All but one of the courses in my abandoned master's studies featured group projects. There were good things about them, but they were generally more bad than good for the simple reason that probably should/could have been anticipated: people are far less accountable while they are wearing their online personas. The progressive ed ideas of collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, are often encouraged in group projects. Sometimes they actually happen - even in online group projects. But, while it was interesting to interact with fellow students from all over the world, the projects more often than not took the form of aggressively dominant students bullying others into control of the projects to assure that no dummies negatively affected their GPA's. And without a doubt the project bullies only got away with that because they didn't have to be the type A dickheads face-to-face and field the push-back of the other group members in person. Kudos to the university for trying, but I think they're pulling back on this educational strategy and I think an online conversation thread I had with a member of the university administration describing what I just typed may have even played a part in my final class (11 of 12) NOT having a group project.
Nevertheless, while doing these projects I was in contact with many of my fellow students and occasionally we got off topic in our communication. The topics unrelated to our projects were what you might expect - where we were located; what inspired us to get MEds; what age and subjects we taught; what time it was; and the like. But another popular topic was the school. More specifically its legitimacy. They advertise as tuition-free but we all paid money for our courses. That was surprising to a lot of students. One of the other surprising things was the accreditation. Most of us read all the claims of accreditation in the school and course descriptions not knowing that REGIONAL accreditation was the big one and they didn't have it, although they DO now. They got regionally accredited somewhere around my 9th or 10th course. By the same accrediting body as Berkeley and Stanford don't you know! So I guess that would be good... if you finish the degree.
On THAT note, there was a hugely popular topic that we discussed and I was not aware of until late in my studies, like about 10 courses in. I had mentioned the thesis course, or what the school calls the "capstone" course to several people and we discussed what we were planning to write our theses on. I had all but settled on Paulo Freire early in the course (like probably before I was done my second course) when I first heard of this guy who should be a household name all over the world, but isn't. He was a popular choice but since his educational niche was adult linguistics - and so was mine - the choice seemed an especially suitable one for me. None of the students I talked with ever mentioned the fact that this course was NOT a thesis course. Absolutely nothing in what any of us had read about the course prepared us for the final two courses, which was when we all found out, and which consisted of preparing and writing one of those boring, statistical, almost mathematical, scientific educational studies in which we try to quantify something unquantifiable. In the upcoming video, Bruno della Chiesa provides us with the word "quantophrenia," which is the obsession in social sciences with treating numerical data as the only valid form of knowledge. I have needed that word countless times in this blog and probably in about 50% of my research papers during my M.Ed. studies! Thank you Bruno!
Anyway, believe it or not, the school actually provides a list of the topics they want us to study. On that list are things that have been researched to death and anyone who has taught for 5 minutes, hell, even non-educators already knows. They NEED to be things that are well researched already because NOW it has to be SECONDARY research meaning that we have to somehow (and as explained in a previous blog post, the university and its professors haven't quite figured out the details of HOW) read lots of previous papers on our topic and relate them to our research???, personal opinion???, fake research??? or whatever, on the same topic.
I even knew a guy in Gongju, where I did the first few courses in the degree, who was on his 11th course and he didn't tell me this very important, game changing information. I think he might have caught things early on when the project was still PRIMARY research and was able to use HIS class as research subjects. I didn't keep in touch and don't know if he ever finished. In fact the only time I talked to him was at a noisy pub in Gongju and neither of us was interested in talking shop at the time. I think it would have made a difference. Shoulda, coulda, woulda...
What I believe happened, (and this is based on communication with the administrator) was the university was running into problems with students not having classes to use for their research, (My 11th class fell during the summer semester during which students were on summer vacation and if I remember correctly, this was why I initiated the dialog with the administrator) as well as liability issues in which master's students had to get permission from parents, teachers, students, and it became too difficult. So I was assured that I wouldn't need to worry about it, the course was changing from PRIMARY to SECONDARY research. And, thankfully, the 11th course was without a group project. I say thankfully but I am now thinking that if we HAD a group project, maybe we could have ironed out exactly how the hell we were supposed to DO this primary study using secondary research. It is literally impossible and I tried until I was unable to try anymore. I explain the details better here.
I have since been contacted by the university and asked why I abandoned my course right at the finish line and told them that they need to fix it before I can finish it. And if they had allowed me to write a "No, you're wrong and here's why" thesis, the very kind Noam Chomsky describes as the type they expect MIT students to write, thereby qualifying that institution as progressive, why, I would have my M.Ed. today. However, my institution, while training me in all kinds of educational progressivism, was like most and refused to practice what they preached.
Aye, there's the rub! Why can't universities practice the kind of education their education departments educate about? This brings up the topic to which Freire devoted his singularly out-fucking-standing life and career, and the topic on which I would have written my thesis if I hadn't mistakenly assumed my uni was going to be forthcoming about the course format from the beginning. Schools, and maybe most particularly American schools need to choose between education and industry and despite what Howard Gardner calls at least 300 years internationally and at least 100 years in America of articulate critique of this view, the choice of industrial education remains dominant.
