Janet DeMeester
Educating Our Future
“Why do I have to learn this?!” This is the typical phrase every student say at one point
in their education. For the longest time teachers have replied with “Because it is important” or
“Because I said so.” I do not think students should feel upset about learning or that their
questions should be brushed aside like they are nothing. The purpose of education is to create
a comfortable learning environment that enhances the students to want to gain knowledge.
Our role as teachers is to first understand how to think critically so we can teach in improved
ways. Students are educated best in a diverse community and learn through their own life
experiences. The main points of what should be taught in school are critical thinking and the
ability to be self-conscious about why one thinks that way.
Holistic education stands out to support my philosophy of education through a quote
that Miller(1991) said concerning holistic education with “Nurturing healthy, whole, curious
persons who can learn whatever they need to know in any new context” (p.7) (Martusewicz
p.13). Education is about want to possess more knowledge and doing so through a comfortable
environment. In order to have this type of education there needs to be more than just a room
with materials to learn from. Education needs to be community centered. This means that
those that “the elders will pass on tradition that sustain the community and ecology”
(Martusewicz p. 80). In the education process the teachers are not the only ones influencing
the students. Everyone around them and everything around them has an effect on their
learning abilities and desires. Within a classroom students should learn how to “produce
knowledge about themselves and the world” (Kincheloe p. 89). The structure of education is to
teach students to reach out and explore on their own. The students need to have an interest in
things in order to learn about them and this is what the education is devised to do, to assist in
the learning of knowledge.
A teacher can only do so much while in the role of being a teacher. They need to
become the learner before they can teach properly. This role of a teacher never lasts all
throughout the year or even a whole day. A teacher should always be watching and learning
through their observations of the class. Teachers can learn just as much from the students as
the students learn from the teacher. A quote from the authors of Contextualizing Teaching
inspired this concept of teaching through saying “Teachers must learn to expand their own
cognitive horizons before they can teach students to do so” (Kincheloe p.246). Students never
come to you as a blank slate. There is a metaphor in EcoJustice Education called “A Gardener’s
Example from Rebecca”(Martusewicz p.53). This story talks about the different conditions that
affect the soil and how that will affect the plants that will grow. The interpretation that it tells
is how there are many factors that influence students. This is why they do not start as blank
slates when they come to school; they have had many influences around them that will create
different challenges or aides in the process of education. The teacher’s role is to seize the
precise moments at which the students are “in the right conditions” to teach the students new
information to enable them to grow and learn.
Going through public education can be difficult. There are many people and if everyone
is a like it is hard to adjust to the real world after education. This is why “Diversity is the
strength of the community” (Martusewicz p. 24). Having diversity within a school gives
students many more examples of experiences that can happen to them. Diversity opens up
questions and doors to topics not typically covered in a school with little diversity. A diverse
community can contribute so many great experiences to a school. At Challenger Elementary
School, in Kentwood Public Schools, there was a multicultural fair. There were families from all
over the area that brought different cultural foods from their heritages and different students
worked with teachers to present posters and games that were about different cultures. This
gave the students an experience they would not have experienced if they were all from the
same neighborhood with the same backgrounds. “Learning is not limited to school, but one can
integrate all one’s experiences and activities into a unified learning process” (Kincheloe p. 304).
This is the best reason of why a student’s experiences need to be taken into account while in
school. Students can learn so much more from relating everything around them and everything
they do to what they learn in their education. This leads to internalization of information
instead of rote memorization. The students will remember subjects better and longer if they put
their own meanings and experiences behind the subject.
The knowledge within this world is vast and expansive. Students do not know how to
sort through all of the information they receive to understand what it actually means. This is
why students need to be taught “to produce self-conscious awareness of how they have come to
think as they do” (Kincheloe p. 255-266). Being taught why one think as one does will help
one understand how to interpret new information better. This is a goal of overall education and
not simply a single year or even level of education. This process will take much planning and
elaborating upon but the idea behind it increases my interest in teaching more than just the
criteria.
Contextualization is a very broad idea but it contains three basic features: etymology,
pattern, and process (Kincheloe p. 257). “Etymology is the origin of validated knowledge”
(Kincheloe p. 257). This subject would aid in explanation that everything we think comes from
somewhere and something we learned. The way we talk, walk, and act is all under the
influence of our learning capabilities. Understanding where our knowledge comes from is an
important idea to teach within a classroom.
Pattern is the connection between things over a great expanse. Being able to identify
patterns throughout our lives has been a big part of studying how things occur. Weather
patterns are watched and monitored to predict the next time something will happen; the same
can be said for education. Graduation rates, dropout rates, and ACT scores are all studied for
the patterns they relay. The information given back tells the supervisors if the school is doing
well or not. Teaching how to read these patterns is part of being able to sort through the
information and find the meaningful data that will assist a student through their education.
“Process implies the cultivation of new ways of interpreting the world that make sense
of both ourselves and contemporary society” (Kincheloe p. 257). This part of contextualization
pulls in my feeling that education needs to be community centered and that “diversity is the
strength of a community”(Martusewicz p. 24). All of the different examples within a diverse
community pull together. This expands the knowledge of the community to include the many
experiences of one another. There are so many viewpoints that can be shared through a diverse
society that it is one of the most important things within education. Teaching contextualization
in public education would be beneficial to not only the students but the staff and community
around the schools as well.
Throughout my experiences I have come to see the biggest and brightest ideas as the
most important. The ideas are also some of the most difficult ideas to follow through with. It is
my goal to create a classroom environment that will enable learning in a diverse environment
that explores a student’s thinking and aides in using experiences to think critically about both
the material being learned and the way a student thinks about the material. There are many
factors that can lead to success in the classroom but I am looking to teach success throughout a
student’s life.
Works Cited
Kincheloe, Joe L., Patrick Slattery, and Shirley R. Steinberg. Contextualizing Teaching. N.p.:
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2000. 89-304. Print.
Martusewicz, Rebecca A., Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci. EcoJustice Education. New
York: Routledge, 2011. 13-80. Print.