As an AE classroom teacher, I had the following students - all at the
4-6th grade reading levels:
~ A young Turkish woman who was quite vocal about her Muslim Views
~ A young southern boy (proud of his cowboy hat and boots) who saw the
world in black and white
~ An older gentleman who loved History, but held to a strict
interpretation of the bible (and several other older ladies who also
held to strict bible interpretations)
2 older black women who had dropped out of segregated southern schools
in their early teens
~ A native American  woman who wanted her GED so she could become a
lawyer and get her husband out of jail
~ A sixteen year old, who was no longer living at home, with a chip on
his shoulder a mile wide
~ A young woman with feminist views, but impulse control issues.

It was NOT POSSIBLE for ANY day to go by WITHOUT an "ideological
orientation" discussion happening in my classroom. What I needed were
tools with which to handle and make use of the ideological debates that
came up EVERY DAY in class.

For me - the teaching/learning tools for addressing many of these issues
were: determining fact/opinion, the *concept* of objectivity and the
role of multiple sources in objectivity/determining bias; and (what I
consider a  basic tenet of education) teaching my students to "question"
- "Why do you think that?" was my mantra.  We also did a fair bit of
work on conflict resolution (insert sigh and eye-roll here).

For your amusement - Our unit on outer space was especially interesting.
[I had one woman shocked to find out that we had actually landed on the
moon - she thought that was all made up; my history gentleman wanted to
study galaxies, but couldn't reconcile the age of galaxies with what he
knew to be biblically true; and my Turkish woman stayed after class with
me for 3 hours to learn "Where the stars went during the day" - I had to
go find a globe.] 

Duren Thompson
Center for Literacy Studies

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 8:02 AM, Cynthia Peters
<cynthia_peters at worlded.org> wrote:

It would be interesting to talk with teachers about how they address
objectivity in the classroom. How do they come up with objective
sources? Perhaps another way of looking at it is to remain skeptical of
all sources and to look at many sources and to ask questions about where
the sources comes from, what interests they might represent, and what
outcomes they might be invested in, etc.

For example, what constitutes "solid information"?

Cynthia
--

Cynthia Peters
Change Agent Editor
World Education
44 Farnsworth Street
Boston, MA  02210


Message: 6
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:39:20 -0400
From: David Rosen <DJRosen at theworld.com>
Subject: [PD 4074] Learners should be challenged to read and view
	things	they might _not_ like, too
To: The Adult Literacy Professional Development Discussion List
	<professionaldevelopment at nifl.gov>
Message-ID: <720D6864-9F3C-48FF-BD95-EFDB4D538F0A at theworld.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hello Steve Kaufmann,

As you may know, the word education comes from the Latin, "educare"  
which means to "bring out of" or to "lead forth." One interpretation  
of this is that teachers should help to bring something out of  
learners; to bring it to consciousness. Another is that teachers  
should challenge learners, as Cynthia appears to suggest, by helping  
them to critically view many sources in forming their views.  I agree  
that learners should read what they like, but not only what they like.  
They should also be challenged by their teachers to examine their  
assumptions, to learn about the world outside their community, and to  
see the world in new ways.

I was recently challenged in my thinking by a PBS documentary on  
Bangladesh in which the responsibility for thousands -- perhaps soon  
to be millions -- of "climate change refugees"  is placed by a  
Bangladeshi educator not on the refugees who contributed not at all to  
the climate change problem that has disastrously affected their low- 
lying villages, but on people in industrial nations such as the U.S.  
and China, countries that so far do not seem to take much  
responsibility for the consequences of climate change because we are  
not (yet) much affected.

To view this half-hour documentary, "Water World," go to
http://www.pbs.org/now/ 
    Good professional development (such as this WGBH TV documentary)  
also challenges teachers to think in different ways and perhaps to  
read what they might not otherwise have chosen.

David J. Rosen
DJRosen at theworld.com


On Oct 27, 2009, at 12:23 PM, Steve Kaufmann wrote:


> If the issue is literacy, it does not matter what the information  

> is. Learners should be encouraged to read and listen to the  

> information that they like, whether the Bible, Karl Marx or the  

> sports page. It is not for the literacy teacher to worry about the  

> ideological orientation of the learner, in my view.

>

> Steve Kaufmann

> 604-922-8551