Since 1974, The American Institute for Creative Education has been dedicated to the proposition that teaching is an art form and effective teachers must be reflective practitioners and life-long learners. As such, teachers’ commitment to sharpening their own skills in the areas of critical reading, writing, and thinking are essential in order to effectively teach students to do likewise in today’s classroom.
The mission of AICE is to provide educators with opportunities for professional growth by offering rigorous graduate and CEU courses in a non-traditional, creative manner. AICE courses are predicated on an understanding of adult developmental and learning theories. The goal is to have meaningful learning through student-centered and project-based work, with a critical emphasis on teacher reflection.
Under the leadership team of Director Melody Christensen and Dean Stephen York, the AICE faculty embraces the challenge to uphold progressive educational values in the 21st century.
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Course Conceptual Framework:
The American Institute for Creative Education is committed to best practices for teaching adults. These “best practices” are historically and philosophically informed by the progressive education movement and the contemporary research of Anne Brockbank, Ian McGill, and Patricia Cross. AICE finds significant value in the “project based methodology” of William Heard Kilpatrick and the “experiential learning” posited by John Dewey. Both men were leading teachers, philosophers, and reformers who taught at the Teachers College at Columbia University. Course work is further predicated on the seminal psychological studies of Lev Vygotsky. Consideration is also given to reflective/practitioners: Malcolm Knowles, Paulo Freire, Jane Vella, and Myles Horton.
The instructional process values the following principles:
· Reflective Practice
Participants will take responsibility to shape their study through an Individualized Learning Plan based on the Vygotsy’s Zone of Proximal Development and the reflective practitioner methodology of Brockbank and McGill.
· Dedication to Teaching and Learning
Instructors respect and respond to the evolving learning goals and learner needs from the variety of settings students are participating in. It is expected that both the instructor and the students will actively engage in the teaching/learning process. Technology is an essential part of empowering the teaching/learning process.
· Synthesis of Theory and Practice
“Stories have the power to direct and change our lives.” –Nel Noddings, Stories lives tell: Narrative and dialogue in education, (p.157) New York: Teachers College Press. (1991)
AICE is committed to merging theory and practice in a praxis methodology—through the lens of Vygotsky’s psychological perspective: learning is social.
· Collaboration and Mentoring
AICE holds to the value that effective communication is an essential part of the creative learning process. Trust among course participants will be emphasized for encouraging positive learning relationships. The course aims to foster an open exchange of ideas and respect among faculty, students, and the broader community. A key component of teaching as a reflective practice includes a strong commitment to dialogical education. Thus, many of our courses also aim to provide teachers and educational technicians with the opportunity to work together as a cohort of learners.
I am engaged with the book, FACILITATING REFLECTIVE LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION, by Anne Brockbank and Ian McGill. (It’s listed on my bibliography.) I have known for a long time that teaching is best practiced reflectively. Now, I am teaching a new course for AICE(The American Institute for Creative Education–see links). The course is “Looking at Ourselves in the Mirror: Teachers as Reflective Practitioners.” Yesterday, for the first time, I met with my group. Today’s blog and blogs in the near future will be focused on this topic and text.
In chapter four, “The Requirements for Reflection,” Brockbank and McGill write:
“. . . We have already referred. . . to the tendency in higher education for knowledge to be treated as static, disembodied, as a product rather than a process where students may be detached from the knowledge being imparted.” My comment: Is it any wonder why this “tendency” is passed down as legitimate practice in the K-12 classrooms? No wonder our students complain of “boredom” and are disengaged with the learning process at an early age. Apples do not fall far from the tree! What is modeled in higher educated is too often replicated, to the detriment of the K-12 students, and legislated into policies by the bureaucrats in state departments of education and, of course, Washington, D.C.–home of unfundated and ridiculous mandates, e.g., No Child Left Behind.
