G.E.D.
Getting an non-traditional education through the alternative educational system can be a hodgepodge of alphabet letters; GED, TASC, HESD. Trying to complete this alternative can introduce a new host of situations, making obtaining a HSED more difficult. Add the existing factors that may have contributed to the necessity of not completing high school traditionally(i.e. child care, homelessness,incarceration), and you can have a hodgepodge of "theoretical" methods trying to move the non-traditional student toward achieving the goal without real-world basis.
In many areas, the educations systems, especially urban areas, are dealing with crises from various fronts. Social scientists are now finding better ways to communicate the needs students have apart from the school setting that affects their school experience; it's a message that caring teachers have trumpeted for far too long.The effects of trauma on education have secretly worked their way through the educational system often inadequately funded, unanswered, or addressed punitively. Moreover, the structural, cultural barriers that exist between teachers and students lends itself to pathologize further and hand out punitive measures. The end result is system that feels oppressive to students.
"The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarmed at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer and attempts to impose his "status," remains nostalgic towards his origins. "~ Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Education can be a practice of freedom, a type of "problem-posing education," whereby educator and student learn from and teach each other; dialogue. This type of praxis toward liberty is at the heart of a kind of participatory action research called Theater of the Oppressed, whereby the community works to find solutions to their peers' dramatized problems. Being moved past an empathic-catharsis toward action in a theater setting, audience members are encouraged to change the scenario that is preventing the peer from achieving the desired goal of passing their GED or TASC.
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Happening September 26-28, 2019 7:30PM Nightly at MuCCC Theater 142 Atlanic Ave, Rochester, NY