are there more specific explanations about transformative education?

Answer 1

OK, I'll give this a stab. Once upon a time, I taught upper elementary school in a inner city that is now far, far away. A report on NPR's marketplace inspired me to put together a unit on toys.

I began by reading the short story "The Lesson" by Tony Cade Bambara aloud to the students. In the story, a "nappy-headed woman" with too much education and no makeup takes a group of kids from Harlem to the toy store FAO Schwartz in Manhattan. By doing this, she shows them that there's a world outside their Harlem neighborhood, and in this world, they don't have much power or money. The narrator--one of the Harlem kids--is angry, really angry at the woman who taught her this lesson.

"You know," said one of my former students about a year later, "We hated you just like those kids in the story hated that woman."

"I know," I said. By then I had learned that if you tell kids they are any kind of disadvantaged, even if you do so by telling them you grew up disadvantaged, too, they will hate you for it.

But I wasn't done with the unit. I had discussion questions for them to write about, and one of them was "Who are the people who buy the toys at FAO Schwartz?" The kids' answers were mostly some variation of "rich people".

Next up, I had them go home and look at the "Made in" tags on three of their own toys, or those of a sibling, neighbor, or cousin if they were "too old" for toys. Actually, this was also a way out for kids who couldn't afford to own three toys.

The next day we compiled the results of our survey. I did that because I had two different figures for the percentage of toys made in China, and I wanted them to participate in gathering our own data: primary research. Some of the kids had obviously not done their research, but I included their made up answers (like "Made in Africa") anyway. Our results showed a percentage in between the two percentages I had from my research. In all three cases, we had figures that showed more than half the toys sampled were made in China.

Next, I prepared them for an article I'd adapted from the newspaper by bringing in maps and coffee table books about China. I showed them, for example, terraces on the sides of mountains and a photograph of people in western Sichuan province with 100 pound tubs of manure on their backs, preparing to hike five miles into the mountains to lay manure on their fields.

At this point, I always asked the small group I was showing this particular photograph a question. Given a choice, would they rather come to school, read some stories, do some science, work some math problems, have recess, lunch, and maybe computer class, or would they rather hike five miles into the mountains with a hundred-pound tub of manure on their backs?

Well, most of them would rather come to school. But there was always one or two who would say, "Give me the tub of manure." These are your "kinesthetic learners", the kids who learn best by moving. In one case the kid was also a student with a high naturalistic intelligence (who happened to be born into a family with no interest in nature) and a truancy problem. I often think of that kid, and how happy he would be if he lived where I live now.

As a general rule, kinesthetic learners are more likely to be put in special ed, to drop out of school, and to end up in jail. They are the group of students that we as educators fail the most. And by fail, I mean we don't do right by them.

Anyway, in the next part of the lesson, my students were to read an article I'd adapted from The Washington Post. The article told the story of a teenager who had travelled from western Sichuan province to the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, outside Hong Kong.

It explained how she'd gotten a job in a toy factory as a sort of human conveyor belt, moving partially manufactured toys from one station to another. It explained how the factory forced her to work extended hours, did not give her days off, and held back some of her pay. The article described how she'd been found dead in her bunk after she was forced to work in spite of being sick.

The next question for the students was going to be, "Who are the rich people who buy the toys this teenager made?" The answer then was, "We are." They were the poor kids in Harlem in the short story, but in this newspaper article they were the rich people who lived someplace else. This is the "disorienting dilemma" they speak of in transformative learning.

Well, we never got that far. A decree came from on high that I needed to start teaching directly from the textbook that I'd been given. In fact, I was called out into the hall on Monday morning, having just written my daily plan on the board. I was told that my teaching partner had been instructed over the weekend to prepare a lesson out of the textbook to be given that very day.

So I walked back into the classroom and erased my daily plan as my teaching partner taught. At some point, I took down the poster that showed where I was in the unit I'd spent my Christmas break designing. All kinds of lessons were learned by all kinds of people in that unit, but some of them were not the intended lessons. I'm not sure just how many of them were transforming.

Erin Gruwell had more success in California, as she and her students chronicled in the book linked below.