4)+Provocations+1+(Re-imagining+School)

Read the following narrative and then watch the corresponding youtube video. Imagine you are a child entering the school system. Do you find the system kind to you or destructive to you? Do you feel you are vulnerable? Are you aware of the power differential? Can collaboration exist in this environment? Reflect on the notion of vulnerability through the eyes of a child entering the school system. = The Child is Placed on the Conveyor Belt =

(From "On Pedagogy and Memory" MA Thesis by Jennifer George 2009 University of Calgary)

I entered Kindergarten this year. I walked to the door of my school and climbed on the conveyor belt that will direct me for the next 13 years of my life. But there is a problem. I am not an object. I am a person. Yet I will sit on the conveyor belt as it moves me from one grade to the next. My head tilted back, mouth gaping INSERT KNOWLEDGE HERE. Every once in a while I will be given a test to see if I deserve to stay on the belt or should be re-routed. I will lose some friends along the way as they are diverted off the belt. Perhaps they didn’t measure up. Some others will manage to slip past the detours unnoticed. They will slip through the cracks of the system. Lost. Along the way, I will be asked to complete tasks. Some will challenge my intellect and inspire my spirit but most will not. Most will insult me by asking me to regurgitate knowledge that was dumbed down and delivered in prescribed, sterile and easily measurable ways. I will learn that the most important questions are those asked by the teacher. I will learn that my single most important purpose is to figure out the single best answer. I will learn to fear the unknown. This will slowly break me. I will see through them and stop asking real questions. In the end I will be dumped off the belt and into a box. And because of the very nature of my arrival I will stay close to the box and rarely venture out. I won’t trust. Outside I feel vulnerable.

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