As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider. -- E. M. Forster

 

 

What will learning and schooling look like 30 years from now?

This question was posed to me recently and I found myself really wanting to chew on this for a while.

I think the question is critical for us to think about on a number of levels.

I don’t think schools as formal learning institutions will disappear. Schools are a hub of sociality. They are like bee hives buzzing with activity both organized and unorganized.

The schools as factories metaphor is tired and ineffective, yet that’s still what’s in place.

They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important. -- E. M. Forster

Forster makes an important point. Driven by test scores and a uniformly uninformed view of accountability, most schools (at least in the U.S.) have ignored the fundamental composition of schools: people engaging with people. Thus the factory model might develop minds but it does little to develop hearts (read: tolerance, good temper, empathy, compassion). The difference IS important. So it would seem rather important for us to begin to develop a new vision for schools and learning that places a premium on matters of the heart.


Schools as ateliers


I like the notion that John Seely Brown and others subscribe, namely, schools as ateliers, as artists’ workshop. In this sense, schools would become centers where what it means to be human can be explored in a variety of forms, be they artistic, scientific, physical, spiritual, spatial, etc. Studio classes in the arts provide two important features: variety and constructive criticism. Students are given many opportunities to hone their skills and refine their practice in a variety of forms. They are then provided feedback, criticism, from the “master” and fellow students. The idea of this criticism is to provide a diversity of views on how they handled the assignment. The student can use the criticism or can ignore it. The point is, multiple viewpoints and perspectives are tolerated and encouraged. This same notion is what allows Democracies (with a capital “D”) to flourish.


So what if schools fostered the development of students as artists, as designers? Artists are commonly associated with creativity, imagination, and sensitivity; people adept at their endeavors. What if schools focused on these individual aspects and how they relate to larger communities and the civilization as a whole? Students could be required to interpret unifying themes of peace, love, and understanding in their work juxtaposing them with notions of fear, intolerance, and suffering (as all artists are wont to do!). They would present their projects in community spaces where members of the greater community could view them and/or interact with the artists.

Perhaps I’m being too idealistic.

In high school, two of my good friends knew what they wanted to be when they graduated. Courtney wanted to be a lawyer (he is now a tax attorney). Chris wanted to be a dentist (he is now an orthodontist). I said, “I want to be an artist.” Courtney and Chris got a good laugh out of that. “What kind of artist do you want to be?” they asked. “I dunno. Someone who is passionate about what they do. Someone who is creative and imaginative whose work is seen as meaningful, dynamic, insightful… someone who dares to make an impact on the world.”

Throughout my college years, I focused on creating music, studying literature, writing poetry, taking ceramic studio classes, dating and hanging out with other artists. I learned that artists aren’t necessarily bohemian or avant garde, that there were many kinds of artists. I met elementary teachers, bakers, and salespeople who were truly creative, sensitive, and passionate about their profession. I began to realize that being an artist was not only about being a painter or sculptor; it was about being empowered, about having a vision and working towards making that vision a reality that not only serves one’s sense of self, but contributes to a larger enterprise.

As I study educators, schools, and learners, I feel it is my job to report the facts as I see them. And what I see often times isn’t pretty. Yet there are moments, there are people doing good work with students, people using the heart as a text. These same educators are not ignoring learning and test scores. Instead they are pushing students to look beyond the text, beyond the test score and the grade point average, to see their collective lives beyond the classroom. They challenge students to create a meaningful life for themselves and the people around them. They recognize that no one is in this world alone, that we need each other to thrive.

Disturbing the Universe

When I think of school reform, the image of a forest fire sticks out in my mind. Forest fires, while destructive, and dangerous, also bring about change and renewed growth. A disruptive metaphor, to say the least. Controlled fires are used here in Florida forests to clear away elements that make wildfires less destructive. Perhaps controlled burning is an apt way to think of school reform. Yet who decides what is to be burned and what is to be left alone? (You didn’t think such a complex notion such as school reform had a simple and clever solution, did you?)


So what does the future of schools mean to you?

What will they look like?

What will be their focus?

Who will take the lead?

What will the reform agenda look like?

If you don’t want to think about these things and begin to take action, who will?

 

 

Doug Belshaw recently requested that I contribute to the Book Meme. While honored by such a request I felt a bit hard pressed deciding which books to include/exclude from such an estimable list.

First I must admit that music has been much more of a catalyst in my life and is arguably more responsible for the way I approach/engage life. That list will have to wait. In the meantime, perhaps a bit of life history will be helpful in illuminating my choices.

