http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/detroit/michigan-teacher-claims-she-fired-organizing-trayvon-martin-144713504.html
I just want to say up front that I am not going to touch the issue of race in this story. It is possible that it is the very cornerstone of everything relating to Trayvon Martin. No, I want to talk about 21st century learning. One of the 21st century skills that we, as teachers, want from our students is for them to be active citizens of America. This teacher found something that her students connected to, which was this story about Trayvon Martin, and she used it to teach English and how to write as well as how to act upon your thoughts and be active citizens.
However, our society is still plagued by the "either/or" philosophy. The school told her that she is being paid to teach, not to be an activist. She wasn't the one who was being the activist, she was cultivating it in her students. I am confused because all of the older generations criticize our generation as the epitome of laziness and political apathy. When we find something that we feel passionate about, whether that be the take back wallstreet movement or this Trayvon Martin movement, we are criticized again and told "You are just being stupid" or "go find a job" or "the hoodie that Trayvon Martin was wearing was as much a part of his death as George Zimmerman was."
Studies have been done about engaging curriculum and they have shown that if you engage your students in a lesson with something that they are passionate about, they learn better. For instance, if you have a student who hates math and love motorcycles and teach him about math using motorcycles (i.e. the length of the parts of a motorcycle, how the motorcycle connects here and there and those are called degrees and how the opposite side of that degree is the same.), they are going to learn so much more than if you just put up an overhead projector and said "This is an angle, this is an angle, they are on opposite sides, they are equiangular, meaning they have the same angle."
This teacher used something that they were passionate about and utilized it, and she was fired for it. Our schools have become ghosts, we don't want to push our agenda, but we want to make active citizens. You can't have both is what the theory is, you can't teach about being an active citizen and remain neutral about party lines. But that is not true, we need to look at it in this way "There is not one thing in this world that we do not have an opinion about. Some math teachers might view math as the most useless thing in the world, but they teach it. Just because we have viewpoints that are not neutral, we should negate the fact that it is imperative to teach how to be an active citizen." My point of that is to say that if we only teach things where we don't have an opinion, students will not as much as they could if we do have opinions.
Then there is the issue that being an active citizen is expected of our generation, and yet, schools are afraid to touch on that subject because they might be criticized for pushing their agenda. Therefore, we have an achievement gap, our students are not learning how to be active citizens of our society. You can argue that it is just inherent, either you have it or you don't. But there are skills in being an active citizen that need to be taught. Students with disabilities struggle with learning (and may never learn) the hidden curriculum of our society. That hidden curriculum are things like "how to speak in front of people, how to form your thoughts, how to think about the opposite viewpoint to your opinions." If students don't learn these things, we, as educators, are not helping them build their castles on solid ground. Our job is to help them learn that if they make a castle in the sand, nature destroys it slowly.
