After reading chapters 1 and 2 in
Daniels and Zemelman, I couldn’t help but go back to the McDonald's incident. My
first thought was: Wow! Those two students must have had to muster up a lot of
courage to walk into a fast food chain’s restaurant and know enough information
about the subject to persuade the customers not to eat there. It was obvious
that they felt very passionately about this topic after diving deeper into
their research (as would anyone who cared the least bit about their health). I was especially surprised when Antonio walked up to the woman
and pulled out his copy of Fast Food
Nation. The author wrote, “she leans down to read the page, heavily
highlighted in yellow, with cryptic annotations in the margins (Daniels and
Zemelman 2).” Antonio must have enjoyed the book and learned a lot from reading
it because he took the time to analyze and annotate (he even remembered what page the statistics were on so he could show the woman). Granted, it took them
about a month to read about the fast food industry and how it affects all
aspects of our lives. However, it proved to be worthwhile and it seemed as though the students were able to learn a lot by researching and diving into outside sources (other
than their 600 page biology text). The best part was that they were able to go out
into the community and spread knowledge about the dangers and prevalence of
food-borne illnesses, all while having fun doing it. That IS science! This is what we need to do as
future educators. We have to come up with ways in which students can give back
to their communities with the knowledge they have gained in school and in their research. This is exactly what these students did!
I really liked the assumption that
the fast-food project was based on. It was the assumption that “teenagers
should not be ‘getting ready’ to be lifelong learners, but should be fully
engaged right now (3).” I think this speaks volumes. I have heard so many
mission statements that want to prepare students to be lifelong learners and
productive members of society. Yet, the students are not exploring these options.
The fast-food project gave these students the chance to learn in an environment
outside of the classroom, with an abundance of outside sources. These students
proved that they have soared far beyond the “getting ready to be lifelong
learners” stage. These students are
lifelong learners.
Hi Alisha, I was also struck by the same line, “teenagers should not be ‘getting ready’ to be lifelong learners, but should be fully engaged right now." It made me think that the way we’ve traditionally taught in high school is often incompatible with how people learn outside of school. These students didn’t just consume text books for knowledge. They used a variety of multimedia sources to research their projects. This is how adults learn, whether it’s a parent trying to research healthy food for their children, or someone trying to watch youtube so they can fix their car horn (although that didn’t really work out for me, so it’s probably a bad example). If we’re truly trying to make schools reflective of their communities, I think we have to teach students to learn in a way that will allow them to be lifelong learners after graduation
ReplyDelete