Sometimes it’s hard to see how our beliefs confine us or funnel us in a certain direction, especially when those beliefs are widely shared. Like invisible tracks our unexamined beliefs about all kinds of things lead us inexorably to preconceived ends thus reinforcing the belief. What’s kind of sneaky about beliefs is that we are often oblivious not only to that very process but also to the fact that we even hold a particular belief at all. Take for example the ubiquitous latent math-phobe. He has an unnamed inkling that math is not for him. When the time of the unwelcome math test rolls around he feels uncomfortably disarmed but briefly opens the textbook to study. Quickly frustrated by the intimidating look of the problems he halfheartedly scratches out a few exercises and resigns himself to his fate. Next day he does poorly on the test: Fear confirmed. Our latent math-phobe is on the long, familiar road to mathematical mediocrity. Now, imagine the effects of a more generalized belief, like say the widely held belief among secondary school students that school is “bad.” When one of the many adherents of this belief is pressed to explain further, she might be apt to say, “School is boring,” or “Teachers are mean,” “It’s a waste of time.” And so she ambles along the broad, unwinding path of academic apathy, confirmed at every sign post that indeed this is her destined route. It’s easy enough for us to see how someone else’s beliefs can have a cumulative effect on that person’s long-term prospects of defining or reaching goals. What’s harder is to examine and question our own beliefs that are often so ingrained that we can only with difficulty distinguish them from facts.
When it comes to education, most of us would probably subscribe to the belief that smart people succeed and less-than-smart people fall short. And in this case, when we say “smart” we mean possessing some innate capacity to do well at performing certain mental tasks; remembering facts, manipulating ideas, applying rules in a variety of circumstances, reading, writing, calculating, etc. There seems little doubt that some folks possess greater facility for performing these tasks than others. The correlation between (one way of looking at) academic achievement and intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is in fact well established: No surprise since intelligence tests were designed to predict academic success. A wealth of recent research suggests that motivation and other personality traits are actually at play here. When it comes to innate ability other recent research actually suggests that the construct of working memory is a more powerful predictor of academic potential than IQ. The problem is that working memory is also very constant, (not in absolute terms since working memory tends to increase with age-related development), but in relative terms. In other words, a student who starts out his academic career with a working memory capacity around the 10th percentile relative to his classmates is unlikely to increase this capacity in relative terms throughout his schooling. But if we look at the big picture as educators who want to improve overall outcomes the belief that “intelligence” (or even working memory) predicts success isn’t very helpful: It exacerbates any objective differences in potential and probably inhibits the development of the majority of students. A complicating factor is the associated dubious belief that academic success is defined in terms of an absolute hierarchy: It’s a competition, and only the best performers are successful. Therefore, by definition the majority of students are unsuccessful.
Here is where it would be helpful and appropriate to question the belief that “smart” students will be successful and those lacking innate intelligence won’t. First of all, no one performs academic tasks effortlessly or automatically: Everyone needs to learn and to practice. Some “smart” students may respond easily to traditional instruction whereas others may respond better to other methods. Secondly, even if some folks do seem to find such tasks easier to master than others, does that mean that the ease of mastering some academic skills is the key to overall success? Probably not. So, the meaningful (and more malleable) factor when considering academic progress isn’t inborn “smarts.” If everyone needs practice, and practice requires effort, diligence, and persistence, wouldn’t those qualities be more important for making gains than a person’s IQ or allotment of working memory? Isn’t such a belief, that academic success is almost entirely dependent on an unearned, unchangeable, innate trait, to some extent just a manifestation of the base human tendency to sort ourselves into a hierarchy, with the consequence that the students who have also developed this belief from early on learn to fit themselves and their peers into the smart/dumb hierarchy by early elementary school?
