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I loved this story about the professional women in Computing reaching out when they hear about the all-girls CS class.  Not clear that that always works.  I’ve heard that studies of outreach efforts find that sending a real scientist into the classroom often scares the kids away from science.  But in this example, it’s about changing stereotypes, about convincing the students that people who look like them work in this field.

When female engineers working at Cisco’s Toronto offices heard about Cardinal Leger’s all-girls program at the nearby Dufferin-Peel Catholic District school board, they invited the students for a visit.

“I think a lot of women don’t go into this field because they’re afraid of being the only girl,” said Hena Prasanna, a Cisco manager who met with the Cardinal Leger girls. “When we asked the girls who worked in the tech industry, they said chubby guys with glasses. That’s the impression they had and we wanted to change that.”

via Girls-only computer class hits…

Computing Education Blog

• Teaching About Labor Issues and the Wisconsin Worker Fight Back

  Finding good resources to teach kids about working-class issues and labor history is difficult, so am very happy to find this excellent compilation.

  tags: labor Children’s literature social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed under: social class
Education and Class

What if a reference librarian was assigned to a college course, to be on hand to suggest books, online links, or other resources based on class discussion? A media-studies course at Baylor University tried the idea last semester, with an “embedded librarian” following the class discussion via Twitter.

At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire up Twitter, and say hello to their librarian, who was following the discussion from her office. During the hourlong class, the librarian, Ellen Hampton Filgo, would do what she refers to as “library jazz,” looking at the questions and comments posed on Twitter by the students, responding with suggestions of links or books, and anticipating what else might be helpful that students might not have known to ask.

“I could see the sort of germination of an idea, and what they wanted to talk about,” she said, noting that it let her in on the process of …

Wired Campus

A survey of students at the University of New Hampshire found high rates of texting during class, and plenty of guilt about the behavior.

The survey, of 1,000 students at the university, found that a majority felt guilty about about sending text messages in class when they were not supposed to. Despite those feelings, 80 percent of the students said they normally send at least one text message in each of their classes. Business students conducted the survey for a marketing-research course.

Chuck Martin, an adjunct professor in the business school who teaches the course, says the students expected to find that most students would, like them, want to be allowed to text during class.

But views among surveyed students were actually mixed, with 40 percent of students in favor of allowing texts, 37 percent opposed, and the rest neutral.

The survey also showed that women were more likely to send text messages than men and that texting in class distracted students from class…

Wired Campus

• The New Poor – For-Profit Schools Cashing In on Recession and Federal Aid – NYTimes.com

  Education as Exploitation

  “At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $ 30,000 a year.

  But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students. “

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed under: social…

Education and Class

• Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class – NYTimes.com

  “The overwhelming majority of Tea Party supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by, and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent, compared with 11 percent of the general public, think that the administration favors blacks over whites. They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people. “

  tags: social class

• Economic Scene – Yes, 47% of Households Owe No Taxes. Look Closer. – NYTimes.com

  Poor and working class families portrayed as being on the dole on Fox News.

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed under: social class
Education and Class

• Views: Open Door to What? – Inside Higher Ed

  Good piece on the recent calls to encourage more students to aspire to short-term technical training rather than to college

  “Some scholars have been asking for years if this extreme stratification is the only way to organize modern labor. Have we simply gotten used to a narrow vision of technical work in America, one that leaves a great many people in lower-paid, unsatisfying jobs, ill-equipped for more satisfying and creative work, while the most privileged among us hold onto our advantages in education and work as in society in general? And the question for today: Do community colleges, providing as a rule short, vocationally focused programming, actually stand in the way of more people gaining more knowledge, and doing more interesting work, despite the relative good these institutions have done for individuals over the generations?”

  tags: 522, social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed under:

Education and Class

• Interactive Map: Rural Students in Poverty

  “Almost one-third of American schools are rural, and more than 40 percent of those students are living in poverty”.

  tags: rural poverty Social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed under: social class
Education and Class

I’ve had much too little time to write here lately.   Yet I’ve continued to get many comments defending Ruby Payne’s analysis of the multiple ways that poor children fall short of middle class peers’ behaviors and .  Many of these commentators offer examples of deeply flawed, low-income parents too naive or ill-willed to raise their children like middle-class parents do, as Payne asserts that middle-class parents nurture  their children within the values and ethics required for success.

But I’m seeing few of these commenters actually looking closely at middle class child rearing.

So, I’d like to ask those who insist that low-income children would succeed if only they were more like their middle class peers  to also comment on this recent NYT article outlining horrific abuse of poor and working class young girls by their more privileged peers.  A sample of the middle-class behavior from this article:

Her Payless and Gap shoes weren’t good enough. She wasn’t “allowed” to play with…

Education and Class

• ‘Made in Dagenham,’ Not Made in Hollywood – NYTimes.com

  A good New York Times article comparing British films’ depictions of working class characters and the recent relative invisibility of working class lives in Hollywood movies.

  A quote:

  Finally, the current paucity of working-class characters may sometimes come down to plain old attitude. Courtney Hunt, the writer and director of 2008’s “Frozen River,” remembers the indignant reaction of a wealthy potential investor after he’d read her screenplay about a heroine who becomes a smuggler to stave off having her trailer home repossessed.

  “These characters are losers, they’re losers,” he ranted to Ms. Hunt.

  “No,” she replied, “they’re just poor.”

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed under: social class
Education and Class