Constructing Knowledge

How we construct knowledge is very interesting to me. I have learned a lot during my Middle School field placement and have noticed the huge range of abilities in every one of my classes. As pointed out in Chapter 27 of our textbook, knowledge is socially constructed. This was made very obvious to me when I handed out a project to my 8th grade social studies class that was almost identical to a project I did when I was in 7th grade. I had planned to spend 3 class periods where students would construct a Civil War "scrapbook" as if they were someone living during the period. The most difficult hurdle for my students to get over was the idea that they would not be writing this project as themselves and that there were really no "right" or "wrong" answers. They had to include certain things in their project but they were allowed total freedom to choose which battles they wanted to include in their letters and what side they were supporting. For me, growing up in a very good suburban school I remember this project being rather easy and very engaging. My MPS kids seemed to be much more hard pressed to get the ball rolling after our first in-class day of working on the project.
Fortunately, I am an extremely patient person and spent most of the first day on our project distributing helpful examples and making myself available to help students as much as I could. By the second and third days they were coming into class very excited to "become" their characters and we finished very well. When I consider this personal experience with some of the things being described in our textbook I truly agree and believe that knowledge is based largely on our social outlook of the world. I could tell that my students had become so used to the standard worksheets that the idea of becoming a character and investigating the material with few barriers or boundaries was foreign to them. I believe that this is a major part of the hypocritical system we all live in here. We tell ourselves that this is the country of advancement and prosperity. We tell the impoverished African Americans of Milwaukee to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps," when they can't even afford a pair of boots! A majority of the kids in my classes live in a world surrounded by crime and poverty. Their knowledge and their experiences of the world becomes hindered and damaged by living in such a system.