Weblog of Wesley Fryer

I got that idea about teachers in classrooms striving to “enthrall” students from my own experiences as a student and teacher, and my own studies about education and schools. When the teacher wants students to sit quietly, remain largely passive, and act as a sponge for information (receiving largely auditory input from lecture) I understand the teacher to be attempting to “enthrall” the student. When a person is enthralled, their entire attention is focused. This is what many teachers expect in a “traditional” school setting: The rapt, full attention of their students for the entire classperiod. My position on this is that as a goal, maintaining an “entralled” audience for 50 minutes or however long the classperiod may be is a daunting, if not impossible, challenge. Have you watched the video? I explain this in greater detail there. My central thesis is that we should ENGAGE students in meaningful work, rather than attempting to “enthrall” them with the prescribed lecture of the day. The link of that thesis to Papert’s distinction between literacy and letteracy is that we need to embrace the wider conception of literacy, offering students opportunities to consume, interact, experience and discover new ideas via various modalities – not just the auditory lecture of the teacher or the words of the textbook. I understand Papert to critique the traditional focus of schools on letteracy and a largely passive mode of learning: reading about the world instead of experiencing it. I agree with that position, if I am understanding it correctly, and am advocating that teachers seek to engage students not by “tricking” them or “sugarcoating” activities– not by being manipulative and coercive, but rather by providing differentiated choices for students for the tasks and learning activities in which they can engage during school. I agree with the idea that the curriculum itself can be a hurtful influence contributing to a coercive classroom culture, but I do not think teachers can be reasonably expected to entirely ignore such a curriculum entirely and keep their jobs. I do think, however, teachers in many contexts still have some autonomy in deciding how they will teach content and how they will invite students to engage with and process those ideas. I’m advocating for a teacher role which recognizes the futility of “entralling” students for very long, and instead opts to engage students through project-based learning activities and differentiated options for encountering ideas and working with them so learners “own them” to a greater degree and “make them their own.”