with students and peers that is a hallmark of modern educational pedagogy. This wealth of collaborative resources accessed by teachers can be used to strengthen student cognition between the usefulness of what has been learned and its implementation to real-world situations.

In the late 2000’s into early 2010 my science classes of 50 to 60 students were involved with the iEARN Earth Stewardship Project. It was a project facilitated by teachers at my high school with the goal of developing collaborative relationships with students from abroad on environmental concerns facing our societies.  During the duration of this project, we frequently collaborated with a group of Iranian female students in Tehran that acknowledged our concerns and held the same motivation to want to help protect and preserve local ecosystems.

During this time, students in both countries shared many messages with each other and expressed concerns about actions we thought needed to be taken to preserve the vitality of our environments. Pictures and posters were shared along with data from experimental discoveries to help each other realize the commonality of the struggle of our issue to provide for the well-being of people.

The girls in Tehran used the novelty of our exchanges to promote and garner more interest and support for their efforts during a local food pantry donation champaign.  There remained a strong feeling of support between these two groups of students, from different parts of the world, during this entire collaborative project.

Most recently, students in middle school collaborated with peers from Europe, Asia and Africa on important issues related to fresh water and the protection and preservation of ecosystems world-wide.  The Water is Life / Team Green International iEARN Project, at its core, strived to promote, world-wide, the need to protect soil through regenerative agriculture practices and planting trees, preserve supplies of fresh water through wetland development and conservation and to mitigate the release of carbon dioxide through reduction in the burning of fossil fuels.

Students in grades 5 through 8 worked on different aspects of the project to draw together comprehensive plans to make changes to safeguard our ecosystems.  Students, working on projects from countries around the world, presented at online and real-time conferences to share what they have learned with peers. Facilitators from iEARN helped orchestrate students’ ability to share ideas, explain experimental outcomes, and to learn from each other about how they live their lives across the planet.

These conferences were some of the most exciting events of the school year because it was the culmination of student efforts to solve problems then having the ability, through iEARN, to share results with peers from faraway places.  It was a model of international educational initiatives that is essential in a world more tightly networked than ever before.

Student motivation to learn was enhanced in both these experiences and it is a rewarding feeling for me to have had the opportunity to take advantage of resources that tap into the essence of what it means to be a learner. Students in both situations were able to articulate to peers from across the planet their beliefs, their discoveries and their hope for a better future.

 

Tenure Denied

A reflection of a teacher’s struggle in high school education

 

Getting up in the morning with teachers and students gathering at 7 am is the crux of what it takes to deliver education to our youth.  Just being there day after day is the experience thrust upon me as an aging teacher. It is a learning experience that has no tenure.

For four months this winter, I ventured back to school as a long-tern substitute teacher at Hampshire High School in Hampshire, Illinois. My goal was to contribute to the effort of solidifying societal fundamental elements of education and guide students into progressive futures.  It was a noble goal and a noble calling for me as a retired teacher.

Hampshire High School is a prime example of our American secondary public education system in action.  Raw emotions and academic struggles that bond together in an envelope of grit and resoluteness.  It is morning in America, and our education system is burdened with unsettling and disturbing social, economic and political realities that we face every day.

It is a fact that teachers evolve with their students.  They deliver academic stimulus and adapt it to changes taking place in the classroom to function as instruments of change for young minds. This has been a learning experience for me, even with 30 years of experience, it has been hard to deal with behavior management while striving to deliver effective and imaginative curriculum.  It is a struggle between teachers and students with both advocating for use of technologies but embracing divergent goals. Phone use is an essential tool for communication in a modern technological society, but at the same time, it is completely detrimental to the learning environment in classrooms.

Teachers at Hampshire are heroic in their efforts to deliver a disciplined and innovative curriculum, even as students experience soul crushing economic, political and social unraveling.  These cultural realities leave students angry, anxious and isolated.  Teachers at Hampshire thread a difficult course through this social upheaval and gut-wrenching economic pressures.  School climate and culture can be viewed as bell-weather indicators reflecting the fulfillment of progress or the failures of our society.

Right now, it comes down to mechanics and the process of delivering learning experiences to students immersed in a sea of futility, lost opportunity and social demise. It is now a rallying time for educators and shareholders in education institutions to address the vitality of our nation.  Our nation’s position as a world power relies on educating our youth.  Is there no greater need or critical expectation?

Technology in the classroom is twin-bladed.  It invigorates the learning process in the classroom by teachers, but it also unleashes immense disruption.  Technology helps teachers deliver curriculum in a more efficient and equal manner.  It also can disrupt the fabric of social order in schools; driving people apart, alienating individuals and instigating hate toward one another.

Phone use in the classroom is one of the most disruptive forces that inhibit learning. Phones distract students from learning and create for them a new set of priorities with learning, in school, ranked low on the scale of student concerns. Academic success and indulgence are secondary to students’ efforts in addressing self-induced perception of themselves online. 

