Archive for November, 2010

why educational researchers like holiday gatherings

Nov 30th, 10 / 0 Comments

hint: because they don’t have to get IRB approval.

Some people spend Thanksgiving weekend in a tryptophanic daze. Some people spend it in a Black Friday frenzy, followed by a Cyber Monday mania.

I spent Thanksgiving weekend testing out my niece’s Zone of Proximal Development.

The Zone of Proximal Development, or zpd (or zo-ped), is a concept developed by the Russian learning theorist LS Vygotsky. In brief, the zpd is the distance between what a child is developmentally capable of doing on her own and what she can do with assistance.

Here’s an example. My niece, Morgan, who’s 15 months old, was playing with a plastic carrot and a square of fabric. Her grandma suggested she could make a hot dog out of these two items! Which she immediately wanted to do! Except that she couldn’t quite figure out how to do it:

So Grandma stepped in and helped Morgan’s hands make the fabric roll around the carrot:


Then Morgan was able to eat the hot dog!

The next day, Grandma gave Morgan the carrot and the fabric and said “Can you roll the carrot up?” And Morgan did it, all by herself!

The Zone of Proximal Development: Morgan knew she could make a hot dog out of a plastic carrot and a square of fabric, but her little hands didn’t know how to do it. The distance between that and her grandma helping her make the hot dog: That’s the zpd. That’s where all learning happens, according to Vygotsky: What Morgan could do with assistance on Saturday she was able to do by herself on Sunday.

This is a powerful idea, in case you were wondering, because it directly contradicted the prevailing wisdom of the time. Whereas other theorists assumed that development came before learning (that a child has to be developmentally capable of doing something new before being able to learn it), Vygotsky argued that learning comes before development (that a child has to be given an opportunity to do something new, with assistance, before she can be developmentally capable of doing it on her own).

Here’s another example: I taught Morgan to say “pie.” I showed her the pumpkin pie and said, “Morgan, oooooh! This is pie! Ooooooh! Can you say ‘pie’?” And I did it enough times that she figured she’d better just say ‘pie’ so I’d stop shoving it in her face and give her a piece. So eventually, I held the pie out and said, “Morgan, what’s this?” And she would say “pie.” (Actually, it came out sounding more like “puhayyyhhhhhhh.”)

So far so good. Except then I wanted to see if she really knew what pie was. So I did this:

Me: *holds lemon meringue pie* Morgan, what’s this?

Morgan: puhayyyhhhhhhh.

Me: That’s right! It’s pie! *holds empty paper plate* What’s this?

Morgan: puhayyyhhhhhhh.

Me: *points to Grandma* Morgan, who’s this?

Morgan: puhayyyhhhhhhh.

So that was awesome.

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the best anti-veganism argument I’ve ever read

Nov 22nd, 10 / 39 Comments

I’m not vegan, but I’ve been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for 18 years, since I was 15 years old. I sometimes wonder whether the relatively minor health problems I deal with are linked to my dietary decisions, which is why this post by a former vegan hit extremely close to home. The author, advised by her physician that veganism was slowly destroying her body, decided to try eating meat again after all alternative efforts fails. She writes:

The changes that I experienced were manifold and occurred so quickly and decisively I almost couldn’t believe it. Within one week I was able to stand up without seeing black spots in my eyes, and I was sleeping peacefully through the night. To my relief, my constant stomach pains and bloating completely vanished. Within 2 weeks I noticed my allergies were diminishing, even at a time when all the trees and flowers in our community were beginning to bloom. Also at 2 weeks I no longer needed a sweater just to sit on the couch, my toes and fingers had stopped feeling like perpetual icicles. At 3 weeks I could complete a light 20 minute cardio workout without feeling dizzy or nauseous, something I had been unable to accomplish for months. At 3 weeks I also noticed the most amazing change of all: my depression was diminishing. Days would go by when I wouldn’t succumb to hours of sobbing or listlessness. At 4 weeks I noticed three very strange things: my mysterious lower back pain that had been bothering me for nearly a year had vanished, even though I hadn’t changed my shoes or done any physical therapy; the skin on my face was plump and full and the fine lines that I had figured were just a sign of being nearly 30 had faded so much they were barely discernible, even though I had not changed anything about my skin care routine; and finally, I noticed my hair was thicker, shinier, and much fuller than it had been in years, even though I hadn’t changed anything about my hair care routine.

