Two of the major goals of the course were to develop the intellectual confidence of the inmates and to enhance their abilities of collectively understanding and solving their problems. Group oral reports and attempts to draw out collective solutions in discussion were methods used to accomplish these goals. The group...
Tag - science teaching
You asked about how we are struggling with the teaching of nature's science and math at Old Westbury. First of all, Old Westbury is comprised of 75% Black, Puerto Rican and Asian students and 20% white working class students. Their average age is 27. We are a youthful faculty, also largely Third World. We do not have...
The N.E. Regional National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) convention in Boston, last December, was different from past national NSTA conventions the Science Teaching Group has attended. We were asked to present our own sessions, given space for our literature table, and the NSTA sessions were run in a more open...
The SESPA Science Teaching Group held a science conference on Saturday, March 10 at the Cardinal Cushing High School in South Boston. The 150 participants included students and faculty from local high schools and colleges. The conference was organized in response to a need felt among science teachers to begin a...
During the summer of 1969 a group of Black students of Community College of Philadelphia challenged the Chemistry department to make chemistry relevant to Black students and their communities. Many communities surrounding Community College of Philadelphia have problems that can be solved by technical and scientific...
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York Herder and Herder, 1970) is a critical book for all those who are seeking alternative lifestyles in the teaching of science life styles which are grounded in and have bearing on the social, political and economic reality of the contemporary world. It is a book for...
The course began with an analysis of the institutional and conceptual foundation of physics today. In fact, since Al's first lecture came the day after the Attica massacre, it was devoted to how science and technology in this society provide methods for repression, control and murder. It was magnificently received.
This past year I have been part of a nine-member staff teaching a one year (three quarter) sequence in social science at the University of Chicago. About two hundred students registered for the course. They were divided up into sections of 25 each. The sections met for discussion three hours per week and all 200...
At the end of the first semester a proposal was made by a group of teachers: instead of giving another semester of general biology to the freshman class, why not offer areas or study which differed in content, so that students would have some choice in their scientific curriculum, and we could thereby pursue our own...
In the last few years many of us have begun to question various aspects of our jobs as teachers. In part this has been due to an awakening consciousness among all teachers about the authoritarian nature of schools and the socializing function they perform. It has been due also to the broad recognition now that...