11/29/17 – Chapter 5
Participants: Elizabeth Dill, Janine Graziano, Stuart Parker
The group worked on a potential student survey that we might give our students and this end of this term and plan to use the last chapter to help implement ideas into our syllabus and using this as a starting discussion for the FIG next semester.
11/15/17 – Chapter 4
Participants: Elizabeth Dill, Janine Graziano, Stuart Parker, Raluca Toscano, Tara Thompson
It’s not always easy to get them to say what they are interested in learning – they turn to the script. I’m here to get a degree.
We discussed some criticisms of the book including…. (unfinished notes)
10/18/17 – Chapter 3
Participants: Loretta Brancaccio-Taras, Elizabeth Dill, Janine Graziano, Stuart Parker
Reading: Diversity and Motivation, Chapter 3
Starting with the notion that personal relevance includes “familiarity” we talked about what we saw as the the tension between this and a need to take students to a place of discomfort that may be necessary for learning to occur. To do this successfully, we considered that students need to be supported by making school relevant and meaningful, if not familiar, and we considered the idea of teachers and learners being “co-authors.” However, questioned whether the institution, as currently structured, supports this. Stuart shared a friend’s “3R’s” – relationship, relevance, and rigor – and also the maxim that students “don’t care what you know until they know you care.”
10/11/17 – Chapter 2
Participants: Loretta Brancaccio-Taras, Elizabeth Dill, Janine Graziano, Stuart Parker, Raluca Toscano, Tara Thompson
Reading: Diversity and Motivation, Chapter 2
Summary: We began by making some general observations about the practices discussed in the section as compared to our own, real-life practices in the classroom. The following questions and comments were discussed:
- Who in our class does or does not feel “part of the team”?
- What do we do with a student who “hijacks” the classroom?
- How might we think of the individual act of writing as an inclusive act?
- How do we get to students’ hearts and move them away from frustration and resistance yet maintain a certain amount of discomfort so that students also feel challenged? How do we support them through the discomfort?
- Do we use “Norms” in our classes and how are we with the follow through?
- Why do students resist group work? – They want the banking method? They feel infantilized? What do we do with the “hitchhikers”?
- How do we teach intellectual seriousness as its own reward?
- What can be said for the value of an idea? How do we give it consideration and move past the theory of: if it’s being tested, it matters?
- What assumptions are we making/does the book make?
- Students don’t want to learn for the sake of learning.
- If we ask students to change aren’t we implying that they are not where they need to be or where we think they should be?
- What are we doing when we educate?
- What should what I teach be important to students?
- We are here to provide tools and methods to help students identify and articulate their positions.
- Group work is important so that students learn how to learn.
Subsequent meetings will be at 11:30 in M391 on 10/18, 11/1, 11/15. and 11/29.
The group decided to read Chapter 3 for 10/18.
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9/27/17 – Chapter 1
Participants: Loretta Brancaccio-Taras, Elizabeth Dill, Azure Faucette, Peter Fiume, Janine Graziano, Stuart Parker, Raluca Toscano
Reading: Diversity and Motivation, Chapter 1
Summary: We began by raising question some of the questions that motivated participants to join this group. These include:
- How do we let go of the resistance within ourselves that manifests in clinging to traditional methods and sometimes irrelevant content within our disciplines?
- How do we address students’ resistance that manifests in their clinging to traditional methods and expected content?
- How do we reconcile and approaches and frameworks that we don’t want to lose within the context of this work?
- What are the underlying assumptions we make about ourselves, our students, motivation, and learning?
- What do students need to know and be able to do in the current, changing world?
- How can we mobilize what students already know and can do in the service of learning?
- How can we bring the marginalized into the center?
- Re the Delpit quote (p.3), how does it feel and how do we manage seeing ourselves “in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze”?
- How do we address the classroom power relationships that students assume exist in the class?
- How do we help students learn how to learn?
- How do we shift from engendering compliance to engendering competence?
We briefly considered the model for the motivational framework for CRT pictured on p. 34.
Subsequent meetings will be at 11:30 in M391 on 10/11, 10/18, 11/1, 11/15. and 11/29.
The group decided to read Chapter 2 for 10/11.