At 5 weeks I noticed a steady, permanent buzz of energy that carried me throughout the day. I started being able to run errands, work out, and do my writing, all in the same day without needing frequent rest stops. I kept waiting for exhaustion to sneak up on me…but it never once reared its ugly head.

I mean, you just can’t tell, can you? About what is ‘feeling normal’ and what shouldn’t be tolerated. Of the above symptoms (among others listed by the author), I have had regular encounters with the following:

  • heart palpitations
  • difficulty gaining and maintaining weight
  • low energy level
  • exhaustion
  • sensitive skin / dry skin
  • back pain
  • increasingly severe allergies
  • inability to sleep through the night
  • stomach pains and bloating
  • coldness in extremities
  • inability to maintain body termpature
  • lightheadedness upon standing

But what’s normal, and what’s a ‘symptom’? And even if these things are symptoms, what are they symptoms of? Who’s to say the problem is that I haven’t intentionally consumed animal flesh in over a decade and not, say, the fact that I almost never eat breakfast and sometimes wait until 4 or 5 p.m. to eat my first meal, a meal that’s often comprised primarily of bread products?

I dressed as the 12th Doctor Who for Halloween this year. I'm frequently surprised at how sickly I look in photos, compared to how I actually think I look.

But here’s something else worth chewing over: The author, Tasha, makes the best argument against political veganism that I’ve ever encountered. She considers whether the vegan movement is perhaps one of the most effective ways of keeping angry women from agitating for change:

As a revolutionary feminist and anti-imperialist, veganism seemed to be yet another way I could fight the injustices we are facing. But as the years wore on and my body began devouring itself for the sustenance that my vegan diet couldn’t provide, I began to lose the will and the energy to do the vital work I had so loved. I no longer had the mental clarity to write my famous scathing exposes, or the physical energy to teach, organize, and build solidarity. I was sputtering out, grinding to a screeching halt. I realized that veganism, my choice to buy ‘cruelty free’ foods, was quickly becoming my only avenue for activism. It was the only thing I really had energy for anymore. As a staunch radical I’ve always been opposed to capitalism’s emphasis on the personal solution, I refuse to buy into the mainstream myth that we can shop our way out of catastrophe. And yet…with my dwindling energy reserves and devastating health problems I realized that was exactly what I was doing. When I stumbled along this quote about veganism by Megan Mackin it seemed as if it had been written for me: “It begins, eventually, to look like a very effective way to co-opt a movement: take the most passionate activist-minded, girls especially, and get their focus on a way of living that drains energies and enforces conformity in others. The Big Boys still run things, but now even more freely – with out much interference.”

Okay, so what do we do with that? Is it an obvious defense for a lapsed vegan, or is it an argument for ethical–and omnivorous–dietary habits?

And, really, with all of these confounding variables, how can we ever tell the difference? How do we even know anymore what it means to ‘listen to our bodies’?

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wanna take online graduate courses in Learning Sciences, Media, & Technology?

Nov 22nd, 10 / 1 Comment

Indiana University’s Learning Sciences Program has recently launched an online certificate program in Learning Sciences, Media, and Technology (LSMT). Below is a list of the spring courses that will be offered through this program, along with descriptions of each.

I’m a graduate student in the Learning Sciences Program at IU and have taken each of the courses listed below. I’ve found each one of them to be incredibly formative and useful in my own development as an educator and learning theorist, and I strongly recommend all three to anyone who’s interested in a) learning about the intersection of learning, media, and technology; b) stacking up some professional development credits; c) figuring out if they have the chops for graduate school; or b) figuring out if they have an interest in pursuing the learning sciences.

