Exposure and motivation

Last week my parents came to visit me. On Thursday we took a trip out to the indigenous town of Tenejapa, and then continued on to San Juan Cancuc. These are small towns, and we were the only foreigners present. It was market day in Tenejapa, so there was a lot of activity, with rural neighbors visiting to shop and sell, but San Juan Cancuc was very quiet. There weren't even any stores to shop for their beautiful textiles. About an hour and a half down beautifully forested, hilly winding roads, it felt worlds away from San Cristóbal.

Three days later I found myself making a presentation at another COMEPO meeting (the independent group of bilingual educators):

A gratuitous photo of me looking professional, if only to prove that I don't spend all my time traveling, eating, and trying to speak Tsotsil.

At the meeting, we got to talking about student motivation: its importance and its often discouragingly low levels. A school director from a rural school outside of San Juan Cancuc, that same sleepy town I had visited with my parents, shared a story:

There was going to be a story contest for indigenous students. The director encouraged a teacher to have her students participate. "No, no," she said, "no time, no materials, can´t do it." (*In her defense - that could easily, easily be me or many better teachers than me.) So, one day when the teacher was absent, the director covered her class and led the students in writing stories for the contest. And one of them won! The student, along with his teacher, was invited to an awards ceremony in Mexico City. Again, the teacher: "Mexico City? That´s too far. No, no, I can´t go." Again, the director stepped in. Before leaving for the capital, it seemed like everyone at the school wanted to provide some last-minute instruction for the student. They collected money for shoes and new clothes but told him he also had to wear his traditional clothes from his community. They told him he had to greet people in Spanish with "Buenos días" and "Buenas tardes," and that he should be polite in receiving food. It was a huge experience for both the child and the director - flying on a plane, staying on a top floor in a tall hotel building, being offered a sandwich and taking off everything so he could eat the bread... It was certainly motivating for the child, the director, the school and the community.

The story made me think about other "exposure" opportunities I´ve witnessed, some of which I cynically judged to be gimmicky:

* The FBI taking our sixth graders on a one-day trip to New York.

* Our college mentoring program bringing a busload of middle schoolers to campus, where their most significant experience was probably gorging themselves in the cafeteria to the point of vomiting.

* Peace Corps hosting a conference where volunteers from all over Honduras could bring two leaders from our site. I brought a health promoter and a woman from the semi-rural exurb where I worked. I remember her spending the nights praying loudly in tongues. I remember an indigenous woman who came with another volunteer sharing about the merits of breast-feeding her five-year old. Most of all, I remember the excitement of traveling somewhere new, meeting new people, and returning to our town, motivated to try new strategies we learned.

And I thought about myself, here in Chiapas for 6 months.

Do we always need big experiences in order to find motivation? No. Should we capitalize on innate curiosity of children as a source of motivation? Yes. But big (and sometimes gimmicky) "exposure" experiences generally don't hurt. And for people like the boy and his school director outside of San Juan Cancuc, where classes are too big, teachers are overwhelmed, and resources are scarce, a big experience can be life-changing.

Thinking and talking, talking and thinking

One of my hypotheses about the strong oral language production of students at Pequeño Sol, the private school where I observe, is that it is strongly connected to their use of Philosophy for Children. The students take part in a philosophy class as part of their curriculum from their first year of preschool through secondary school. (If you want to see an adorable example of this program and small children in philosophy class, check out the documentary Just a Beginning. It is especially cute because it is French.)

A couple weeks ago, I attended a conference on Philosophy for Children (Filosofía para niños).

The Latin American Center for Philosophy for Children happens to be located right here in San Cristóbal, and this week I had the chance to meet the director, Dr. Eugenio Echeverría.

I had just come from a school where a dynamic teacher was rapid-firing questions at fourth graders, eliciting a few one or two word answers. I was already thinking about how class structures can promote actual discourse and scenarios in which students are the ones who are asking the questions. In Pequeño Sol, children ask a lot of questions - of their teachers and of their peers. In fact, in our conversation, Dr. Echeverría shared a comment made by the high school teacher of one of his children who had attended the school: "You must come from Pequeño Sol because you ask a lot of questions and you talk a lot."

Philosphy for Children follows a format of a community dialogue and has 4 main goals:
* Develop thinking skills.
* Explore values.
* Construct concepts. (e.g. happiness, culture, reality, power, democracy, beauty...)
* Life project (This does not translate particularly well in English, but the idea is that children begin to answer the questions "What kind of person do I want to be? In what kind of world do I want to live?)

Apart from these, Dr. Echeverría spoke of additional goals and constructs of the program: self-esteem, resiliency*, internal locus of control, defense against manipulation by the media, critical consumption, position taking, developing intellectual humility or epistemic uncertainty... Certainly high aims for a program that works with children as young as 3 years old!

The structure of the classes themselves is a wonderful venue for developing oral language. Dialogues are partly student-run and the teacher/facilitator pushes students to use specific vocabulary, probes thinking so that they can express well-formulated opinions, and requires that they respond to each other´s ideas.

Apart from this structure, the Philosophy for Children program interests me in the shared space that thinking and speaking hold in educational discourse. Although both are valued - critical thinking especially is a popular buzz-phrase - they are rarely considered an ends in and of themselves. As educators, we encourage students to use talk in order to develop their writing and comprehend reading, in order to express mathematical reasoning, or in order to describe scientific observations. We encourage them to develop thinking in order to more clearly express ideas about their reading, writing, and arithmetic.
We promote speaking to develop writing, but rarely writing to develop speaking.
And even less speaking to develop thinking (indeed, my preferred approach to formulating a thought!)

A class devoted to thinking? It sounds absurd. The same for a class devoted to speaking.
But that doesn't mean they are not honorable end goals.






*For a reflection on the teaching and testing of skills like resiliency, check out the blog of fellow Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching recipient, Patrick Walsh: https://bigpictureeducation.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/are-21st-century-skills-non-cognitive/ (I highly recommend his blog in general.)