preview

Summary Of Cathy Davidson's Classroom Makeover

Good Essays

In Cathy Davidson’s, “Classroom Makeover”, Davidson analyzes and elucidates upon the faults she observes in the American education system. Davidson uses her own experiences in the education system to explore alternate methods of teaching that would cater to the strengths of a greater population of students. For instance, Davidson introduces an iPod experiment that she conducted at Duke University, in which she gave all first-year students free iPods to use in class. Expectedly, the upper-classmen were annoyed that they were not given iPods also and therefore, Davidson allowed upper-classmen to take part in the iPod experiment if they were able to have one of their professors implement the integration of the iPod in their class. In this way, she describes how the freshman at Duke University were able to enhance their educational experience by the integration of technology in the classroom and the upperclassmen were able to use iPods as an incentive to creatively persuade their professors in various classes to integrate this technology. Similarly, Davidson introduces the case of a middle school student as well as a teacher who introduced games in her classroom to teach lessons, as a means of illustrating that intelligence can be demonstrated in ways other than excelling in the traditional evaluations. Consequently, she believes that the current education paradigm does not benefit unique individuals and that the education system must change in order to aid everyone, and not

Get Access