Archives: school reform

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. George Noblit, the Joseph R. Neikirk Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education in the UNC Chapel Hill School of Education, to discuss an upcoming school reform project he is currently working on. This project will focus on student-based school reform using the mediums of communication, such as mobile devices and social media, the students are regularly engaged in.

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Transcript

Dr. George Noblit (0:04)

I’m George Noblit, a professor here at the School of Education at UNC. Right now we are working on an idea with LEARN NC to try to think about how we can help schools solve the problems they create. So often, we’ve been working through schools trying to get them to fix curriculum problems, to try to change curricula so the students will achieve. We see moments where we get change, but no real evidence that it’s sustained or sustainable.

(0:40)

Kids, however, are the ones that could take on school in a different way. The kind of examples we are talking about are taking a curriculum– that the kids see as problematic or kids see as crucial to their success in school and they are not succeeding in it– and then ask the kids through the media to work on that curriculum, to create maybe a guerrilla’s handbook to algebra I, maybe the wacky writer’s guide to surviving creative writing courses, maybe how to learn to read for kids who reading is seeming to be a problem. We get the kids to take it on.

(1:22)

We’ll work with them through LEARN NC. We’ll have faculty and students here at UNC linked to groups of kids– the kids can be individuals, but we will probably go for kids who are facebook friend sets or connected through various kinds of community organizations. They are going to diagnose the local school or school district for the areas where kids are running into trouble and where the gaps in achievement are becoming apparent. And then we’ll have the kids take on the bits of curriculum. That way, they can figure out how to solve the problems in their own way.

(2:01)

We hope that means that we will then be working outside in to schooling and helping schools deal with problems they play too much of a role in creating. We think the kids can solve these problems; they’ve got all the talent.

Researcher bio

Dr. Noblit studies the various ways knowledge is constructed and how the competition over which knowledge counts construct powers and difference. This process means exploring both the highest reaches of theory and the everyday lives of people as they struggle to make sense of the world. To Dr. Noblit, “there is not a theory-practice gap, only a failure of imagination.” Dr. Noblit conducts funded evaluation projects, most recently on A+ (arts-enhanced) schools (the subject of his 2009 book), charter schools, and prison education for youth adult offenders in North Carolina. “For me, evaluation and policy studies are a way to be part of larger political processes in our society,” Dr. Noblit says, “and to help shape the agendas of important innovations.”

A full biography can be found on the School of Education website

Video download link: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/video/Noblit.mp4