Fecho Ch.4-6

            In Chapter 4, Fecho discusses the role that tension plays in the learning process, claiming that it is “the boa constrictor in the room that most educators do not want to acknowledge” (38).  On the whole, I feel that my school’s environment does not recognize and work through tension, and this attitude is evident in the classroom. I was taught that if a student uses a word like “faggot”, I should pause the lesson and turn this occurrence into a “teachable moment”. We discussed how to handle this type of situation in our training for TFA, but I mostly felt like I was being told to follow a script that encouraged my students to be politically correct, but didn’t address the reasons behind their beliefs or biases. In a classroom that is truly dialogical, I wouldn’t be giving a lecture, but my students would be engaging in a discussion about why they use or do not use that word. In addition, any acknowledgement of tension that may arise from what is said in the classroom or what happens at school is discouraged by the administration at my school. There should be no deviation from the standard curriculum. I agree with Fecho’s suggestion to recognize and work through tension in the classroom, and I think that this should ideally begin with administration recognizing and working through the tension that exists throughout the school and involves administrators, teachers, and students. In this way, teachers will be more likely to discuss tension within their classrooms without a fear of someone catching them “taking a detour” from the scheduled lesson plan.

            Fecho points out in Chapter 5 that “far too many books on education are written as if teaching is not a messy, complex process” (45) and further explains that this translates school districts that “saddle themselves with the concept of best practice” (46). In my experience as a teacher so far, everything that we are told to do has been called “data-driven” and “research-based”. In my frustration with the information that was being fed to me during my first year of teaching, I came across an article that relates to Fecho’s discussion in this chapter and has stuck with me. It is entitled “What would big data think of Einstein?” and warns us about our current obsession with following practices that are based on data from research. Many of the education practices are what the article calls “backward-looking”. In other words, they only analyze what happened in the past and fail to imagine what could happen in the future. If teachers were given more autonomy with their practices, then they could try out new ones and perhaps stumble upon something that works well for them. Big data is not the same as big ideas, and as Fecho states, teaching is a messy, fluid, and complex process that requires big ideas to be improved.

            In Chapter 6, Fecho explains the importance of wobble. When wobble occurs, something is changing, and we must respond to it. Fecho states that “wobble grabs the person’s attention and compels some level of reflection on the contexts that created that belief system’ (54). In my experience, it has been hard to get wobble to occur in my classroom. I naively thought that my students would be interested in how I learned Spanish and my experiences living in a foreign country, where many of my moments of wobble occurred. However, many of them seem to dismiss what they have not been exposed to, as is human nature. I think that exposure to different ways of life is essential for creating Fecho’s concept of wobble, and I am in search of new and creative ways to give my students this type of exposure despite the fact that our resources are limited.