New Year, New Semester: What is school for?
As my regular readers know, I teach writing at the local community college and I’ve just earned a MA in Community, Liberation, and Ecopsychology.
Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has been a huge influence on my teaching philosophy, and some semesters, my students and I have read chapter two of that book where he discusses the problems of banking education and suggests instead a problem-posing approach where students name a problem, investigate solutions, and put a solution into action.
Recently, marketing guru Seth Godin and author of Tribes and Linchpins targeted the ills of education: in 2012, he published Stop Stealing Dreams as a free pdf. (I last wrote about Godin’s advice here–this is about public speaking.) As I was already a big Godin fan (see photo!), I read it immediately, and had a chance to talk to Godin about his suggest
ions for community college education. He recommended that I get my students blogging–which I started doing in January 2008. (Read Cathy Davidson’s argument for blogging in the college classroom in this January 2012 NY Times article.)
If you don’t want to read the pdf, you can get a great sense of his argument from this TEDX talk above from October 2012.
art predator 
Reblogged this on whisper down the write alley and commented:
Seth Godin in a video worth watching about what school is for