Class Goals: Categorizing the readings as positions/perspectives that can be taken on a given issue.
Connection to Course Goals: Focus on synthesis, getting to know the "conversation" in a particular discourse community.
Activities:
- Discussion (group or classwide) of main points in Gatto and Anyon to bring out:
Gatto
- "I don't teach English; I teach school"
- Gatto's "seven lessons"
- "central control" of U. S. "requires compulsory schooling"
Anyon
- characteristics of school types based by class background of students
- school as functioning to reproduce "relations in society"
- personal connections to the issues
- Compare Gatto's ideas with Anyon's for similarities and differences. CSOW: They are discovering gradations of difference between positions that are more complex than "for" or "against" something.
- Discuss
implications of these points and the assumptions they present about the purpose of school in the U. S.
- what does each writer believe is the (unacknowledged) purpose of school?
- challenge these notions -- as Gatto said, few people even in the field of education can conceive of alternatives
- personal connection
Assignment: Read "Collecting, 529-49, PHG, and "Conducting Research" and "Evaluating Sources", 116-26, EW (Easy Writer handbook).