Close Reading of "Project Classroom Makeover"

In the passage, Davidson focuses heavily on explaining "crowdsourcing" and its conflict with the formal hierarchy of the education system. Crowdsourcing, as Davidson defines it, is sending out problems to a group of people regardless of their expertise and seeing what solutions result. The hierarchy, on the other hand, establishes a rule set for who can and cannot provide a solution based solely on how much they have trained in the area. The words, themselves, also exemplify this split in methods. Crowdsourced is a simple, straight forward term that immediately tells the reader who the question is directed at and who can answer: the crowd.  The term hierarchy, however, is more complex and causes an immediate divide between those that know what the word means without aid and those that do not. This passage serve as a key frame to Davidson's entire essay in that it shows what she feels is the main conflict in education today, sticking to old ways while ignoring the new opportunities to pull in information from nearly anywhere or anyone. She describes the story of her mother-in-law who taught outside the boundaries of modernized school and encourage her students to think and draw information from anywhere and anything, but who also had to fight against the superintendent who did not want this kind of teaching, but instead the streamline system already in place. In this case, the mother-in-law's teaching is crowdsourcing and the superintendent's is the hierarchy. In both methods, people learn, but in crowdsourcing more people are included in the learning and more innovation can occur.