The Best Butter

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear. 

Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.' 

`Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare. 

`It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied. 

`Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter grumbled: `you shouldn't have put it in with the bread-knife.' 

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, `It was the BEST butter, you know.' 

Last week we read Shapiro who wrote in 2011, "Whether Democrats or Republicans occupy the White House or State House, there is wide agreement that the first priority of schooling is to ensure increasing productivity and economic competitiveness."  Attempts to accomplish this objective often involve students memorizing what their teachers tell them and regurgitating the information back on a  test.  Freire termed this the "banking model of education" and rejects it " in favor of problem-posing education in which students act as "critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher."  The banking model appears to be based on monological discourse in which the information is transmitted from teacher to student in an authoritative manner, leaving no room for dialogue, negotiation, or interpretation.  You can be an expert on a certain subject and have the best intentions for your students, but if monological discourse is your approach, you may end up gumming up the gears of a perfectly good watch with butter, albeit "the best butter, you know".   **As an abstract sequential thinker I personally appreciate an instructor who is an authority on a certain topic and like to be treated as a vessel to be filled, so I certainly think that there is a time and place for monologicality in the classroom.**  Anyway, August argues that dialogicality can be used as a tool with which a democratic learning environment can be created and fostered in the classroom.   She extensively studied how the kindergarten teacher Zeke attempted to create a democratic classroom using the tool of, what she termed "dynamic dialogicality".  
Chapters 5 and 6 detail the interactions among Zeke and his students, particularly Cody, an adopted Cambodian boy with two lesbian moms.  August originally set out to see how Zeke, armed with dynamic dialogicality, might interpret what happens when a child with lesbian moms tells family stories in a classroom.  But when Cody didn't bite during several of the topics during the "family" unit,  "Zeke and August discover he was more uncomfortable with his status as an adopted child, revealed after the reading of "Tango Makes Three," a story about an adopted penguin" (Corey's blog 10/07).  I think Corey's connection that "Clearly, August was surprised by this turn of events, but it still was a fascinating turn in her research.  The reading taught me that, as teachers, we make mistakes like that, too.  We may only see a piece of a bigger puzzle, not the big picture with our students.  The teacher, Zeke, was able to find out this information because he was successfully able to "stretch" Cody's notions of his life and his power in it."  So August got more than she was expecting by the end of her research in Zeke's kindergarten class, but still the conclusion emphasizes her idea that participation in a democratic classroom would allow students to explore, unrestrained by crumbs in the butter, "the way the world works and what can work in the world."
GK