Participation Gap

To begin with, I'm going to give a bit of context on my teaching experience. Thus far I have only ever taught or assisted teaching in college setting courses, primarily in the field of math and physics related subjects. As such I am familiar with students who do not participate, but I'm also seeing them at a later period in life than many here with high school experience are used to. When I see that a student is not engaged is the lesson, it seems to often have to do with the fact that they don't understand what's going on. Whether the lack of understanding is the cause of non-engagement, vice versa, or they both share some common root is something that I've always struggled to determine. I've always gotten the sense however that it's a feedback loop where not being engaged means they don't pay attention enough to understand the material and since they don't understand the material, they disengage from the lesson even more. More so, I don't think that this is a cycle unique to the class I might happen to be teaching. I get the sense that this cycle is one that has developed over many years and they have come to see themselves as someone who simply just isn't good at school. This is something which seemed to be described by Halverson's "Film as Identity Exploration" as a 'narrative' (pg 4). This self narrative is about who you tell yourself you are, which is often influenced by who other people tell you that you are.

There have been many studies for instance done about girls who believe that because they are girls, they are not good at math. This belief causes them to give up a little sooner on tough math problems, opt for the regular instead of advanced course when on the verge of being able to do either, and pursue jobs in less STEM related fields. It's a subtle thing, but it adds up quite a lot over the years. Now think about who else this happens to. It's not just girls that lose out on opportunities because of this, other stereotypes include those about race and the lower class. Because people think they are not worth giving opportunities to, they do not get these opportunities. Fast forward to high school and you get a participation gap, certain students that do not participate because they don't want to display how 'bad' they are, and by now they actually may very well be bad at the subject because they haven't put in the effort over the years that others have by participating. I would love to see this gap be overcome, but when there is one teacher and twenty students per class (not even considering multiple classes per day) it is difficult to devote enough attention to be able to build that bridge once the gap already exists.

Curating Copyright

For this week's prompt, I found myself doing a lot more research on copyright law than I really expected was ever necessary. In the end, I think that what most spoke to me was the Fair(y) Use Tale and Fair Use School videos on what copyright law /does/ allow you to do. Thus for this week's video critique, I will be looking at Day at School, which I found to be cute, but unhelpful. As works go, it was a fun video to watch, and called back to the advertisements of the 1950s, however I found it to be what I would expect for a great contest entry, but not a great informative resource. Disregarding aspects that I just didn't like (I feel like they picked several of the worst aspects of the 50s to model while leaving out other things that reduced the effect of resemblance) in this video they inform you of three things which you can't so and alternatives for what you can do in place of those. These three points were good to address because they're the most common things that educators think are okay, but this really didn't paint a whole picture about what actually can be done. After watching that video first, I was left with the impression that copyright law is extremely restrictive. It seemed like the only things that an educator is allowed to do is show something they've already bought which is directly related to the curriculum, use only /very/ limited clips, or outright make their own content.

Something I found much more helpful however, was http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr280.shtml which talks about what can and can't be done. Their link to the five major topics provided for easy navigation to important topics such as where the line between stealing and fair use for educators is, the cans and can'ts of fair use and copyright, and how the matter gets complicated by newer technologies. In fact it was in the new technologies section where I found evidence that my use of a song by Kevin McLeod would have likely been okay even if I hadn't found it at a royalty free site with a creative commons attribution license. On a more critical note however, the education world website is... cluttered. White space might not be bad, but they have wasted space on either margin of their site which they could really have moved their content into to give it more room. The navigation bar on the left is a reasonable size, but on the right column is a couple of unrelated tools that take up way too much room given that it's not the primary focus of the website. This page's actual purpose is the article itself and the tool column on the right is almost the same size as the actual article. Worse, the tool column is only one page deep while the article itself extends several pages down into where it is an isolated bit of text with more space /not/ being used than the article itself takes up. This makes their site look unprofessional and like it doesn't actually have useful and important information which can be very unfortunate because they really do.