The What + Why:
1) Remembering that your Alternative Schooling Moment (ASM) must happen outside of a traditional schooling environment (college or secondary campus, tutoring centers, or community class spaces), please write two paragraphs describing your group’s ASM.
Our group Alternative Schooling Moment (ASM) is a tutoring/mentorship center that is not affiliated with the public school system in any way. It is a large center situated in Brooklyn. We are open for only 3 hours each day and employ people from various fields to better accommodate the various students’ interests in their careers and their lives. Most of what we do is teach things that students do not understand in a much more interactive way than just making them read books. More importantly, we give the students advice that can’t be found in books, such as how to apply what they have learned and use that to achieve their goals.
This center is largely focused on creating an interactive learning environment with the students. For example, if someone has trouble with physics, instead of reiterating all the equations that they have read off of books, we will take them outside and show them through different activities what those equations are actually representing. Also, we focus more on the skills that are relevant to each students’ objectives in life. For example, if someone wanted to be an actor, we won’t bother teaching them anything about Chemistry. We would have one of our teachers who is in the field of acting teach the student using our methods. We would then build a foundation for their acting career by doing things such as connecting them with agents. Overall, this center is a place where people attend not to only learn about subjects they don’t understand, but how they can manage their lives in the real world.
2) Who will be the audience/students of your ASM? Why?
The main audience in our ASM are students who are mostly in high school and in college. High school and more so, college, are pivotal parts of a student’s life and are the building blocks of a student’s career. We feel that it is essential to enhance the relevant skills a college student has before entering a particular workforce. Many college students today are strictly enforced to formal education; consisting of taking tests, writing papers, and doing homework. We believe that interactively teaching the students will allow them to be adept in many academic fields. We are not limited to college and high school students, however, anyone who is trying to get on the path of starting a career would be part of our audience as well. This includes adults who have already completed their education, but want to learn more about how they could put the stuff they learned to use for their general welfare.
We will divide our audience by age and grade level. High school and college students will be separate, however, they will be interacting amongst each other frequently in our center. It is important for all our students to be sociable to promote an enjoyable way of learning instead of just a quiet lecture with no communication as we see in regular schools.
3) Remembering that learning objectives are active, please list the three main objectives of your ASM?
- Our first objective is to find out what subject/field does each student needed help with, then assign a teacher from that particular field to work with him/her individually, where they will teach them using interactive methods.
- Our second objective is to help students to apply what they have learned to real life application and helps students to develop/strengthen skills that are relevant to daily life.
- Our last objective is to set the students up and build a foundation for their career goals.
4) How do those three main objectives reflect your group’s philosophy of education and school?
Our first objective reflects on our philosophy of education by understanding what exactly the students are trying to learn. Once we learn that information, we can further develop methods to create an interactive way to help the student learn that particular subject. This shows how we put a major emphasis on practical education as oppose to formal education. Our philosophy revolves around the idea that students should be able to learn things in a way that they can put to use of it also known as practical education. By understanding what the students want to learn, we can guide them in the right direction.
The second objective is the vocal point of our philosophy. We want our students to apply what they have learned and enhance their everyday skills in order to develop their education. Our last objective is the impact that our philosophy makes. With our unique interactive learning methods, we allow students to build a foundation for their career. Again, we want students to be able to use what they learn in their careers, and that is one of our primary goals at our center.
5) Which two of the readings does your group’s philosophy on schooling and education respond to (either by supporting or challenging)? Please provide textual evidence of the relationship between that reading and your group’s philosophy.
We believe that learning doesn’t merely happen through just the completion of coursework. Successful learning comes from hands-on learning experience. John Locke once said “From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded….our observation, about sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves in that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking” (Locke, 2). Observational based teaching techniques creates relevant, engaging, memorable educational experiences that effectively address the specific challenges that learners face. Making connections between things read off of books and the real-life observations of these topics immediately registers the topic in the learner’s mind. We believe that this is not just because the learner can memorize the material better with observations, but because since the learner is now able to make more sense of the topic and understand it deeper, they will not forget it. Ultimately, this sharpens our thinking ability with more practice and exposure to observational learning, which is very beneficial in a person’s long-term learning career.
Particular experiences such as traveling and exploring can be regarded as an essential tactic to learning. This is why we will often times take the students out on trips to do fieldwork. In Frankenstein by Mary Shelly, the monster didn’t obtain education through a schooling system. He also wasn’t taught to read or write by friends or family. He did however, have the ability to explore his environment. By traveling around every day and observing his surroundings, the monster was able to gain knowledge about society. This relates to our philosophy in that it supports our objective of teaching students in a way where they can see and understand things for themselves, with a bit of our help.. We believe that teaching students in the form of interactions engages them better as opposed to reading countless textbook pages. Frankenstein’s monster serves as a perfect example because he used nature to learn and not textbooks. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock” (Shelly, 13). According to Shelly, knowledge learned through experience allows a person to store more information in the long-term memory. This supports our philosophy because we believe that observational learning methods are more efficient than reading words off of paper.
