Category: school

behavior · community · education · environment · school

Mountain View to offer Ferndale Fries as pilot farm-to-school program – Local News – bellinghamherald.com

Beth Kelley

Where I live is incredibly fertile farmland, with lots of kids having to get up to milk cows, feed chickens, and so on before they catch the bus to school. It’s nice to see that connection to the land follow them into the classroom, and teach their classmates where their food comes from:

Mountain View to offer Ferndale Fries as pilot farm-to-school program – Local News – bellinghamherald.com.

Students at Ferndale’s Mountain View Elementary School will soon be treated to freshly baked potatoes from northwest Washington as part of their school lunch.

On Jan. 27, the french fries and tater tots at the school are being exchanged for locally grown potato wedges, as part of a pilot farm-to-school project.

“This is something that’s good for the students and it’s good for the local farmers,” said Alex Singer, Ferndale School District’s Food Program director. “We have students who may not have ever had french fries that weren’t frozen before.”

community · culture · education · family · learning · play · school · Social · technology

HASTAC, Superman, and the school fair

Beth Kelley

The Education system in the U.S. has reached a pretty low low right now. This is currently being displayed on the big screen in the documentary “Waiting For Superman.” Film-maker Davis Guggenheim “follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, and undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying ‘drop-out factories’ and ‘academic sinkholes’.” (IMDB)

So, what do we do about it?

Lots of things.

One idea is HASTAC, or Humanities, Arts, Science, and Advanced Technology Collaboratory. Pronounced “haystack”, it is “a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities.” They’re the group behind Reimagining Learning (DMLcompetition.net), and other scholarly workshops.

Cathy Davidson, Duke University Co-founder, HASTAC; Co-PI, HASTAC, writes:

Traditional education too often forgets its precious social condition of face-to-face interaction and takes its collective opportunity for granted. If your classroom can be replaced by a computer screen, maybe it should be.

We are using lessons from collaborative open web development and peer-to-peer learning and assessment to storm the academy at the first international Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona, Nov 3-5. Surrounded by pioneering open source web developers and experimenters in online peer-to-peer learning, we are using methods of the open web to look back and at shake up traditional learning institutions. Were looking at four key areas that need storming: collaboration, syllabus building, assessment, and publishing (including peer review). Our chief idea is that face-to-face learning should not be taken as a given in education but as an affordance, as an opportunity not a default. How does thinking about the unique opportunity to learn together change the components of traditional learning?

more via We’re Storming the Academy! A Provocation and a Promise | HASTAC.

Teachers are already spending their own money to provide supplies for a fuller education experience.

“Vicky Halm spends a $1,000 a year out of her own pocket to equip her Brooklyn classroom. She buys star stickers to help motivate her students, but she also spends a great deal on basic supplies — such as pencils and paper.
A whopping 97% of teachers frequently dip into their own pockets to purchase necessary classroom supplies, according to a national survey conducted by Kelton Research. Last year, teachers spent more than $350 on average from their own income on school supplies and instructional materials, according to the National School Supply and Equipment Association” (CNNMoney)

There are lots of opportunities for students to gain hands-on learning outside of the classroom too. Zoos and Universities often have family or kid-only programs to try out.

“Children and parents hummed through wax paper-covered combs while jazz singer Jeni Fleming sang the “Science Saturday” version of “Hound Dog,” everyone rocking out to their newly learned blues chord progression. And so — with tingling lips and a room full of smiles — the second season of Science Saturdays came to a close. Over 900 children from Bozeman, communities as far away as Helena, Stevensville and Glasgow; and the Crow Indian Reservation have participated in Science Saturdays since MSU started offering the program in the fall of 2008, said Suzi Taylor, outreach director for MSU’s Extended University. (MSU News)

Parents can also organize these events. A blogger on GeekDad describes his son’s school fair:

For our school fete we blacked out a classroom with curtains and asked for donations from people to enter the “Corner of Curiosity.” It was amazing what people came up with. There was a delightful Plasma Ball near the entrance which was a favorite of the younger children, and a beautifully faded yellow newspaper from 1938 headlining concerns about Hitler’s leadership in Germany. One parent produced a display of the “history of mobile” phones and others had insect collections.

