| 1997-98 MIT'98 - SECOND YEAR | |
| Summer
1997 |
Trip
to Peru: escaping from freedom. Workshops in Ica, Lima and
Chiclayo. First visit to my university in Peru, la Universidad Nacional de Educacion La Cantuta. I learned of the students and one colleague who were assasinated by an army squad in 1991, one year after I left. It was sad to find my old alma mater under a re-organization process directed by people foreign to campus who were sent by the government and were protected by an army squad staying on campus. It was sad for me to realize that there was nothing for me to do there. Being Freirian in my thinking now, there is no way to even dream of going there to tell them what to do; at the same time, I very much doubt that neither faculty nor students would be able to really understand Freire's Pedagogy of Oppression. Again I can affirm that any attempt from the outside to free them from oppression ends up being another act of oppression. |
| Fall
1997 |
MIT'98-Second
Year Using rubric to assess student teaching and writing resarch paper. Rubrics are to learning what the piano is to music, it limits the possibilities but does the required work. Rubrics can very well serve the purpose of guidelines in a student-centered school environment. Trip to Peru in November Faculty and students visited rural communities in Northern Peru and participated in community activities in Guadalupe. |
| Winter
1998 |
MIT'98-Second Year
Constructing a student-centered seminar. Students had studied Freire and Shor, they could write convincing papers about a student-centered approach to education but when they were given the opportunity to practice it in their own module, they had a hard time adjusting to it. They had been asking faculty to tell them how to be a student-centered study group. In short, most students in this group had not internalized the philosophy of the MIT program. I tried to demonstrate some points involving this powerful idea of moving to a student-centered approach to education. The first point we all agreed was that with freedom came responsibilities, then we understood better this idea of being in the center without necessarily be physically in the center. It was quite an experience to work in a MIT program in its second year. I was in charge of reading ten pieces of masters projects, the ones I read were tremendous pieces of writing. |
| Spring
1998 |
MIT'98-Second
Year Using a rubric to assess student teaching serves the purpose of control and gives a written document to demonstrate someone's academic performance in a problematic case. It is an excellent tool in a traditional school but in an alternative school it potentially eliminates other alternative possibilities. In Evergreen, rubrics could play a good role as guidelines, as basic information on expectations. One probable reason for me to think about rubrics as guidelines only, is that being in Evergreen, it is difficult to put categories in every step of the way to control the achievements or the failures. It simply is not a style that Evergreen is used to deal with. It was very enriching to work with Jan, Betsy, Sioux and Pauletta King. |