Author: Grady Leonard

Problem: Education is evolving at a faster rate than professors can keep up with. As new curriculum and methods are being created and implemented, long time professors struggle to keep up with or adapt to the new methodologies, rather than the traditional lecturing towards a passive audience.

Solution: Have younger and newer professors help the older and more long time professors learn the new methodologies and help them to implement them into the classroom.

Effects:

• This will create a more open and inclusive classroom environment where students will feel more free to express their opinions in a way that contributes to the learning, instead of allowing themselves to simply be lectured at.
• Education will be more uniform across the University because professors will all be using very similar methods in their classrooms
• Both younger and older professors will benefit and have a learning experience of their own learning the new methods from younger professors and a more classical approach from the older ones
• Students will want to be more engaged in classroom discussions because the professors are no longer just lecturing towards the students and are rather more open to student ideas

Meghan Kidd:

Praise: I like your stance on Gen Eds and how pointless they are

Use of Percy: This quote fits well with what you want to talk about regarding Gen Eds

Constructive: This doesn’t really say what you’re going to be writing about in your paper, elaborate more on what you want to write about

Olivia Vearling:

Praise: I think this is a good idea because you are not just focusing on the school work but are also learning just life experience.

Use of Percy: No use of Percy

Constructive: I don’ think that this is enough, just doing tutoring is not enough to transform learning at WCU.

Team Members: Grady Leonard

Topic: The campus and the community. We go to town for yogurt (no! have some acai instead) or whatever, but most of us don’t really have a  sense of community beyond the campus at WCU.  We can do better. We must do better. How should students at WCU, and the institution itself, interact with the community beyond the campus in order to achieve the goals for transformative learning?  Identify the problem and then use the work of Percy and Freire to assert (at least) four ways in which WCU could use our non-campus community to support something at the core of the student experience at WCU.  Your ideas must be supported by four critical ideas from the work of  Percy (and Freire if desired).

Working Thesis: With the wonderful town of West Chester just steps away from the University, it is heinous how uninvolved the students are with the community as a whole. Students need to become more involved in the community by doing things such as participating in community events, volunteering throughout the community, get a job in town, or even have the community have more influence on the University as a whole.

Percy Quotes:

“The tourist who carves his initials in a public place, which is theoretically “his” in the first place, has good reasons for doing so, reasons which the exhibitor and planner know nothing about. He does so because in his role of consumer of an experience (a “recreational experience” to satisfy a “recreational need”) he knows that he is disinherited. He is deprived of his title over being. He knows very well that he is in a very special sort of zone in which his only rights are the rights of a consumer. He moves like a ghost through schoolroom, city streets, trains, parks, movies. He carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role of consumer. He is saying in effect: I am not a ghost after all; I am a sovereign person. And he establishes title the only way remaining to him, by staking his claim over one square inch of wood or stone.”

“The sonnet is obscured by the symbolic package which is formulated not by the sonnet itself but by the media through which the sonnet is transmitted, the media which the educators believe for some reason to be transparent. The new textbook, the type, the smell of the page, the classroom, the aluminum windows and the winter sky, the personality of
Miss Hawkins—these media which are supposed to transmit the sonnet may only succeed in transmitting themselves.”

Team Members: Grady Leonard

Topic: The space of education at WCU. Freire’s challenge for us to reimagine the ways in which we learn doesn’t just ask us to re-shape ourselves intellectually; Freire’s ideas also suggest a need to re-shape the spaces of education. Use your understanding of Freire’s ideas to analyze the space of education at WCU, identifying and proposing the means by which WCU’s space can be deployed to achieve the ends of Freire’s concept of learning.

Thesis (working): The typical classroom, or learning space, has always been the same since the beginning; it is set up in such a way that is conducive to the banking concept of education. The design of classrooms needs to change in a way which is more conducive to actually learning rather than memorizing, and the coconstruction of knowledge.

Quotes:

“The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people living “outside” society. They have always been “inside”—inside the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such
transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizaçao.”

“Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.”