Here’s the official description:

Online Courses Available Spring 2011 from Indiana University
Learning Sciences, Media, and Technology (LSMT)
In-State Tuition Rates for Most Non-Residents
All Courses Taught by IU School of Education Faculty

Three exciting graduate courses uncover current learning theory for the 21st century, and its intersection with media and technology. These are not traditional “distance education” courses. Engaging networked projects will connect you with other students and relevant external resources and communities.  You will be able to establish yourself in broader digital professional networks via these courses.

These courses will advance your education and career goals in schools and industry, and will prepare you for advanced degree programs in the Learning Sciences or related fields. At Indiana University, these courses will count towards the 12 credit hour LSMT certificate program (currently in the approval process), the Learning Sciences Master’s and Doctoral Degrees, and many other graduate degree programs.

Want to enroll? For more information on these courses or other opportunities at IU Learning Sciences visit http://www.iu.edu/~lsmt or email learnsci@indiana.edu. Current IU students should email deregstr@indiana.edu to request authorization to register via OneStart.  Students not currently enrolled at IU can enroll via the IU distance education website at http://education.indiana.edu/disted.

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neutral as in ‘Grandpa’s arsenal,’ not as in ‘Switzerland’

Nov 10th, 10 / 1 Comment

Image by Joe Salmon, taken from http://www.uiiu.co.nz/neutral.html, sort of without permission so I hope he's ok with it.

I’m a fist-shaking, bleeding-heart, critical pedagogy, politiciany sort of guy. I believe that it’s useless and even potentially damaging to treat learning as apolitical, and I believe that learning theorists of all political bents do themselves a disservice and learners an injustice when they assert an ideologically neutral stance. Because there is no such thing as an ideologically neutral stance.

  • We may mean ‘neutral’ as in ‘Switzerland,’ as in ‘we choose not to get involved.’ When we choose not to get involved, we choose not to throw our weight against any particular wheel. We choose to allow the people with the most guns to have their way.
  • We may mean ‘neutral’ as in ‘agnostic,’ as in’ no opinion either way.’ When we choose not to state an opinion, we choose not to throw our weight against any particular wheel. We choose to allow people with the loudest voices and the most microphones to have their way.
  • We may mean ‘neutral’ as in ‘multipurpose,’ as in ‘there is no ideology built into this theory,’ as in ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ Nope. Cotton balls don’t kill people. Kool-Aid packets don’t kill people. Why? Because their design makes it really hard to use them as murder weapons. Whereas guns are a tool of choice for killing people, because they’re designed to be very good at sending projectiles at a very high rate of speed toward people’s heads.

We are reminded by Kris Gutierrez (2002) that “culture is encoded not only in practices, experiences, and beliefs; culture is also indexed in language” (p. 313). It follows, then, that the very crafting of theoretical claims about learning indexes individual and shared beliefs and value systems, and that, therefore, the most dangerous utterance a learning theorist can make is: “I am ideologically neutral in my approach to learning.” Any theory that claims to be “ideologically neutral” is probably simply so well in line with dominant cultural practices that the beliefs it indexes are simply too broadly accepted to strike anyone as worth challenging on the level of ideology.

I believe, then, that claiming that a learning theory is ‘ideologically neutral’ is so deeply troubling, so dangerous to all learners and to education in general, as to make it effectively and practically indistinguishable from educational malpractice.

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MCCSC referendum passes

Nov 3rd, 10 / 0 Comments

This is a good thing, sort of. No, no, it’s a really good thing, no qualifications necessary.

It’s just that…

Well, this school board has shown a confusing enthusiasm for taking money away from programs that are used primarily by disadvantaged, struggling learners and funneling that money into programs embraced by wealthier, more privileged learners and families. I voted for the referendum, even though I don’t trust this school board to make decisions that work at their core in the best interests of all learners in this school corporation. I voted for the referendum, even though I know the money will probably be disproportionately directed toward the kids who need it least.

And I’m glad that it passed, even though I know I’m going to be bitterly disappointed in how the resulting funds will be used. All I can do now is hope that Superintendent J.T. Coopman and the MCCSC Board prove me wrong.

