FIN Commons

Roy Robles asked why we weren’t posting anything so here I am. Our group is a bilingual (Spanish-English) ESL and Wood Technology (cabinet-making) program. We work together in the shop and classroom and do contextualized teaching/learning.

Here are a few of our challenges: Getting to the inquiry question and documenting student concerns. I am constantly amazed at how hard it it is to get to a researchable inquiry question. Katie Hern worked with our FIN group not too long ago and we spent a lot of time describing different lessons finally identifying a research question that might be more specific than “how does contextualized learning work for students?” For example, in a specific lesson what evidence do we have of student learning–written or through interviews. Then we could analyze that.

We realized that often students would not be completely honest on video even if the interviews were conducted by fellow students on learning. Our student inquirers told us of instances where students said more to them once the video camera was turned off, almost confidentially. We discussed interviewing student inquirers after they do the interviews of students to gather more information. If confidentiality is a problem, names could be left out and the student inquirer could say: “One student I interviewed said…” Anyway it’s an interesting problem and a good way to get more documentation.

Another interesting challenge that came up during out FIN meeting was this: Esdras, one of our student inquirers, mentioned the “roughness” of communication at the workplaces and how students don’t get prepared for this in our program. We thought about conflict resolution methods or simply having some discussion on discrimination and ways of reacting/responding (role-playing). This is a very difficult situation to replicate or prepare students for.

I myself have worked in shops and factories (as a woman machinist) where life or death questions have come up on the shop floor, or where people say some of the most horrible things about women, blacks, Latinos, gays or lesbians. These are real situations that I was so glad were brought up–a result of student involvement in our FIN project. These are just some thoughts and reflections I wanted to blog about.