Post Modern Principles

I've devised a game that allows a pair of students to exercise a few of the post modern principles. This drawing game utilizes:

• Recontextualization 
• Interaction of Text and Image 
• Juxtaposing 
• Layering 

The Rules are:

1. Both partners choose a social issue and write on a piece of paper. Tear it off and swap with partner. 
2. Draw a picture relating to that issue. 
3. Write an adjective, noun, adverb, verb, adjective, noun, relating to that social issue. 
4. Tear off the sentence you just formed and swap with your partner. 
5. Glue sentence under your drawing. 
6. Analyze the text with your drawing. Try to make a connection between them. 
7. Discuss a solution. 

For example:

I've made an accordion book to display an example of what the activity should look like:

Partner A: Immigration

Partner B: Obesity

Text reads: Sick, doctor, slowly, eating, tired, urban cities

Text reads: Poor, man, patiently, works, long, night

Middle School Curriculum

This post is based off the article: A Middle School Curriculum: From Rhetoric to Reality by James Bean.

The middle school curriculum is based on general education, which refers to common needs- problems, interests, and concerns of young people. It is also based upon the stage of life and relating to others in a social world. Early adolescence is the most dramatic stage in human development in terms of physical, socio- emotional, and intellectual changes. They begin to ask questions such as: Who am I? What can I be? What should I be? What should I do? The curriculum must parallel these issues of concern with the larger world.

This chart above is helpful in making that parallel. It illustrates curriculum topics that are compelling to an early adolescent's personal concerns as well as connecting them to social concerns of the larger world.

Social Issues: 

• Independence among people in immediate network of relationships to the global level. 
• Diversity of cultures: race, ethnicity, gender, geographic region, and others. 
• Environmental problems: sustaining a livable planet 
• Political processes and structures- including their contradictions, that have simultaneously liberated and oppressed groups of people. 
• Economic problems: securing personal economic security to inequitable distribution of wealth and related power. 
• Technology: its place as it enters various aspects of life as well as moral issues. 
• Self- destructive behaviors: substance abuse, crime, adolescent pregnancies, participation in street gangs, attempted and actual suicides. 

Skills in Curriculum: 

• Reflective thinking: critical and creative, meanings and consequences of ideas and behaviors. 
• Critical Ethics: identifying and judging morality in problem situations 
• Problem Solving: problem finding and analysis. 
• Valuing: identifying and clarifying personal beliefs and standards in which decisions and behaviors are based.
• Self-conceptualizing and self-esteeming: evaluating personal aspirations, intrests, and other characteristics. 
• Social actions skills: acting in problem situations both individually and collectivly. 
• Searching for completeness and meaning: cultural diversity.

Exquisite corpse

Just testing out the blog...

I found this image here