The Bloomington Herald-Times has put up a paywall around its online news, which is problematic at best in good times and abhorrently shortsighted and socially damaging during hard times. It’s also civically irresponsible to paywall election coverage. For these reasons, I’m posting the entire text of today’s Herald-Times article on the referendum passage below.

MCCSC referendum passes

By Bethany Nolan 331-4373 | bnolan@heraldt.com
November 3, 2010, last update: 11/3 @ 1:03 am

A request by MCCSC to raise about $7.5 million more next year in property taxes was approved by voters Tuesday.

With all local precincts reporting vote totals at about 10:45 p.m., the public question had received 17,712 votes for it vs. 11,194 votes against it. Only voters within the Monroe County Community School Corp. district voted on the referendum request, which will increase the district’s general fund property tax levy by 14 cents per $100 of assessed valuation for each of the next six years.

MCCSC Superintendent J.T. Coopman praised volunteers, who he said pounded the pavement, made phone calls and talked to their friends and neighbors to ensure they were aware of the issue, saying, “I think the community has responded, and indicated they believe in supporting public schools.”

Jeannine Butler, MCCSC school board member for District 7, stands outside the Monroe County Courthouse Tuesday asking voters to vote for ballot question #2, a school funding referendum. Jeremy Hogan | Herald-Times

As for next steps, Coopman said administrators and school leaders will work to maximize the referendum dollars for the benefit of local students, including prioritizing smaller class sizes for the 2011-2012 school year by restoring the approximately 70 positions cut due to a state funding shortfall.“That will be a major priority for us, to put those dollars into the classroom,” he said. “We will be good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars, and the faith they’ve placed in us.”

Megan Mahaffey, a Highland Park Elementary School parent and volunteer, said Tuesday she supported the referendum.

“From my perspective as a parent and school volunteer, I’d seen the realities of what we were dealing with already,” she said. “I couldn’t fathom what we’d see going forward without this replacement funding.”

School officials have said the referendum dollars will be used to make up for $5.8 million in cuts made earlier this year in response to state funding shortfalls. The district’s request to raise more than what was cut is partly because that $5.8 million is a net figure — meaning more total dollars were cut, but were offset by savings in other areas, according to MCCSC comptroller Tim Thrasher — and partly because the district still expects to see more cuts from the state.

School board members have approved a budget allocating the $7.5 million in referendum dollars for 2011 which, among other things, restores salaries for lost positions, including teachers, assistant elementary school principals and counselors. Any unspent referendum dollars will accrue in the district’s cash balance, which Thrasher has said is seven to eight times lower than recommended.

Taxpayers will see the property tax increase on their spring 2011 property tax bills.

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book review: Kenneth King’s Germs Gone Wild

Nov 1st, 10 / 0 Comments

summary: and you thought you saw journalists, scientists, and the government as dissemblers and obfuscators before….

At any given point in my life, I have a small handful of friends and acquaintances who view me as an angry, bitter human being who holds her rage inside like it’s a cold and heavy stone. My pal Rafi tells me I should let go of my anger because it’s weighing me down and wearing me out.

But although I’m angry at an awful lot of goddam bullshit going on in the world, I’m not an angry person. Even though I spend lots of my time railing against injustice, I’m actually fairly joyful most of the time–even, sometimes, while I’m really effing mad. I take enormous joy in truth, in all its versions, and I get mad when someone or something stands as a barrier to the truth being told. I get mad when people tell lies, and I get mad when people believe lies. It’s sort of why I got into all this social justice stuff in the first place.

That’s why I’m really enjoying Kenneth King’s book Germs Gone Wild: How the Unchecked Development of Domestic Biodefense Threatens America. I’m not an expert on bioterrorism or advances in biodefense research, so if you want to know if this text is an Important Addition to the Growing Evidence that Biodefense Research is Bad, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I am sort of an expert in crusading against lying liars and the lies they tell, though, and from that perspective I can tell you that this text is an important addition to that growing canon.