When looked at in this light, this belief seems eminently incongruous with the values of a democratic society that espouses equality. It smacks uncomfortably of social Darwinism, or worse. But keep in mind that the American conception of equality is one of equality of opportunity – the ability to use your natural talents to set yourself apart from others, to stand above the crowd. It is, after all, a competition: the playing field should be fair, but not everyone wins. But in recent years it seems that many Americans have become sort of vaguely aware of the unhelpfulness of the idea that success is just the product of some people’s inborn talent, that there are born winners and losers, while at the same time remaining unable to shake off the old notion entirely. We cling to the paradigm of life as competition, but at the same time increasingly we hate to see people lose. So we can observe strange phenomena in the classrooms and on the playing fields of America: In classrooms across the land motivational posters claim that every student is “smart” (presumably in his or her own way). Every youth soccer participant is a trophy-winning star. America’s children, like those of Lake Wobegone, are all apparently above average. But could it be, as Malcolm Gladwell eloquently argues in Outliers, that what we typically call success is far more attributable to circumstance and character traits than to giftedness or natural genius? And, if so, wouldn’t that be a valuable message, or belief, to pass on to students? Even if we take as a given that talent or smarts has something to do with success, it’s far from the whole picture, and it’s really not helpful to dwell on something you can’t change. Wouldn’t promoting diligence, self-improvement, and cooperation be more helpful than denoting inborn talent as the key to success?
One helpful way to evaluate the influence of widely held beliefs is to examine parallel beliefs held in other cultures. This kind of comparison can offer refreshing alternatives that one might otherwise never stumble upon. Researcher Jin Li has been doing just that. Her work shows an interesting contrast between the beliefs of children about learning in some Asian cultures and in American culture. In general American children acquire the belief early on (often by age 4) that being “smart” leads to academic success, whereas in contrast many Chinese children believe that trying hard is not only the key to success but also a moral imperative. While neither approach is judged to be inherently better, and it is readily acknowledged that the changing of cultural perspectives is profoundly difficult, it is reasonably posited that a conscious adjustment of attitude can yield benefits.
A more individualized approach that measures success by personal betterment through the cultivation of such personality traits as conscientiousness and tenacity rather than by rankings of natural talent in a competition could help in the long run to alter the alienating and counterproductive attitudes associated with schooling in general. Unfortunately, schools for the most part mirror the perceptions of the societies they serve, and until widely held beliefs are changed it is unlikely that more constructive beliefs will take hold in education. Nevertheless, the educator in the classroom can go far in constructing and promoting a more positive and effective set of beliefs than the conflicted and diluted social Darwinism of the naturally gifted star-pupil.
Disclosure of a Disability
Some students question whether they should disclose a disability in the college admissions process. There are good reasons to do this, despite the discomfort that some students feel in announcing a learning disabled label that they feel inadequately characterizes them as students. First, students who learn differently have been shaped by their experiences, which have very often led to the development
of significant determination, diligence, and advocacy skills–all important character traits for college success. Secondly, disclosing a disability may help to put in perspective a student’s performance on standardized testing such as the ACT or SAT.
Despite all the work that you have done researching colleges, the best indicator of which college will be right for you will be your college visits. In addition to considering academic programming, the availability of support, and the other critical factors that we have outlined, it is important that you get a sense of the campus life at the schools on your list. Remember, this is the place where you plan to spend the next four years.
When do I visit?
We suggest that you begin planning college visits in the spring of your junior year and complete as many as feasible during the summer recess. It is also possible for you to plan visits during the fall of your senior year, but you will want to limit the number of visits during the fall to allow yourself plenty of time to complete applications and keep up with your senior coursework.
How do I make an appointment?
What should I do on campus?
Tips
QUESTION: Are college visits considered an excused absence?
Yes, however, a visit to one college in Florida should not take two weeks.
My graduate research and my teaching interests have focused primarily on the intersections of public writing and rhetorical theory. Specifically, I am interested in the disconnect between school writing and public writing and how our students and off-campus communities can come together and create social action projects with reciprocal benefits. A primary cause of this disconnect is that a lot of the important projects that students and faculty create for thinking through and solving social problems that communities face turn up in standard, alphabetic literacy oriented research papers, instead of multi-modal community projects and are therefore inaccessible to those community members who could stand to benefit the most.