This decline in learning in the classroom will continue as students’ motivation to remain engaged in societally generated orders of events, like schooling, gives way to the need to access applications on smart phones and maintaining continual feeds of real-time connections with peers.

There is a grudge match between teachers and students conflicted between achieving academic outcomes and remaining immersed in social interactions on phones.  A gulf of online interaction with phones in the classroom has decreased students’ ability to focus for long periods of time on projects, solving problems or when they design new ideas dealing with engineering challenges.  The immediate rewards of online instant access are just too seductive for our youth. They are mentally addicted to phone use, and it crowds out motivation to complete school projects on time and with quality.

Student reflection on conceptual understanding or achieving outcomes on projects is a process of learning that develops critical thinking and creative thought within individuals.  It is a process of reinforcing understanding, and it takes time to develop. Phone use cuts into time needed for this learning process to materialize, while at the same time deemphasizes the need for deep thought.  The disengagement of academics by students in the classroom results in an immediate stimulant to them with their phones online. It leads down a road of lost opportunities to learn and a delivers a lack in the development of abilities to think creatively and produce critical thought in their personal development. This is a lack of education.

Without education, potential dies a slow death, and prosperity is diminished for all.  A lack of education results in a decent into a third world nation status.  We are poised as a nation to excel into prosperity or plunge into despair.  It is always up to us.  It is our choice.  We dictate our future; we live with our decisions, we live or we die as a nation. 

It has been an unending learning experience for me at Hampshire High School this winter.  For over 30 years, success as an educator for me has relied upon continued evolution of my teaching pedagogy.  It is tenure denied because the final threshold of teaching students can never be achieved and one can only keep pace with ever-changing situations in life that have impact on us all.

 

It Is All About Culture

 

The meaning of culture leads to shared values, perspectives, beliefs, ethnicity and
historical lineage. Culture is a culmination of social structures that include shared
economic considerations, segregation of socioeconomic groups of people and political
alliances between generations.

Culture sets the stage for social, political, and economic continuity in our society. It is
the social anchoring of our existence. How we perceive different relationships in our
lives (personal emotional, financial and work-environment) determine our means and
our ability to alter life-fulfilling outcomes.

To be progressive is to house a mindset that originally stems from anarchism and is
later transformed into ideas for change. As quoted by Nathan Schneider in the book
Chomsky on Anarchism, “anarchists figured out how to organize themselves in a
functional egalitarian and sufficiently productive society”. Cultural norms are an outcome
of many perspectives by millions of people. It is fundamental to ensuring society’s well-
being and continuity.

Change is the upending of cultural norms as society becomes emboldened to act on the
inevitability of progress. Schools must deal with cultural norms across society. It is a
blend of generational thinking from Boomers, Generation Xer’s, Millennials, and
Generation Zer’s laying foundational guideposts for which schools can function as
educational institutions.

Classrooms provide the template of thinking and deliver learning environments that rise
to generational expectations. The collage of different thoughts, perspectives, and
expectations makes development of progressive educational initiatives, at times, at
odds with student needs. Students brought along a pathway of least resistance
established in schools and at home will deal poorly with developing their ability to foster
resiliency in their lives.

Differences in generational expectations, within school learning environments, cause
conflict in the deployment of curriculum. What cuts through this maze of competing
expectations is a consensus for fundamental concern of students’ well-being. Student
preparation in schools must deal with addressing development of the mental fortitude to
surmount challenges that they face in their lives and to develop their ability to work
collaboratively with peers and solve problems. This is the goal of education.

This intersection between school curriculum and school culture places educators in the
crosshairs of conflict. Divergent values, traditions, and identities clash with educational
goals. Curriculum can reflect the importance of knowledge, but multigenerational perspectives cause discourse in what is determined to be the most important to teach students. A multigenerational society will struggle when deciding desired educational outcomes and the legitimacy of presented pedagogy.

 

As a seasoned educator for 30 years, I see this struggle played out in classrooms.
Content may be eternal, but the delivery and expectations teachers have for students
becomes a collegial multigenerational interpretation. This decade of immense social,
economic and technological change will tax our education system to its breaking point.
Hopefully this crisis in social, environmental and economic foundational pillars of our
society will ultimately drive consensus among educational shareholders.

 

Corporate lawlessness, threats of fascism, unchecked executive governance and an
economy lacking resources to see to the needs of people lay the groundswell for an era
of crisis for our country. From Boomers to Generation Zer’s, the consequences of a
crisis faced by society call upon people, from their position of legacy experiences with
knowledge and understanding, to bring forth a commitment supporting and fostering
needed change. Education of our youth is the challenge, and change will require
empathetic relationships between educators that act as the rudders of a ship, thereby
helping to steer a progressive course through this tumultuous time in history.