Collaboration in Pedagogy

Hello everyone,

There are practical considerations that need to be addressed in modern education that aren't always attended to.

1. Non-skilled jobs that pay a living wage are not readily available in the United States. This is addressed frequently in the press, but education has been slow to adapt to it.

2. Children in America have been watching television instead of reading for more than 60 years. (I date the modern age of commercial television from 1946.) Film/video have become the dominant literature of our time.

3. It is rarely necessary to calculate any more; most calculation is done electronically.

4. We are educating the third generation since drug use was popularized in the 1960s.

5. Most entertainment, and indeed most communication, is done through the internet.

6. Research is easy. Determining the validity of sources is hard.

7. Plagiarism is easier than ever. Catching plagiarism is also easier.

8. Portable entertainment will only becoming more portable and more entertaining.

9. There have been monumental shifts in public attitudes on race, gender, and sexuality that have affected all discourse.

10. Lawsuits have governed much of what we do for more than 50 years.

11. Postmodernism is winding down; something else is emerging, as yet defined only by such characteristics as extreme fragmentation, ad hoc communities connected superficially, rapidly shifting language, lack of privacy, polarization, and amorality.

12. Most of our students are more electronically advanced than most of us. (I am an "immigrant" to the world of computers; my students are natives.)

I could go on, but I list these things to suggest that there are reasons that educators struggle sometimes to find things that will work with their students.

There is no single force that can change things; there is no single approach that will work in all cases. Further, none of us is able to handle everything necessary to help our students.

That is why collaboration becomes essential. Our collective intelligence is far beyond anything any one of us can have. I made a list of practical difficulties according to my own observation, but I have only a few strategies to overcome them. I have friends, however, whose opinions I value, and whom I would go to for help if I bumped into a problem or a student or a situation that I couldn't solve from my own background. When I can't solve a problem (I have never been successful with all my students), I have relied on others to pick up the slack.

Jeff Combe