One student produced what has to be the most curious of collections – a collection of animal scats. A local community member supplied a whale vertebrae (and a kangaroo vertebrae for comparison). But, the real value was being able to present a fund raising activity for the school that was also educational. (GeekDad)

Any small measure, from buying markers to throwing a curiosity fair, helps enrich kids’ learning and keeps them wanting more. Even just a little bit of time each week adds up quickly.

education · school

The new economics of college vs. trade school…or no school

Beth Kelley

This is something that people have been struggling with for awhile, but as this article from the New York Times says, the current economic crisis is putting it into sharp perspective: a lot of kids are being pushed to go to college when in fact it may not be the best choice for their future.

College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.

Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.

“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.

Read the article…

Even though I was someone who excelled in college, and even went to graduate school, I am in fact a strong proponent of the idea that college is unnecessary for a lot of people. I think this was brought home even more for me the year that I worked as a college teaching assistant. The push for four-year colleges is almost starting to feel like a racketeering job.

I think we in the U.S. need to move past the stigma of not having a college degree being equivalent to being a slacker or stupid or unmotivated. If anything, they are smarter for not automatically buying into the system, they are more motivated to start contributing to the workforce, and more goal-oriented than their college-bound counterparts who often view college as an extension of high school.

disease · school

Oh sure, blame the primates

Beth Kelley

Poor guys get in trouble for everything.

First a new strand of AIDS found in Gorillas (and a woman in Cameroon), and now the poor chimps are getting blamed for Malaria.

Seriously, people, can’t we take a little responsibility?
(total side note, but I mean it! Some student is suing her college because she can’t find a job. In a recession. After less than three months of searching. Grow up!)

children · education · school

How to Be an Explorer of the World: New book

Beth Kelley

This is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. In school, at work, yes, yes, yes!!! Go Keri Smith. I’m seriously thinking about writing her a thank you Christmas Card, or at least buying several copies of her book and giving it to all the parents I know.

How to be an explorer of the world

school

Journalism vs. Anthropology

Beth Kelley1 Comment

A friend asked me the other day why I was changing my career goals from being a journalist to an anthropologist. I couldn’t give her a good answer at the time. I mumbled something about low pay and a competitive drive that I just seemed to lack when it came to the written word.

But it got me wondering and really looking at my reasons why I was switching gears, and now even though the moment is passed, I’d like to answer her question in full:

Being a good journalist and a good anthropologist are actually very similar. You have to find a good question and try to answer it. You must do hours of background research and familiarize yourself with the subject. You must figure out who to ask and what questions to ask them. Then there are more hours of research and compiling your information into one cohesive picture. When you finally think you have enough information to give your readers the right message, you must write it all up in a readable, thought-provoking way, and even then only if you’re lucky will your work be published—unless you’ve been asked by your boss to do this work in which case there’s probably a ridiculously short deadline and it’s not something you particularly care about and you just slap something together and call it a day.

My Journalism teacher in college had his doctorate in Anthropology, and he was one of the best journalists I met, if however also one of the most jaded. Anthropology is the perfect accessory to an aware, mindful journalist, just as journalism and writing are essential skills for an anthropologist who wants to get their findings across to their audience.

Where the line is drawn for me, however, is somewhere among the details. The depth with which you explore the subject matter. The reasons behind why this research is being done. The pace and attitude behind the work. With Anthropology, you are (in theory) painstakingly recording people’s minute behavior and details about their situations. With Journalism you must sum up an entire world event in 1200 words or less (this is a skill, by the way, which is being taught more and more often by social science teachers). Anthropology is more interactive; you have to get to know the people you’re researching. In Journalism you are expected to keep your objective distance and not get involved in your story. To even acknowledge in the story that you were there is considered a bit tacky.

Anthropology seems to emphasize the journey, whereas Journalism emphasizes the destination. For me, an MA in Anthropology offers me the chance to study different topics I love in greater detail, and to apply them to different areas of life, not just in print or other forms of media. An MA in Journalism would have given me a better idea on how to hunt, capture, and skin the story, and not much else. For some, that’s enough. For me, the academic side of me won over the practical side and decided to give the whole researcher gig a shot.