The research paper genre fails to address the diverse needs of writing communities. John Ackerman and David Coogan (2010) define a rhetoric of “out there” as those actions and activities mediated outside of the university that promote social justice outside of the university. In order to connect school writing and public writing, I propose a rhetoric of “right here, ” which promotes open dialogue about social problems between students and off-campus community members in order to narrow divisions concerning the cause and effect of such problems. A rhetoric of right here calls for social action mediated by the activities of students and off-campus community members in the form public writing projects where both parties compose texts across genres to raise awareness of and potentially begin to solve specific social problems.
Genres of community action include several familiar types of texts, such as fliers, chalkings, public forums, farmers’ markets, and blogs. These texts may not cause feelings of empowerment in isolation, but when considered together a genre set that can move people from apathy to action students—and teachers—begin to recognize the power of learning how to recognize and mediate this genre to meet specific goals. At a two-year college, for example, students pass hundreds of fliers a day without considering them a text for community action. But, considering a flier that can be mediated into a poster that can be mediated into a speech or even a project can foster a newfound interest in something that was before uninteresting.
Part of theorizing and practicing a rhetoric of “right here” for me means engaging students and off-campus community members in having open dialogues about social problems that affect them, and then inviting students and off-campus citizens to create social projects that aim to raise awareness of the problem to a larger segment of the community. An innovative way of raising awareness of and potentially solving a problem in a community is for students and off-campus community members to come together and create multimodal, civic projects that tap into the creativity and learning abilities of diverse community members. It is essential that students and off-campus citizens have opportunities to creatively think and compose about social problems in ways that do not exclude them intellectually. In the aural project that Ioften present at workshops, the work of Selfe (2009), Williams (2008), Murray (2009), and Kress (2010) inform my thinking about the power of promoting producing multimodal composition to reach all citizens.
Promoting a rhetoric of “right here” means engaging students and off-campus community members in different theories and practices of public writing in ways that privilege those students’ and diverse community members’ cultures, voices, and writing . TESOL pedagogy, or theories and practices for teaching second language learners, privileges intercultural rhetoric, small cultures, individual and community voices, and writing practices of not only second language learners but of all learners. Specifically important to my research and teaching is Ulla Connor’s work on intercultural rhetoric and the implications is has for creating social action projects between students and off-campus communities. Connor defines intercultural rhetoric as “the study of written discourse between and among individuals with different cultural backgrounds” (2). Important to intercultural rhetoric, and also to the farmer’s market project I examine, is recognizing small cultures and large cultures and negotiation and accommodation in intercultural communication.
Large cultures, according to Adrian Holliday, “have ethic, national, or international group features as essential components and tend to be prescriptive,” while small cultures are “rooted in activities and a specific discourse is one of the products of small culture” (Qtd in Connor 29). Intercultural rhetoric recognizes large cultures but values small cultures. In my presentation I will present my audience with a diagram created by Holliday (1999) and Dwight Atkinson (2004) that shows how small cultures work, and I will compare Holliday’s analysis to my own ESL classroom and how the students’ overlapping cultures helped create the farmer’s market, thereby creating a strong connection between school writing and public writing with the Urbana, Illinois community. Negotiation and communication in the context of intercultural rhetoric means forming a give and take form of communication. Within this give and take relationship attitudes, knowledge, skills of discovery and interaction, and skills of interpreting and relating create critical cultural awareness (Connor 32).
I wish to challenge colleges and universities, as well as my own high school where I teach, to develop and launch a successful social action project that connect school writing to public writing by committing to the following:
I guess I’m not used to reading papers on education reform penned by business gurus. When a friend recently forwarded me this article from the guys at Innosight, I was at first struck by the notable absence of the all-too-familiar “edu-speak” literary style and then by the decidedly outside-the-field ideas being floated. Innosight is an institute co-founded by Michael B. Horn, Dr. Jason Hwang, and Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen to develop and promote their ideas on education and health care. In 2008 Christensen and Horn along with Curtis Johnson published Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. An ambitiously titled work centered around Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation – “innovation that transforms an existing market or sector–or creates a new one–by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, reliability, and affordability, where before the product or service was complicated, expensive, and inaccessible.”
