Double Entry Journal # 14

Chapter 7: Shape-Shifting Portfolio People * Chapter 8 A final Word the content fetish

1. What was the most interesting idea you encountered as you read the chapter?
One idea that was very interesting to me is Gee’s comparison of traditional schooling to Capitalism. I had never noticed it before, but there really is a connection between a work place in which expertise is owned and controlled by the bosses rather than the workers, and a school system in which teachers impose knowledge on students rather than engaging them in learning. Both stress efficiency, streamlining, and control, and both are very prevalent in our society.(Gee, 95)

2. What connections can you make between Gee's critique and Sir Ken Robinsons' critique of traditional schooling?
There are many connections between Gee’s and Sir Ken Robinsons' views of education, especially in the area of the disembodiment of learning in schools today. Both argue that learning does not take place only in the head; that we learn with our whole bodies, but traditional schooling disembodies learning by removing the context and physical action that should be part of learning. Gee makes this point with the statement: “ Learning does not work well when learners are forced to check their bodies at the school room door like guns in the old West.”(Gee, 39) And Robinson says “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.”
Both also compare traditional education to economic systems. Gee compares it to the Capitalist system in which specialists hold all of the power, knowledge, and money, and do not allow students to participate in or direct their own education, while Robinson points out that the educational system is based on a hierarchy in which the most useful subjects for a job are considered the most important in education; an outdated system that greatly undermines human creativity.

2. How did this book change or support your understanding of good teaching?
This book helped to develop my understanding of good teaching in one way by making me aware of the different varieties of language and the difference between vernacular and academic varieties of language. No matter what a teacher’s subject matter is, language will still be central to it. I have a greater understanding of the diversity of varieties of language students use based on their home life and culture, the early proto-types they bring to school, and how these are often actually more rich and efficient ways of communicating than academic varieties of language. Gee did a great job of proving his point by warning readers in the first chapter that they might experience alienation while reading different parts of his text based on our own familiarities with varieties of language. He was right! I had no problem reading and comprehending the more academic areas of the book, but the minute I started reading his descriptions of video games, I found it very hard to focus. As a person who has only very rarely played video games, and has never had a personal interest in them, I was very disconnected with those passages. However, Gee succeeded in showing me that that is how others may feel when reading something about art written in a specialist variety of language. I’m sure that experience will make me more sensitive to student’s fluency in varieties of language.
I also have a deeper understanding of the process of learning. After reading Gee’s argument that learning is accomplished with the whole body, not just the head, and is best when paired with individuals’ culture, interests, and active, context-based experiences, I thought back on my own learning and could validate his argument a hundred times over, and saw similar evidence in my clinical placement. Students do not learn well with rote memorization, skills drilling, or lessons that are totally disconnected with their own lives and experiences. The last chapter of the book reaffirmed for me the greatness of the responsibility teachers have. Through we work in a flawed system, it is our responsibility to begin changes that will transform schools into “..sites in which all children can gain portfolios suitable for success, but success defined in multiple ways, and gain the ability to critique and transform social formations in the service of creating better worlds for all.”