Rethinking Education Ideology

                                     

Dr. Michael Wesch is an anthropologist who talks about action research implemented with his own class in his TED Talk presentation "What Baby George Taught Me about Learning." He starts by stating four notions that have been instilled in education; anything outside the classroom is the real world, classrooms are places in which students must be in a fixed seat and should get information dumped on, students are always thinking of how to get by and not actually experiencing the learning, and once a course is completed there is no reason to revisit it. His action research begins by obtaining data and he begins asking students what they thought of their education, and in his findings, Dr. Wesch discovered there was a sense of disconnection between students and their education. Dr. Wesch’s main point is about learning being a "fundamental human trait” and how the school has misdefined what learning should be. 

Dr. Wesch uses his one-year-old George, who is going through the process of learning how to successfully land upright on both feet going down the stairs. Through his learning, baby George does not give up, is always excited, and when he manages to reach his goal he celebrates by doing it all over again several more times. Baby George’s learning experience is exactly just how learning should be. Education should not define students by a simple letter grade but rather by the skills they possess. Teaching should not be just a place in which students are in a fixed seat and the teacher dumps information on them. Teachers should take the time to get to know their students and what drives their learning. Dr. Wesch believes projects should be reshaped in which students work to accumulate an end goal that will give the students the opportunity of “living inside the learning." He believes students should be able to work towards something that is worth it. Dr. Wesch was able to redefine learning as a fundamental human trait by implementing all these changes in his classroom. He successfully finds learning to be true when students are “asking questions, making connections, taking chances” because that is exactly what “took us down the trees and to the moon."