Running head: INQUIRY PROJECT 1

Inquiry Project

Ronnie Trimmer

EDUC 275.004: Schooling in the United States

Instructor: Vincent Basile

December 9, 2015
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Inquiry Project

On Tuesday, November 24, 2015, I interviewed Craig Blackham, a 54 year old White, male, who

has been teaching 9th and 10th grade Literature and Composition, and AP Literature at Elizabeth

High School for the past 25 years. To garner the perspective of a community member who isnt

as close to the setting of a K-12 school, I also interviewed 23 year old, Luis Rodriguez, a

Hispanic Engineering student at Colorado State University, on December 2, 2015. Craig

Blackham and Luis Rodriguezs views contrasted as Rodriguez felt that public schools were

doing a great job meeting the needs of all students, while Blackham acknowledges that schools

are doing their very best to meet the needs of all learners, he feels that they arent being fulfilled

to their highest potential; however, both individuals believe education will always get better over

time.

The Purpose of Schooling

After spending more than 25 years teaching high school students, Craig Blackham

has become uniquely intuned to education in the U.S. and offers great insight into the classroom.

Blackhams personal philosophy of education is, Knowing that everything we do leads to an

eternal truth, whether youre reading Fredrick Douglass or Shakespeare theres some basic truth

that we can find from all of these, either explicate or implicit. Blackham has held this belief

since his time in college at the University of Colorado, and tries to impart that notion upon each

of his students in order to meet his idea of what the purpose of schooling is, which is, to equip

people to be both productive and happy members of society. Luis Rodriguez has been out of a

K-12 classroom for nearly five years now, however as a member of the community his ideas are

equally valid as he is a representation of how non-educators feel. Rodriguez felt that the purpose

of schooling was, to educate the uneducated, obviously, but its also to help people kind of
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find their own place in the world and to lead them to a better life. John P. Miller confirms that

this is the same goal for nearly all of academia in his paper Educating for Wisdom, stating, The

focus of most schools and universities is on the development of marketable skills. This

commonly aligned belief shows that people put their faith in public schools to assist people on

their way to living happy and productive lives.

Experience in Schooling

Luis Rodriguez believes that schools are doing an exemplary job when it comes to

meeting students educational needs, however he believes there is still work to be done when it

comes to making everyone feel welcomed into the educational community. Though he is unsure

if he felt that way due to experiencing racism because he was a Hispanic student enrolled in

classes, which were filled with primarily White children, or whether he felt excluded because he

was simply shy. Rodriguez revealed that while in school his race felt like it was the elephant in

the room that no one wanted to address. Zo Burkholder wrote on the exact issue that Rodriguez

was facing, this called the colorblind issue, which happens when educators and students refuse

to acknowledge race, misguidedly thinking if it isnt talked about no one will be able to feel

discriminated against; however it then becomes an issue of students feeling as if theres

something abnormal about other cultures and actually leads to racist actions against minority

students for being different. Burkholder wrote the following in regard to how the colorblind

method was able to become so prevalent in the public school system, Schoolsstopped

encouraging meaningful discussion of human diversity and instead required all students to

exhibit "good manners" in their interracial relations. Teachers insisted minority students perform

proper etiquette by conforming to white middle-class cultural norms.Rodriguez believes that

without that essential feeling of acceptance in school theres no way to build a sense of
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community in school because students are then forced to be on their guard when they go to class

rather than simply focusing on learning. Other students may have felt they were being polite by

never mentioning his race however, this lead to Rodriguez to feel unaccepted- students could see

his race, but they never said anything because they felt it to be more polite to stay quiet, but in

reality they only made him feel like an outsider.

Are Schools Meeting the Needs of All Diverse Learners?

Craig Blackham is also unsatisfied with how these issues are being met. However

Blackham brought up a powerful and important issue when discussing the various needs of the

varying abilities, I think the fact that we have to address all of those things makes it almost an

impossible task. I think were better than we were twenty years ago, but I still think theres room

for improvement. Society has placed an overwhelming amount of things on our plate, everything

from protecting our kids, to nursing our kids to building up who they are as a person. All of these

things that stray away from true academics, have become part of what we have to address, and

that makes it so, so hard to meet everyones needs on a daily basis. Its easy to say that its an

essential need to make sure no one feels discriminated against in class, though exampled by the

concerns of a seasoned educator, there are simply too many issues that must be in addition to

teaching whats on the syllabus. Rodriguez recalled his experience in schools and could feel the

struggle that the schools faced when he was a student, I know the schools did their best to help

students like me do their best in school, and they do their best to praise everyone equally. Though

I know sometimes they struggle with that because its kind of hard to do, especially with other

kinds of kids if you know what I mean, like bad ones, not so talented ones, not so gifted ones,

even just like the different ones. The knowledge that teachers are being asked to take on a

tremendous responsibility as they attempt to make their classrooms a safe place, is well known at
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this point for the general public, though society is still asking them to take the challenge upon

their selves.

