Schoolishness
Description
In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.
Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically.
Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."
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Person
Susan D. Blum is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of I Love Learning; I Hate School, and My Word!, as well as the editor of Ungrading.
Content
Introduction: The Education Gospel and the Deeply Held Structures of Schoolishness
1. Experiencing School: What's the Problem?
2. The Aims and the Ends, Values and Value: From Games, Sorting, and Exchange Value to Learning, Being ,and Use Value
3. Pedagogy and Pedagogizing: From Direct Instruction to Independent Learning
4. Teachers, Students, Classes: From Authorities and Competitors to Communities of Varied Learners
5. Questions: From Compliance, Control, and Evaluation(Authority) to Curiosity, Power, Wonder, andEffervescence (Democracy)
6. Time: From Speed, Uniformity, and Deferral to Need,Variation, and Sufficiency
7. Work, Labor, Play: From Toil and Exchange to Worth,Meaning, and Use
8. Spaces and Places: From Separation to Connection
9. Genres of Consumption: From Scarcity, Artificiality,Constraint to Abundance and Variety
10. Genres of Production: From Artificiality and Controlto Authenticity and Freedom
11. Tech and Media: From Clunky to Vibrant
12. Attending (to) Bodies: From Stillness, Isolation,Normativity, and Control to Action, Connection,Variation, and Agency
13. Selves: From Alienation to Authenticity, Wholeness,and Meaning
14. "The Trees Need Water": Authentic Learning in an Educational Ecosystem
15. Making Schools Less Schoolish: Of Evolutions and Revolutions
Conclusion: Creating the World We Want to Live In