In the paper, “RETHINKING STUDENT MOTIVATION: Why understanding the ‘job’ is crucial for improving education,” the authors begin with the premise that the main cause of American educational woes is the lack of student motivation. They cite the pithy statement attributed to late educator Jack Frymier, “If the kids want to learn, we couldn’t stop ’em. If they don’t, we can’t make ’em.” From here the chain of logic flows thusly; the main problem with education in America isn’t the quality of education being offered, it’s that kids don’t want to buy this “product.” How to solve this problem? Christensen, Horn, and Johnson tacitly propose that we treat education like any other product with a reluctant market ( and make the important presumption that the defining education consumer is the student, but more about this later) and apply the new principles from their research on the puzzle of customer motivation. The assertion is that traditional marketing practice gets it wrong, and that’s why oftentimes good products don’t sell. The answer is to look at a product as a commodity that performs a “job” for the consumer. Therefore, defining and understanding the job is all important to successful marketing. But what does this mean that a product does a “job”? The authors offer several examples of their model in the context of corporate innovation, and at times the impatient reader might feel that the story has drifted far from the purported theme of education reform. I will relate a much abridged version of only one of the examples because it is both amusingly quirky and illustrative. When operators of an unnamed fast-food chain decided to improve their shakes they set about studying what consumers desired. Using the principle of understanding the “job,”( in this case the job a shake does for a consumer), researchers discovered that a good many customers bought shakes in the morning to give them something to do during their tedious morning commute and to assuage their pre-lunch hunger pangs. Armed with this insight the operators of the chain figured out that a thicker, heartier shake that was quickly and easily purchased from an automated card-swipe machine performed this job better for the set of hungry, bored, rushed morning commuters.
I am going to assume we all get the point of understanding “the job” and will mercifully return to the theme of education more quickly than the authors of the paper. So, in this sense, what is the “job” of education from the perspective of the consumer, i.e. the student? The authors state, and I think it’s a pretty good guess, that from a student perspective the “job” to be done at school is to have fun with friends and feel successful. Good teachers know this intuitively and have the personal attributes to successfully meet these goals. Sadly, intuition and personality are hard to commoditize. But some programmatic approaches are more apt to facilitate meeting the goals of fun with friends and feelings of success. Project-based programs, for example, would seem to work well. In working on group projects that apply academic skills to real-life goals students are more likely to feel successful and to have fun with their friends along the way. Voila, the problem of student motivation is (potentially and hypotheitcally) solved, and more than half the battle is won.
Of course, there are other ways of thinking about this. If the main job of education becomes providing fun and a feeling of success, any number of inane and meaningless games and activities could be implemented to do the job. The difference between the fast food chain’s shakes and a school’s education program is that the former has only to satisfy the customer without the complicating burden of ulterior motives. The real goals of education are defined by the community. Many would cite such goals as producing an educated, employable, and productive citizenry. For secondary schools one goal might be to produce well-prepared college candidates. The fun and success would have to cloak the real “job” being performed on behalf of the real consumers; education of the youth at the behest of policy-influencing, adult members of society, and in particular parents. The job within a job model can be fraught with difficulties. Nevertheless, for educators it would be useful to think more clearly about the “job” of schools from both perspectives: that of student and that of the invested educator. As the authors point out, the traditional system of grading automatically defeats the goal of most students feeling successful (think of the bell curve), while the traditional classroom structure of sitting quietly in rows and ranks, doing individual work defeats the goal of fun with friends. Here one is reminded of the Finnish system with its long recesses and its lack of tests and grades at the elementary level. There is a lesson to be had here after all. It’s not an easy balancing act, but part of the challenge of educators is certainly to engage and motivate. Thinking about the “job” each individual student needs done, both from the student’s perspective and from the professional educator’s perspective is a good way to start.
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