I have watched, re-watched, and re-re-watched this video in which Gardner says they'll come back to that, but they don't come back to that! However, some fascinating points are brought up about the elite protectionism and its not-so-well-known but enduring presence in the constitution, government, and culture of America since it was established. I love the point about Ralph Waldo Emerson saying that if the poor are educated too much, they'll come for our (ruling class) throats. One of the framers of the Constitution, James Madison, said virtually the same thing at the Constitutional Convention when he argued for the protection of the minority of the opulent against the majority (of the peasants). But, unlike Freire, they don't really state unequivocally that the solution, as I think every educator knows from all the critique Gardner mentioned, is the pedagogy of the oppressed. We must educate the poor, not oppress them. But the ruling class considers this a threat to their positions of power so they call it radical and revolutionary. It's still valid, probably more relevant than ever, and people are still being oppressed as much as ever. We just need educators with the balls to challenge the oppressors and implement proper education.I think here we need a little background on THE MAN. When you talk about education, you might think Dewey or even Chomsky is the main man, but I have no doubt they'd both defer to Freire. In fact Chomsky talks of attending a Deweyan school when he was young that had the very Freirean dialogical, formative - not summative assessment style. He says he skipped a grade but had no idea he was a good student cuz the school was not obsessively comparing him with other students. Bruno mentions the PISA standardized tests that are probably the best example of this educational evil that is LITERALLY (and I don't use that word in its modern watered down form) killing 14 and 15 year old students and the careers of teachers the world over because we MUST have these evaluations. Why? Higher evaluations = more money. It's as simple as that. It's nothing like this:
Trust me! GOOD teachers have been teaching to the tests and prioritizing the comparative, competitive curriculum at the expense of real education because they could lose their jobs if they don't. Students have been climbing to school rooftops, holding hands, and jumping to their deaths because of failing their families, schools, and countries through mediocre PISA scores. We all know the horrors of the industrial education methods, every Ed. degree course including even Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaches of their evils, we are consistently taught that each student's personal progression is what is most important, and then the prof says, "This will be on Tuesday's test which is worth 30% of your final grade. Those who fail will stand a good chance of having to repeat the class. Check the rubric in the group chat for what will be covered on the test." Victor Weisskopf's "It doesn't matter what we will cover, it matters what YOU will DIScover," is just a wonderfully pithy quote, but it happens only in educational La La Land, am I right? Well not entirely. It happened in Brazil in the early 1960's because one man had the cajones to do what so many teachers are scared to do. He got put in jail, kicked out of his country, and effectively cancelled from a lot of educational cultures because of it, but boy did he get results!That man was this man, Paulo Freire.
Things were going swimmingly and by 1963 Paulo Freire was appointed to director of the Brazilian National Literacy Program due to his phenomenal successes in regional programs in his area. The government wanted all of Brazil to be literate I guess. THAT government needed to go it was determined, perhaps BECAUSE of that, by the heads of the military coup (incidentally they were backed by the US in case you believe their war on education was strictly domestic) who overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964. They blatantly declared Freire's empowering education a form of subversive, revolutionary, and radical action and imprisoned him for 70 days after which he was exiled for 15 years. Well, if you watch the video, at least he wasn't murdered like the Jesuit teachers and their daughters and housekeepers in El Salvador. So he had THAT goin' for him...
Freire developed his educational and consciousness raising philosophies while in exile in Bolivia, Switzerland and primarily Chile. He even taught at Harvard for a while in '69/'70. It was during his exile from Brazil that he wrote the sadly inaccurately titled Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It should have been called the Andragogy of the Oppressed since he wasn't teaching little kids, but never mind.
When I first learned about Freire, read his book and learned his educational philosophies I immediately found in him more than just agreement but, although I will never suffer like he did for education, a kind of brother... a FRERE if you will. That means "brother" in French.
Before I ever heard of him I formulated my own opinions and philosophies on the marginalization/oppression of the poor in almost every country and the duty of those of us who have experienced this injustice, and are in positions to educate young minds and old about it, to do so. I always preferred active, participatory learning to the passive vessel "banking" model Freire criticized in so much of our "traditional" education. Teamwork, problem-solving, and, indeed, group projects were always integral parts of my curricula. Though I experienced failure with them online during the Covid 19 epidemic. Becoming critically conscious, thinking deeply about it (praxis), and dialoging about it were strongly encouraged in my classroom.
I was much like Bruno who hadn't heard of Freire but who found that he had been exposed indirectly to a lot of his ideas and educational philosophy. Learning about Freire for me was like learning that word quantophrenia from the video. "WHERE have you been all my life?" I immediately asked and thought of all the times I could have used that knowledge.
I suppose the reason I wanted to write my thesis on Freire, and maybe even one of the reasons why I am writing this today, is so that I can give one or two other people that overwhelming feeling of support. Freire and many of the other educational giants who I read about in my master's studies, gave me a kind of attaboy from the grave and made me more confident that I wasn't the only one clinging to the hopeless hope of proper education in this world.
A hope I have almost given up on. I'm still volunteering a couple hours a week educating for free but I think my final job on this earth is destined to be in security. A great waste of a good teacher to be sure, but at least I'm not as likely to be assassinated by American anti-intellectual militants working as an industrial security guard in Sarnia.
So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice...
