Dear ACR 150 Students,
Thank you for taking the time to conduct your interviews and to share them with me. I have learned a lot from your reflections, and from the transcripts. Some of your interviewees grew up in different countries, so this, in turn, became a global oral history project. I took notes from everyone’s interviews so that I can now share bits and pieces of the project with you:
Ryan’s Mom reports “This teacher knew her struggles with the language so she told her this that if you are reading something and there is a word or phrase you don’t get don’t stop and give up because the word that may follow will give you context and what it means even if you must reread it will connect in your head. I found this amazing because it was just simple context clues, but it stayed with her all this time that if you don’t know a word that the words that follow will help you understand it better. As she uses this all the time reading on her phone, she said it’s a habit ever since then and helps her literacy.”
Santos’ uncle says, “I learned how to write at home because of my older brothers, they taught me the 27 letters of the alphabet.”
Sophia asked about the difference in schooling methods between before and now: “Definitely moving away from rote memorization. And into just like inventive spelling and sounding things out and they didn’t care that you spelled words exactly right and sounding out words it was more creative. Like for us we had to write words over and over again and memorize and everything had to be written and spelled exactly right and our penmanship. Now it’s about just figuring it out and they don’t care about the mistakes along the way.”
Robert’s Mom reports on a big takeaway from school: “Knowledge and enrichment; becoming more aware of different people and interests. I learned I like biographies and nonfiction more than fiction books, and I love the theatre. Schools taught me a lot about life.”
Musa’s brother says that he was one of the best students in class and that therefore his relationship with teachers was excellent.
There are two projects I cannot open: Kacper and Milo–please copy and paste into an email and resend or copy to Microsoft Word.
Many of you said in your reflections that the contrast between your interviewee’s schooling and your own was enormous. Is this a better time to be a student? In some ways, we’ve made progress: corporal punishment is, for the most part, no longer practiced. More educational resources are widely available, although there is a gap, minorities have less access to education, and the wealthier you are, the greater chance you have of attending a top level school. Educators are no longer seen as “gods,” and some will say this is a positive development, others might disagree. In my own pedagogical practices, you, my students, are my partners in learning, because I ackowledge that every one of you comes to class with some expertise you can share. The oral history project exemplifies this belief at its best.
In gratitude,
Prof. Barnes
