The Culture of Power

For John Dewey, as people adjust to an ever-changing society, they are made different with their experiences. Dewey also believes that people are “social animals” who learn not only from reading textbooks but also through active interaction. These active interactions can only occur if we use our literacy skills. Literacy is what we use to communicate with one another using speech, auditory, visual, writing or reading. From this, we try to construct meaning and understanding. When considering the concept of nature versus nurture in a child’s education, I feel that the most influential yet detrimental is nature, which in this case is the culture of power. As defined by the merriam-webster, culture is “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization”. Schools are institutions that represent our society. Our society when looking at the people in power fail to really understand the problems teachers face in today’s society. In a traditional Socratic class, the teachers would lecture while the students sat in their seats listened and took notes. The teacher had the power. Today, we know that this kind of teaching is not only failing to engage our students but most importantly does not allow room for flexibility. I as an educator am faced to apply different approaches to my teaching in order to successfully provide my students with the best education experience. When thinking about the culture of power, a shared attitude about literacy it seems as though students are not welcomed to use their home language which today might be Spanglish, in their classroom. When looking at standardized test, many of the students fail because there is either a right way of communicating. According to Dewey, my students’ learning would increase when they are engaged in activities that have meaning to them. To Gee James Paul in his article, “From Video Games, learning about Learning”, one should adapt our teaching and instruction to reflect our society and times for a better future for our students. I have never viewed video games as reflecting a new form of learning and thinking. In his own words, "the theory of learning in good video games fits better with the modern, high-tech, global world today’s children and teenagers live in than do the theories of learning that they see in school”. What he means by this is that we need to relook and change the way we facilitate our students learning which according to Gee James Paul, is less challenging and “shorter and simpler”.