Observations

I was fortunate enough to be able to observe Craig Blackhams classroom, especially

since he was my 9th grade English teacher. I found the experience to be unique because I was

able to view his class in a different light than when I was his student. Now as I am in classes

teaching me how to be a good teacher Im able to pick up on Blackhams subtle text-book

examples on how to interact with students in ways that will not only benefit their educations, but

will also help them to be better people long after theyve left his classroom. Blackham was to

manage his classroom the entire time, in the sense that there were no students disrespecting one

another or taking time away from the class by causing a disruption. As the classes were 100

minutes long each, Blackham had time to begin each of his lessons by taking about ten minutes

to interact with the students personally to assess how they were all feeling, as well as allowing

them to talk amongst themselves to get comfortable in the room and become ready to learn. By

doing so Blackham was not only giving the children a better connection to each other and the

class, but he was also teaching them love and compassion for one another. This is following the

Dalai Lamas philosophy of compassion beautifully, because as he said, you will come to

realize that what we call love and compassion are not necessarily a religious matter. Love and

compassion are basic necessities of life- not only for the individual but also for society. This is a

lesson Blackham truly wanted his students to walk away having learned.

To assist his students who learned in different ways Blackham made sure he was able to

address each Howard Gardners different learning styles (Fernandez-Balboa, Marshall). Auditory

learners were able to listen to Blackhams words, but he also encouraged his students to always
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discuss what they had talked about in class with each other to make sure they were able to

always hear what they needed to. For visual learners, once the lesson had begun Blackham

stayed up near the white board to write down all of the main points, and encouraged his students

to take notes so theyd be able to see the information when theyre studying for their final.

Finally for his kinaesthetic learners while he was lecturing he would use hand gestures to help

people remember what he was saying, for example when a student asked him how to read roman

numerals he would point to his eye and then cross his arms to represent, IX. By doing these

things he was not only giving his students the best ways to remember the information that he

could, he was also being repetitive and offering them multiple ways to remember everything that

would later be relevant to his students.

Time Spent During Two Class Periods

100
80
60
40
20 First Class
Minutes Spent 0 Second Class

Function Performed

The only issue that I observed in the classroom was something I wasnt expecting to see,

especially since Id taken his class before and hadnt noticed it before. I was able to see a distinct

difference regarding how he interacted with his female students compared to his male students,

the discrimination was actually a bias against his male students. He often chose females first

when members of both sexes raised their hands to ask questions. This lead to several more
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females having the opportunity to have their questions answered than males, which can be

observed in the chart below. When he spoke to males it was typically to reprimand them for not

staying still or for not doing work, while never made the same requests from his female students.

In Killing Us Softly 4, they make comments on how women are often the ones being subjected to

discrimination based on their gender, and only give a brief comment on how boys are repressed

at the very end. This kind of acknowledgement sets the tone for how differently men and

womens issues are perceived. In the waves of feminism America is experiencing it seems that

Number of Times Called On

29% Female Questions

Male Questions

71%

the males are being left behind.

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Conclusion

Regarding the future of education, I find myself agreeing with both Luis Rodriguez and

Craig Blackham. Rodriguez hopes that one day the cost of higher education is either reduced or

made completely free. The result of reducing the price tag attached to university would, in his

opinion, stop intimidating potential students away from seeking out a degree, especially those

who can not afford to go the opportunity, and allow for more people to have better lives through

financial success. Blackhams wish for education is for people involved in education to resist the

divisions that are being caused, whether its ethnic or religious, or political. He believes that

education should be something that has the ability to pull people together rather than dividing

them against each other. From the experience of speaking to both someone pulled from the

community, and someone whom has been teaching for longer than Ive been alive, I find that

theres a general opinion that something is wrong in Americas public schools. Rather than the

issue being educational its an emotional problem that must be addressed before we as a country

move to attempt to radically change how children are graded, its their well being that needs to

be looked at rather than their grades.

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References

Burkholder, Z. (2007). Because Race Can't Be Ignored. Education Week, 27(9), 29-31.

Ferniandez-Balboa, J., & Marshall, J. (1994). Dialogical Pedagogy in Teacher Education:

Toward an Education for Democracy. Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3), 24-34.

Glazer, S. (1999). Education and the Human Heart: His Holiness The Dalai Llama. In The Heart

of Learning: Spirituality in Dducation (3rd ed., Vol. 11, pp. 85-95). New York, New York:

J.P. Tarcher/Putnam.

Kilbourne, J. (Director). (2010). Killing us softly 4 [Motion picture]. United States: Media

Education Foundation.

Miller, J. (n.d.). Curriculum, Teaching and Learning. In Educating for Wisdom. Toronto, Ontario:

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the U of Toronto.