Skip to main content

[Re]Eisner: The Educational Imagination


While reading the article, I was stopped when Eisner mentions about how "the differentiation of classes into ability groups" can motivate students. Successful academic performances are rewarded both by grades and by admission to honours classes. Such reward system motivates and pushes students to complete tasks. Another part that struck me was the implicit curriculum. What schools advertise is not everything that students and their parents can expect. The implicit curriculum is something that is not advertised but can be even more important than the explicit curriculum. The attitude towards learning or their classmates can be observed and absorbed informally and unintentionally.

 The concept of the null curriculum is very interesting because it makes me wonder what the boundary would be for teachers. I agree that what schools do not teach is also important to consider. However, if one starts to wonder what schools have been neglecting, it will be impossible to list all the aspects that need to be emphasized yet have not been considered as important as what schools have already been teaching. Even though what schools do not teach affects students in a way, I believe that the explicit and implicit curricula prepare them for their future.

Comments

  1. Susan GerofskyOctober 11, 2017 at 10:20 AM

    Yeni, I think you have really misunderstood Eisner's point about differentiation into ability groups! Would you please reread the article and revise or add to your blog post to take a deeper and more thoughtful consideration of what Eisner is saying? Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Susan GerofskyNovember 29, 2017 at 1:10 AM

    Yeni, please re-do this reading and blog post so that you show you have understood Eisner's ideas? Please let me know when you have done so, so that I can re-mark it. This is necessary for you to pass the course.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownDecember 6, 2017 at 7:00 PM

      Susan, this is the revised version I edited in October. I'm so sorry for not letting you know!

      Delete
  3. Susan GerofskyJanuary 2, 2018 at 7:56 PM

    Thanks Yeni -- all good!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Skemp: Relational Understanding and Instrumental Understanding

The advantages of instrumental understanding Skemp lists in this article can be viewed as study strategies for students who want to have easier grades and see apparent progress. This type of learning could help students who have had serious problems with mathematics and just need the grades to pass a course. Although my teaching experience is very limited, I have witnessed quite a few students who say they hate mathematics, and some of those students even think that they would not need mathematics in the real world. They might be right in some way, but if they were taught to learn relationally rather than instrumentally, their mathematical approaches towards the world might have been very different. With instrumental mathematics taught, students might think they understand, but they are not able to apply those concepts they learned to different situations. Lack of this skill leads to memory work and eventually boring classes. In boring classes students tend to strive for ...
3 comments
Read more

Unit Plan

EDCP 342A Unit planning Yeni Yoo St. John’s School, Math 8 Ratios, Rates, and Percentages Preplanning questions: (1) Why do we teach this unit to secondary school students? This unit explores the concepts of ratios, rates, and percentages. The unit focuses on some of the most essential mathematical skills that students could apply in their everyday lives. Students will learn to compare ratios, find equivalent ratios, do scale drawings, convert between percents, fractions, and decimals, etc. Such mathematical skills will be strongly needed in students’ future lives and will enable students to evaluate important factors more precisely and make more reasoned decisions. Students will find such mathematical skills interesting and useful as they explore more and more real-world applications where they could connect the mathematical concepts and demonstrate their knowledge through problem solving. (2) A mathematics project conne...
5 comments
Read more

Teaching Perspectives Inventory

I was surprised to see how accurate the results are. Except the fact that the scores are generally higher than I expected them to be, I think the results represent my perspectives pretty well. The test allows me to review my philosophical viewpoint. According to the results, nurturing is my dominant perspective whereas social reform is my recessive perspective. I was surprised by this because that is exactly what my perspectives are on roles as an educator (or a math teacher). The intention bar of the nurturing perspective is the highest and its action bar is the lowest. This result raises a question: Will the result change after my practicum? Will it change again when I really become a teacher? Since the test was taken assuming I have an experience teaching a classroom or currently work as a teacher, taking the test again when I actually have an experience might change the result. I might realize that another perspective other than the nurturing perspective is a lot more important. ...
1 comment
Read more