Much of this text is focused on the efforts of a small group of citizens to fight the establishment of the nation’s second-largest biodefense lab in rural Pulaski County, Kentucky. According to King, the lion’s share of the fight was against an onslaught of pro-biolab propaganda that declared the planned lab to be, according to U.S. Rep Hal Rogers, “as safe as going to Wal-Mart.” King shares statistic after statistic designed to dismantle this propaganda, and in the process he paints a picture of politicians, scientists, and journalists as misguided or misinformed at best; at worst, they are shown to be master dissemblers, motivated by greed and fear.

King–a longtime Kentucky resident–makes no bones about how angry he is. If the title doesn’t clue you in to the general attitude of this book with respect to America’s biodefense industry, then you’ll have it figured out by the third paragraph of Chapter One, in which King refers to regional proponents of expanding biodefense research as “the local ‘influentsia’.” On page 2, you’ll see King point to “biodefense shucking and jiving” as he describes his decision to join in on efforts to block the expansion of biodefense within America’s borders. This is a man who is clearly deeply committed to truth-telling and equally deeply committed to pulling back the curtain on what he perceives as anyone’s efforts to obscure the truth.

For example: King describes the objection of U.S. Representative Gene Green (D-TX) to the use of the term “bio-weapons agents” to describe what he says are actually “infectious agents occurring naturally in nature”; Green wonders if there might be a more accurate and less emotionally charged term to describe the chemical compounds mixed in biolabs around the country. The research scientist being questioned by Green agrees with him. “Ah yes,” King writes,

poor misunderstood bioweapons angents. All those decades of being abused by mad scientists in the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia, brutalized and trained to be CIA and KGB killers–anthrax, brucella, tularemia, smallpox, Ebola. Forcefully tattooed with swastikas; implanted with Bjorg control modules; forced to assassinate generations of monkeys and guinea pigs and pretend they enjoyed it. When all they really wanted to do was snuggle up in a dead cow leg somewhere in a Texas ditch and get back in touch with their inner cowboy.

And poor misunderstood biodefense complex, which is not in the scary old bioweapons agent business at all, but is just trying to do the humane thing and give these poor abandoned germ orphans some rehabilitation and stability in their lives…. And isn’t it wonderful how we were able to spend $60 billion plus to save the millions of Americans the Graham-Talent WMD Commission predicts will die sometime in the next decade from excessive consumption of sick rabbits and the careless handling of cow carrion? Please, whatever you do, don’t call the germs in biodefense laboratories bioweapons agents. Call them emerging pathogens, or Little Orphan Annies, or little boll weevils, jes-a-looking-for-a-home.

King’s furious that anyone would dare to lie so baldfacedly, to obfuscate and rename and dance around the truth so persistently. That’s an anger I understand.

Whether King makes a convincing case is probably better left to someone who wasn’t already pretty much in his camp in the first place. And by the way, if you are on the fence about whether the federal government really does work against the best interests of its own citizens, if you aren’t convinced that the majority of the “credible terrorist threat” rhetoric is intended to keep us afraid and willing to give up our own and others’ freedoms and safety, then this probably isn’t the book for you.

If you are already convinced, even partially, of any of the above, then this book offers a heartfelt, genuine David-and-Goliath story, except that in this case Goliath basically wins. But the Bible doesn’t tell us very much about why David would try to fight Goliath in the first place, while Germs Gone Wild gives us a glimpse into why King has taken up this particular crusade. As King explains, the 2007 campaign against the Pulaski biolab came at a time of great personal loss for him: His wife had recently died suddenly; his parents were suffering from ill health; and–though he never comes out and says this–it becomes clear that King is looking for somewhere to channel his pain and his energies.

The only significant stumbling block of this book is its density–it weighs in at just under 500 pages and contains so many acronyms that I kept wishing for a glossary to help me keep them straight. Then again, the history of contemporary bio-warfare is a complicated one, and by the end I ended up wondering if the acronyms weren’t just another tactic for keeping the public passive and confused. That’s what this book does so well: Leaves you wondering whether you really were skeptical enough about the government before you started reading it.

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