Education Reform

The two texts are very interesting to read side by side because of the drastically different historical contexts from which they emerge. While both discuss different ideas in the realm of pedagogy, one is proposing potential pedagogical interventions into the contemporary multiculturalist climate of the United States, while one is simply charting the historical development of reading and writing pedagogies of the homogenous French society at a historical point in time.

Sonia Nieto’s piece on Language, Culture, and Teaching is another interesting example of valuing the experiences of students in developing critical pedagogies. We saw this kind of valuation of student perspectives, especially those from minority groups, in Wiggan’s article on high achieving African-Americans. In her essay, Nieto provides these students an opportunity to reflect on a variety of aspects of schooling life, such as curriculum, pedagogy, and tracking. A really unique thing about the author’s sampling pool was the racial, ethnic, class, and age boundaries that she crossed unknowingly. It seems like for these reasons, her conclusions would definitely lead her to the understanding that a greater inclusion of multicultural education was necessary. She states that, “teachers and schools need to build on rather than tear down what students bring to the school…. They need to understand and incorporate cultural, linguistic, and experiential differences, as well as differences in social class, into the learning process… The results of such efforts often provide inspiring examples of success because they begin with a belief that all students deserve a chance to learn.” (121) Ultimately she believes that this is necessary to create a pedagogy that is critical of things such as relations of power while shaping people who will work towards social justice. Nieto places a strong importance on the value of experiences of students lives inside and outside of the classroom, and that education should be as grounded in these sites as much as possible. It seems that traditional curriculum and pedagogy constantly clash with the realities of the students’ lives and create impediments to constructive learning. She echoes Dewey in some of her sentiments when she states, “”there is often a tremendous mismatch between students’ cultures and the culture of the school… Rather than “going elsewhere,” their learning therefore often goes nowhere.” (127) Even though students are having experiences in school, these experiences are lacking the proper quality, which makes them unable to contribute to the construction of valuable experiences in the future.

Even the article by Chartier and Hebrard on the progression of reading and writing in France relates directly to the experience of the students. This is because, ultimately, the experience of the students cannot be separated from the socio-historical context it exists in. This is true of the situation in Nieto’s piece, which is problematized because of the huge varieties of cultures present. The problem essentially becomes how to be inclusive of all cultures and make sure students’ diverse voices and identities are acknowledged. As shown by the Lebanese student who was excluded from the school cookbook, even slight negligence, whether purposeful or not, can have lasting impact on student self-esteem and identity. However, in historical France, the problem was a more subtle difference in class status and religious association and not because of the huge extremes in cultural representation. Instead of needing to include a variety of cultural perspectives, modern education in France was going through the process of becoming something to allow students to engage with a variety of subjects. It seems like a major breakthrough in educational curriculum occurred when education was able to more definitively become a tool for political education and less of a religious one. It appears, through both of these articles that education always has an overarching power structure that defines it. The reason why multicultural education is necessary in Nieto’s article is because there is a dominant hegemonic discourse that stifles the voices of plurality. However, in France, writing and reading in the vernacular language and common texts were actually more inclusive even while they were working against the religious ones. At the end of the first stage in schooling Chartier and Hebrand even state when discussing the progress of reading skills in education that, “it had established, beyond the reading-writing-reckoning trilogy, a whole new set of basic skills… that would replace the religious culture.” (273), and then pose the question “What were the new objectives of reading in a situation of increasing conflict between the church and the state?” (274). The state being juxtaposed with the church is also parallel to the common individual being associated with the religious elite. As schooling was shifting towards educating the masses, education also had to shift to reflect the experiences of the people who were participating in it, for example, by teaching them French instead of Latin.

So while both articles reflect the need for socio-culturally relevant pedagogy, their different environments produced different capacities for educational reform. If shifting from the power of the church to the state in schools allowed great strides to be made in the importance of reading and writing, then as time progresses we should be able to fine tune pedagogies to reflect the needs of the masses who are being educated at the time, even if they have a variety of perspectives.