” In recognizing the interaction for dialogue as constituting a relationship between teacher and learner and between learners we are saying that is knowledge that is the material of the interaction comes through communication.” (Italics are mine.) I remembering distinctly having a phone conversation about this very concept with Til Evans my long-time friend, mentor, and teacher from my days at Starr King School in Berkeley. Til, now 85, has more “on the ball” then all of the bureaucrats in the entire Department of Education in Washington, D.C. put together. Til said that the curriculum IS the communication between teachers and students. Alfred North Whitehead in his seminal book, THE AIMS OF EDUCATION, wrote at the beginning of the 20th Century about the “inert ideas” that are taught in the classroom and the deadness of it all. Much of what is passed along as “teaching” is really a mere “transference” of information. Many educational bureaucrats, who in the opinion of this writer have been out of the classrooms far too long to be making policy decisions, think that “transference” and “testing” the recall of said transference is “education.” I don’t know how much more ludicrous it can become.
Teaching is far more than informational. It is transformational. It is not teaching for students to “be told” or “lectured to.” Teaching requires dialogue–meaningful, reflective, conversation. This level of teaching is why Brockbank and McGill are justifiably holding higher educators responsible. Unless the Academy changes, the classrooms in K-12 will not be able to change effectively.
We must move beyond the “Henry Ford” mentalitiy of “education as product.” For more information on that, I encourage you to read Aldous Huxley’s prophetic, prescient work, BRAVE NEW WORLD and the PS written years later. Education is not a product. It is a product.
Brockbank and McGillfurther write, “For us dialogue that is reflective, and enables critically reflective learning, engages the person at the edge of their knowledge, their sense of self and the world as experienced by them. Thus their assumptions about knowledge, themselves, and their world is challenged. By this we mean that the individual is at the edge of their current understanding and the sense of meaning they give to and with the world. Existing assumptions about understanding, self, and the world are challenged. That learning becomes reflectively critical when the emergent ideas are related to existing sense of knowledge, self, and the world and a new understanding emerges.”
I believe this. What do you think?
Write back, dear readers. Kind Regards, Stephen York
Writing IS Hard Work . . .
April 29, 2008
Tom Absher, poet and a retired professor from Vermont College, published a monograph: “Writing is Hard Work.” I bought a copy for a dollar or two years ago and still have it to this day. Although I never had Tom as a teacher, I appreciated his work in this mimeographed book. It was a guide to writing annotations for various forms of genre and a very helpful tool for me. I was navigating my uncharted waters of getting a liberal arts education in a non-traditional setting. My experience with the book was back in the “old days’ when Vermont College was part of Norwich University.
The concept, “writing is hard work,” rang true for me then and still does. It’s not that I am a poor writer. It is that I find writing to be “all-consuming.” It can be a creative flow that I can get lost in or it can be an exercise in negative self-editing before I even get the piece written.
One of the reasons that I am writing these blog entries, something that is a huge step for me, is to keep me writing. I expect that my students in AICE (The American Institute for Creative Education) to write reflective papers, reader response/process journals, summative papers, etc. In order for me to have the moral authority to do so, I need to be writing myself.
Writing IS hard work. It is 5 AM. I have already been working for a couple of hours trying to put a new course together. Once again, the thought of writing something new on this blog was on my mind. I acted. I had started with the title of this blog yesterday. Today I decided to put some things down.
For me, this blog is an opportunity for ongoing conversation with my students, who by the way, are really tremendous adults from all over the State of Maine and occasionally from Canada or a neighboring New England state. It is also an opportunity to “practice what I preach: writing–no matter what.”
I think that resistance to writing is not only about hard work, but it is about “risk taking.” Putting one’s thoughts down for others to read requires courage. It is opening oneself up to feedback from others. Jesse Stuart admonished would-be writers to write something that they would like for themselves and not to worry about what other people would think about it. Rainer Maria Rilke said something similar in the book, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET.
I am curious as to what you, the reader of this blog, do to get yourself writing. Do you write regularly? Do you find writing to be “hard work?”
Well, those are my thoughts this early Tuesday morning. I’ll be looking for your response.
Kind Regards,
Stephen
