Learning Posts from Owl's Farm

Before I decided that I needed a separate blog on teaching and learning, I posted frequently on education at my first blog, Owl's Farm. Since its inception a little over a year ago, its focus has shifted from being primarily on William Morris, to being primarily on the ideas associated with what geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia, or love of place, and on philosophical considerations regarding place and home. And although my interest in education is tangentially related to where I was born and how I was brought up, I finally decided to create a blog devoted entirely to the process of learning in and about the world.

And so, in order to avoid repeating myself too much (a tendency toward repetition is an unfortunate consequence of aging), I thought it might be helpful to post links to my educational remarks from the Farm, with small glosses on what they were about. In that way, both I and my readers can refer back to them if necessary, and they're all tidy and handily available, in chronological order.

Dismantling the Boy Farms (26 June 2007): a riff on William Morris's philosophy of education, grounded in his own experience at Marlborough.

Paying Attention (15 September 2007): something of a rant on the inappropriate and/or expedient use of technology in the classroom.

The Assessment Obsession (23 December 2007): the first of several ruminations on the current trend in education to teach to the test, focus on assessment rather than content, and related issues.

Surviving Plutopia (22 April 2008): an Earth Day reflection on current conditions. I go off on several points here--including Philip Pullman's view of education.

Building a Better Schoolhouse (2 May 2008): inspired by the community-based education movement in England, which provides a preferable alternative to "No Child Left Behind."

The Age of Endarkenment (2 June 2008): a lament about the lack of curiosity among our young, and the growing lack of interest in knowing much.

The next couple of months were taken up by house-recycling efforts, but during that time the idea for The Owl of Athena started brewing and I eventually began to channel my educational musings over here. So far the feedback has been helpful, but I do hope to get more students involved, and direct the conversation toward the comments section of the blog, rather than casual conversations in the hallways.

The educational world is changing, both locally and globally, and I'm looking forward (and not always quaking in my boots) to seeing what happens over the next few months. It should be, as they say in China, interesting.

Images: A Roman relief of a school, and a woodcut from the title page of Wenceslaus Brack: Vocabularius rerum, 1487. Both from Wikimedia Commons.