Category Archives: Intrepid Classroom

State of the Intrepid Classroom

I feel I am in a bit of a rut here at the Intrepid Teacher blog. Reading over my last few posts, I can see that I am sounding a bit repetitive and bitter. I think this is in part due to the fact that I am not interacting with students on a daily basis. I cannot emphasize how difficult this exile has been for me. I have done nothing but work with kids everyday for the last eight years, so to now sit alone in a coffee and stare at a screen is tough, but I wanted this post to be a breath of fresh air, not just me whining again, as it appears I have been doing.

I want to take this time to talk about and reflect on the Intrepid Classroom experiment I am working on. The mission statement of the class is:

Intrepid Classroom is a place where students of all ages from around the world visit, meet each other, share ideas, and decide what they want to learn from each other. The goal is to focus on the following topics: conflict resolution, global sustainability, peace activism, music and art as agent for social change, technology as a tool for social justice causes, but we are open to any other topics the readers of this blog suggest.We can discuss any topic we feel important here at the Intrepid Classroom. The hope is to create a fluid, organic curriculum that engages all participants.

What does that look like? So far we have 28 members from all over the world. We are using a variety of web tools to help create and maintain a natural network of students determined to investigate and pursue their own interests. I am fighting every urge to micro-manage the daily functions of our Ning, which seems to be the actual classroom where students come almost daily to talk about books, the war on terror, best forms of governments, music, or technology.

It has been fascinating for me, because I have taught some of these students first hand, while others I have never met. I am watching students from Doha discuss books with students I had in Malaysia, only to have a complete strangers join them from Costa Rica. I am allowing the students the freedom to explore and investigate not only what they want to learn, but how they will synthesis any new knowledge or skills they acquire. I often find them participating late on a Friday night or discouraged because tools are blocked at their schools. I am hoping that they will discover and share which of these tools are best for each task that they choose to pursue.

The point, I suppose, is for kids to realize that their learning is more than a grade. Seeking truth and knowledge is a natural and exciting human action. Furthermore, I hope they will realize that the search for this new knowledge need not be scripted or found in “approved” sources only. I want them to work with strangers to find meaning in their individual investigations. I cannot think of a more student centered way of teaching. I am not the expert, but another member of the network. I use the blog as a platform to share my thoughts and knowledge. It is becoming a great resource for political conscious music and film. I look forward to seeing it grow, so that the members of the class can share it with others.

I am always amazed by how much we underestimate students. When given the freedom to produce innovative work based on their own interests most of them will often surprise us. I am very pleased with our progress at this stage in the game. We are working with very few rules or guidelines, but there seems to be a synergy building that I am looking forward to exploiting.

Besides the blog and ning, we have a youtube channel for storing any video we may produce as well as a place to document and store video resources. We have started a wiki for a collaborative writing project as well as a place for brainstorming and collaborating on future projects.

Kids today do care about the world in which they live and are looking for ways to have a say in its administration. If you haven’t already been to the Intrepid Classroom please come by and snoop around. Join the Ning, we could use a few more teacher voices in our growing network, or use our resources to talk to your students about instilling a sense of creative activism. Invite them to join us. This is a great post to get them started. You may have to loosen the leash, but you will be surprised by how far they can run.

Activist Classroom

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Since March 10th, I have been out of a job and it has been difficult for me to post anything worthwhile, because after all, it is tough reflecting on teaching when you haven’t been teaching. There have been many times I have had a post brewing, but I let it slip away due to either, laziness or self-pity. Whatever the case may have been, I have a new project and I am excited to be back in the game.

Although I am not getting paid and my future is still unclear, I feel the need to be involved with my teaching network and trying to rustle up people who are interested in exchanging ideas and learning. Those are the reasons I teach anyway, not for a paycheck.

As I sat day after day, thinking about how the educational institutions of the world are mistreating me, I started to re-think what it means to teach in an institutional environment run at best by bureaucrats and at worst by corporate interests. I also began to brainstorm “perfect” classroom ideas. I have been forced to really sell myself to potential employers, and these negotiations have got me thinking about courses I would like to teach that don’t exist in most schools.

