Looking at a couple of blogs I suddenly realized that I hadn't explicitly linked our topic to oppositional thinking, so here goes!
Considering how much memorization Korean students supposedly do, I have often been shocked at how little general knowledge they seem to have. The ethnocentric quality of my casual observation was highlighted by Curt's story of his wife's comments on Kant - we certainly didn't cover that in high school, but apparently Korean students do!
The implication is that the South African education system and one of their products, me, have a different definition of general world knowledge than the Korean system. This is important in terms of Bloom's cognitive levels (as mentioned in the previous post), since basic knowledge is a prerequisite for higher cognitive thought. When I receive new information, I measure it against previous information, and when I ask my students to read things critically, I often expect them to evaluate the readings using my background knowledge, not theirs.
Awareness of such an error of perspective immediately brings to mind 2 possible remedies:
1> Introducing EFL teachers in Korea to the basic content of the Korean high school curriculum.
2> Supplying students with more background knowledge before expecting them to comprehend the context of the readings.
a lot to think about in these posts... another story my wife told me recently was about one sociology teacher she had in high school. she said his tests were notoriously difficult because they forced students to apply the theoretical arguments they had to memorize. he was able to do this in a multiple choice tests. for example, he would give a general social problem then ask students to select which answer best represents ___'s response to the problem. this connects with your posts in a couple of ways. first, (like you said) separating information from engagement (memorization from application) may not be useful or accurate. second, educational experiences in korean high schools might be a little more varied and complex than we like to think. my wife loved sociology because of this teacher. she tried to take it up as her university major, but was told she had to study business because of her scores on the entrance exam. bummer. so perhaps, (in response to question #1 above) rather than providing teachers with info on the basic content of high school curriculum, maybe we can, as teachers and potential cultural outsiders, spend time eliciting this sort of information from students... personalizing it, and perhaps building it into our courses. easier said than done, but perhaps worth the effort. good stuff
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