Read the weekly research article about the Jigsaw Classroom technique.
After reading, can you list
any advantages or disadvantages of this technique? Also, can competition add to the cause of
prejudice? Refer back to the Koppelman text to support your answer.
My Response for This Prompt
I loved and hated reading this week's research article. I loved it, because it validates my own plans for group instruction methods and implies that they should be quite successful. I hated it, because it is almost as if someone stole my thunder from forty-something years in the past. I have given much thought to overcoming the problems faced by my own childhood/teen classmates and me. I have thought about the nearly homogeneous social/political/economic environments in which we were raised. I have thought about the different teachers we had, their strengths and weaknesses as educators, and I have considered the best manner in which to incorporate the mindset changes that rural and suburban southern communities need most and have traditionally resisted the hardest.
The South, unfortunately,
still lives in a highly stratified mindset.
Too many children live in poverty with little physical reserve left over
to engage in intellectual pursuits. Men
of color and women of all colors espouse a full range of socially acceptable or
unacceptable opinion, often seeing the needs of their own In Groups ahead of
the needs of any other group, even when the underlying interests of those
groups truly coincide. Moreover, far too many white men go their
whole lives wondering what all the bellyaching is about, claiming that it was
not so hard for them, so people should stop whining so much and just buckle
down as they did. There is significant
competition for resources among the various resident cultural groups in our
state, which can lead to competition in the classroom when students arrive with
homegrown prejudices in tow. Our research
article for this week leaves no doubt that Aronson was correct in noting that
the “competitive atmosphere of the
typical classroom only served to fuel the fires of inter-group hostility”
(Reese). His Classroom Jigsaw method “was born of the need to change the
atmosphere from one of competitiveness to one of cooperation” (Reese), and
could go a long way toward overcoming prejudice-sparked competition in the
South’s rigidly traditional public schools and communities.
The public school cluster where I live now is a world of
difference from the socioeconomically homogenized environment of my youth. As I shared in our discussion last week,
there are so many people from different ethnicities and socioeconomic
backgrounds currently living in Gwinnett County that language barriers are a
significant problem at our schools; our teachers have to “Jigsaw” almost as
their default setting. The educators I
have been privileged to meet here in Gwinnett do not engage in the sort of victim-blaming
that was the norm in the 1970s/1980s.
Back then, it was publicly held to be the “foreigner’s fault” for coming here and encountering difficulty in
school, and their children were often told, “if
you’re going to live here, you can at least learn to speak the Bible’s language.” Academic failure was also openly held to be
the fault of children of color for “drinking
the Hand Up Kool-aid,” and they were often told “you should just try harder and, if you’re lucky, you can be as good
as the rest of us.” Some of our
teachers would even seem put out by lower income students who had trouble
grasping concepts because the SES problems their family faced made schoolwork
incredibly difficult, and chastised them for missing things in class that “normal white kids everywhere are smart
enough to get”. Our textbook defines
victim-blaming as “a focus on the group
being harmed by societal prejudices [with insistence] that society doesn’t need
to change: The group needs to change. Victim-blamers
urge individuals to stop being so sensitive or so pushy, to work harder, and to
quit complaining. Group members are told
they are responsible for whatever problems they must overcome” (Koppelman
39).
Here, if a child has trouble keeping up, it is the educators’
direct responsibility to get that child (and their family) on track. This is partly due to our teachers’ inherent
desire to give Gwinnett kids the best opportunity possible, and partly due to
residential reprisals should it come to NCLB probations. It is a relief to know
that I will work for a school cluster that truly
wants every single one of its families to have a better life via education and
community-sourced outreach. I cannot
describe to you how deeply thankful I am that I will get to be an educator in
this time where it is acceptable to call people out on their prejudiced
assumptions, their bigoted words, and their discriminatory actions, and to live
in this forward-thinking school district.
REFERENCES FOR THIS DISCUSSION POST
Koppelman, K.L. and Goodhart, R. L. (2011). Chapter 2:
Understanding prejudice and its causes. In M. Mattson (Ed.), EDUC-2120: Education GA Perimeter College North
(pp 25-41). Boston, MA: Pearson Custom Education.
Mattson, M. (2014). Chapter 2 lecture notes: Understanding
prejudice and its causes [PowerPoint slides]. GPC iCollege, EDUC-2120-001. Retrieved 27-Jan-2014 from https://gpc.view.usg.edu/d2l/home/485701
Reese, S. (2009). Classroom connection: The jigsaw classroom [PDF
document]. In Techniques Magazine:
Connecting Education and Careers. Association for Career & Technical
Education. Retrieved 27-Jan-2014 from https://gpc.view.usg.edu/content/enforced/485701-CO.710.EDUC2120.30523.20144/2120Jigsaw%2520Article.pdf
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