It appears that more and more people are starting to realize the fundamental flaw of teaching in a system that is based on profit. Teachers like Clay Burel and Bill Farren are asking us to rethink the very nature of how a school should function in society. As the global consumer cultures attains more and more influnce over all of our lives, should it not be the role of schools to offer young people alternatives to current systems.

Our schools should play a role in encouraging and teaching students the basic principles of activist culture. As the authority, teachers are nervous to tell an already rebellious group of adolescents to question authority, but we owe it to them to demand more of their educators.

I hope to play with some of these ideas further at the Intrepid Classroom, but I want to use this space to reflect on the reasons behind why these themes should be taught in traditional schools. I hope to create a sort of activist training school. A place where students can question the very systems they are told to worship. I would like to create a source of resources from art, to music, to web culture that helps students understand that although the mass media may try to make them believe they are powerless, there have always been people fighting for a better world, and most importantly they too can participate. Although perhaps not for much longer!
I have written in the past about my Utopian classroom, but now I want to focus on my perfect curriculum. The reoccurring themes for most of my ideas are the incorporation of Social Justice and Peace Activism into traditional curriculums. I see a series of specialized courses that deal with political, class-based issues, and artistic and philosophical themes. One such course would be an elective, probably a semester long on music as an agent of change. I hope to outline each course in depth, but for now I want to start drawing the rough sketches:

The music curriculum would study everything from sixties protest music, to the blues, to modern day singer/activists working for change. Students would not only listen to the music and examine and reflect on the lyrics, but they would also be asked to research and learn about the social problems that were the impetus of the music. As you can see there is already a Social Studies and Language Arts element to the material. They would also be asked to collaborate and create socially conscious music themselves. Using networking tools like Youtube, they would than try to promote their music to as wide an audience as possible.

I have taught a mini-music unit every year of my career, but it always seems forced, and it takes time away from the curriculum I “should” be teaching. Now that I am out of a real classroom, I hope to teach students about the power of music in a less constricting and confined environment We owe it to our students to not only study history, but learn to be a part of it.

How do you incorporate socially conscious material into your curriculum? What obstacle to you face?

Intrepid Classroom Is Back.

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Hello colleagues, peers, fellow teachers, and friends. For those of you who have been following my trials and tribulations on Twitter you know that it has been a roller coaster ride of almosts and not quite so’s. But I have finally realized that I need to get back to work. I may not have a classroom or a paying job, but I need to reconnect with students and other teachers. In short I need to teach!

I have been thinking about what role my classroom blog, Intrepid Classroom, could take during this time of involuntary sabbatical. I have been thinking about this transformation for several weeks, and I think I finally have enough structure to re-launch the site with some tangible goals and a compressible philosophy.

I hope that after visiting the site and reading the opening post of the Blog and the about page, you will use it as a resource for your students and invite them to enter the conversations at the Intrepid Classroom. I hope that this site will become an independent place for middle and high school students from around the world to come, meet, learn, teach, and share ideas. I hope to act as facilitator, social-network liaison, web 2.0 tutor, presenter, performer, observer, and organizer.

I want the site to focus on the following topics: conflict resolution, global sustainability, peace activism, music and art as agent for social change, technology as a tool for social justice, and any other topics the readers of the blog suggest.

In short, I want the site to be a place that students find interesting and entertaining, but also a place where they can challenge, not only mass media produced propaganda, but also their own entrenched culture beliefs.

Please read the introduction to the new Intrepid Classroom and share the link with as many educators and students that you know. Let’s see if we can create something special for both teachers and students. I would love to have guest contributors. People like Clarence Fischer, Clay Burell, George Mayo, Diane Cordell, and Lindsea come to mind as potential friends of the Intrepid Classroom.

If you want to get involved please leave suggestions or ideas in the comment section below.