"Empowering Education" by Ira Shor

Empowering Education
By: Ira Shor

Reflection/Quotes


This article truly showed how to teach in a classroom and how to include all of your students. If they are able to participate and connect it to what they already know, they will be engaged and not resist anything that the teacher does.

On page 13, Shor says that "students who come to class with their own dreams and agendas, sometimes cooperating with and sometimes resisting the intentions of the school and the teacher". So Shor is saying the the reason some children go to school is to follow their dreams but then on page 15, he says that schools "teach students what kind of people to be and what kind of society to build". So what is is??? Are they going to follow their dreams only to be turned down and have to do what the school tells them is right for them? I think Shor is contradicting himself there....

Page 28 gave a good example on how to run a class so as to involve the students and not have resistance.

"...students could participate more, answer their peer's questions as best as they could, practice thinking out loud, and display what they already knew-all this before I provided nay academic response. They syllabus was built upward from student responses instead of downward from my comments...making a democratic curriculum is a way to authorize students as co-developers of their education...which in turn will reduce their resistance."

Teachers need to "embrace education without fear of boredom or of a cultural invasion" (54) and have their students use what they know and their cultural background to help them understand and let their peers learn more about them as well.

"Few students will learn academic material if it is lectured at them in a manner designed simply to transfer information...subject matter is best introduced as problems related to student experience" (54).

Then why do we still have lecture classes in college and in other schools? We are literally just told information to remember for a test and then it is forgotten. We need to be able to participate and relate it to other things so students can remember it and use it in the future and not just forget about after they write it down to be graded.

Point to Share:

This was a great reading to wrap up the semester with because you can connect it to a lot of the other readings we had, like Delpit and Johnson. Also was a great reading on how to structure your classroom and lesson plans.

I also thought Shor was a woman until I googled the name and realized he was a 70 year old man...because most of our readings were from a female's perspective.