Why are you at NDSU? here? You’ve all been in

Transcript:Why are you at NDSU? here? You’ve all been in:
Why are you at NDSU? here? You’ve all been in school for most of your lives. You must be experts on what makes a learning experience effective, what makes a teacher good, what the most essential elements in any learning experience must be, and what’s wrong with our educational system... Right? This stuff is pretty important. After all, here you are, spending quite a lot of your own or someone else’s money on an “education,” committing yourself to at least 4 years, putting yourself through all kinds of nutsoid experiences. Will it be worth it? What’s all of it FOR? How can you get the most out of it? For your first project, we’ll be asking those questions and more. We’ll read some philosophically very different arguments on learning, examine our own personal experiences, and then closely analyze a popular movie about education. You will hopefully do some interesting thinking about the very class you are sitting in, about your all-important future, and about how to critically examine arguments which popular media are continually making. Remember, on the first day, I asked you to “describe this class”? Let’s look at some excerpts. What are the fundamental elements of any learning experience? TEACHER. STUDENT. ENVIRONMENT. MATERIALS. CONTENT, SUBJECT MATTER. METHODS. PHILOSOPHY (PEDAGOGY). An environment; a place Formalist Formalist Describe this Class A commodity; a product you are buying An institutional experience A social experience; interaction with people Vocational training; skills acquisition An exciting opportunity to express yourself; explore perspectives Technology A hoax. BS. Jump through some hoops. Someplace your parents want you to be ? ? ? Waste time while you do your REAL learning in the outer world Formalist Formalist Purpose of Education Learn social manners; conform; socialization; prepare you to be docile consumers Get a job; learn nut’s and bolts skills No one knows; we just do it because we’re robots Question authority; challenge tradition Become a happy, fulfilled human being; figure out what it means to be human, alive Accept authority; value tradition Help you learn to learn ? ? ? Readings for This Project See our Schedule as well as the Project Assignment 1 folder in Bb. BTW, what did you think of the article about yoga pants in North Dakota high schools? What’s this film’s argument? What is it trying to get us to believe or think or feel or do? Entertainment media continually present arguments