That to me is the final kicker. I remember so often sitting at my computer, typing up all the wonderful stories I’d heard from researchers and scientists into an abbreviated article, and how I kept thinking to myself that I would much rather be the one out there doing the research and being interviewed about it than the other way around. That was why I made the leap. To get out there into the world and see what I could do, not just sit back and write about it.

play · school

Play Anthropology

Beth Kelley1 Comment

Rafe and I attended a very interesting meeting this weekend, and I hope he will put his thoughts down on this experience as well.
It was essentially a pitch for a new business and the audience was supposed to provide feedback on the idea. The meeting, however, was a little different because it was focused on Play. Yes, the fine art and discipline of play.
Frank Forencich, the guy pitching the idea, has been making a living writing books and giving classes on his philosophy of how humans don’t move enough and Americans need to start living like Exuberant Animals, and now wants to develop a camp/home base for his classes. All the people who had been invited to hear Frank’s pitch for the Exuberant Animal Retreat (the current working name for his idea) – physical therapists, physicians, primatologists, traceurs, trainers, students, artists, yogis, outdoor trip leaders, and a budding anthropologist (me) – were all interested in how people play and how to get people to play more and incorporate it into their lives, and for some had made it their job. The best example of this was Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play (technically it’s his “retirement” job, but it’s not much of a retirement).
This idea, this concept, of studying how people play, why people play, what they get out of it, and the fact that all those things should be obvious to people and yet it’s not, is a really intriguing idea to me. The idea of studying play for a living and helping to promote play has been distracting me since last Wednesday, and it’s only getting worse. I only half-joked to Rafe that I should base my master’s thesis on watching puppies play with each other.
It was so inspiring to talk to this group of people because it showed me that I could get paid to study play, or at least parts of play. A lot of work is with corporations or doing studies on education, which is fine with me. I would be more than happy to do a study that shows, once again, that kids learn better in school if they have recess, hence taking recess away is NOT going to help them do better on standardized tests! I don’t know how that study would qualify as anthropology, since I’m not really looking at any culture per say, but it could fall under human behavior and processing the world; that’s close enough. If anybody knows someone who’s looking for a play anthropologist, let me know.
What really got me starting to think about this in a cohesive way, almost serendipitously, was an assigned essay on anthropologist Victor Witter Turner. While Turner was known mostly for his work on symbolism and study of religious ritual, his theories of liminality, structure and anti-structure, everyday ritual, and play in general really struck a chord with me. He’s one of the first theorists I’ve come across who have even looked at play and ritual and pretend and considered it as important as I certainly think it is. I’m actually having a hard time with my paper and simply writing an overview of all of Turner’s work and not just talking about his ideas on play and how according to Turner play, pretend, and cutting loose is an essential part of being human and functioning in society. I’m seriously considering a paper on that particular subject for one of the anthropological conferences coming up in the Spring.
So, even though I am still stressed and sleep-deprived, even though I feel ragged and worn, the whole experience of the past week has re-instilled a purpose in me. It has reminded me why I’m putting myself through hell to go to grad school, why I fell in love with Anthropology in the first place, and where I can be useful, where I want to put my energy into the world.
“Play” is a perfect category to describe everything I’m interested in: how do people learn, the behavior and ritual in sports, performance of all types (dancing, art, story-telling), identity, photography, people adapting to new environments and technologies, and of course looking at biology and culture combined. All of these have aspects of play, or just straight up are play. Turner’s ideas can be applied to all of these cultural actions as well, and can be used to look at and dissect the meaning, the purpose, the reason why we do them.
The only sad thing is, because play is “just play” the subject probably won’t be taken seriously by many. Even I have moments of feeling silly about wanting to study the seriousness of play. But it’s not silly, it’s vital, and knowing that there are other people out there who feel the same way – Rafe, Frank, Stuart, Deborah the primatologist, the traceurs, the yogis and physical trainers – gives me strength in going forward and going after something so passionately.
Thank you!