I was born in New York City in 1966 to parents fully integrated into the “beat” movement (i.e., pre-hippies). We lived at 210 Thompson Street, a couple of blocks from Washington Square in Greenwich Village, the eastern Mecca of bohemian America. My father rebelled against his father’s wishes and left an engineering program at the University of Virginia and became an English literature student at New York University. Our small, two room apartment was tempered with discussions of William Blake, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Ivan Illich, Abbie Hoffman, the Viet Nam “conflict” and supported in song by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Oscar Peterson, and the Grateful Dead.

We left NYC for Washington, D.C., in the mid-70s, then moved to Tampa, Florida in 1977. We went from two cultural capitals of the U.S. to a cultural blackhole (aka Brandon, Florida) in the South. While Tampa does offer many enriching and enlightening comforts, as a teenager, I could not wait to move on, even if it was only two hours up the road to Gainesville.

In college I majored in English literature with a specialization in creative writing (poetry) and earned enough credits to qualify for minors in philosophy and classical studies. I worked part-time jobs at the college newspaper and throughout the university, and played guitar and drums with a number of local musical outfits. I married my best friend, Lynn, after graduation and after a brief stint in the U.S. Army as an infantryman (a long story) stationed in Boblingen, Germany, I moved back to Gainesville and worked as a graphic artist in a publishing house that specialized in interstate travel guides. Three children later, Lynn and I decided to become teachers and went to back to earn masters’ degrees. I loved teaching and learning yet I wanted more of a challenge (i.e., going from working with 18 year olds to working with twelve year olds was not a good fit). I managed to get hired by the university to manage distance learning operations at a centralized level in 2000 where I became entranced with teaching and learning via technology and the World Wide Web. I enrolled in a doctoral program part-time where I am today and switched jobs to focus on distance education opportunities in the College of Education.


1. A Book that Changed Your Life

Perhaps the most important book in my life was The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. My mother used to read me passages before bed, before I could read. Listening to her read, I was transported from my room to the ends of my imagination where I became Mowgli living among wolves, bears, and king cobras. The copy we owned (which I still have) was a Golden Illustrated Classic (1963) illustrated by Tibor Gergely. I became impatient waiting for my mother to read to me. I wanted to be able to read about Mowgli and Bagheera on my own. I consider this book to be my looking glass, a catalyst that opened up new worlds that I could travel to at any time I wished.

As a foolhardy 15 year old, Ingrid Lachotta, my high school literature teacher changed my world when she had us read The Grapes of Wrath. She not only had us read the text, but she asked us to do additional research on migrant workers and Cesar Chavez’s farm worker movement. For a bored kid with a passion for the underdog, this book inspired me on multiple levels. The story of Tom Joad and his family showed me how a fictional story could become a change agent for social and economic improvement.

As a college freshman, Jack Perlette, was a literature professor who won my attention and admiration with his teaching style and class reading list which included Equus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hamlet, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Lolita, and Wild Palms.

Yet the most important book that changed my life at this time was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple given to me by a close friend. Most texts that I read up to that point in my life where written by old, dead white guys. The Color Purple changed the way I thought about women, about race, about myself, and about how a novel could be written. This text led me to explore many works by Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston which still provoke and inspire me to this day.

2. A Book You've Read More Than Once

As a literature teacher, I read many books more than once with my classes, so I tried to choose texts that I could enjoy over and over like Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Macbeth, 1984, Brave New World, The Stranger, and Song of Solomon. As for texts that I reread out of personal choice, I regularly revisit a number of poems and poets including Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, John Keats, and W.B. Yeats.

I have also returned to Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed several times.

Yet the one book I return to most often is Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Her other works, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Teaching a Stone to Talk are also high on my list of works worth revisiting. Yet The Writing Life fuels and sustains me. It presents writing as both a daunting proposition and the most important thing you can do. No pressure there!


3. A Book You'd Take onto a Desert Island

The desert island pick is always a difficult choice for me. At first I think the Complete Works of Shakespeare would be my obvious choice. But when I really think about it, the text I would probably choose would be The Blue Cliff Record translated by Thomas Cleary. I discovered Buddhism after my daughter was born. I am not a religious person, but like most of us, I am deeply spiritual. Buddhism is not a religion; it’s a way of thinking about the world. It represents what the Christ, Mohammed, and all great spiritual leaders serve to unfold for us, i.e., how we might conduct ourselves that supports and nourishes all living things. The Blue Cliff Record is a collection of koans or riddles that are used to unlock the mind. It invites non-sense to inform our perceived sense of things. Being a fan of brainteasers and solving problems, I’ve decided this book is a must for me on a deserted island.

I also thought the Complete Beatles Song Book would great to have. Imagine wiling away the hours singing Love Me Do to the palms and ocean breeze….


4. A Book That Made You Laugh

Books that made me laugh include:

• Jean Shepherd’s Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories;
  
  
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend;
  
  
• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson;
  
  
• Naked by David Sedaris;
  
  
• Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais;
  
  
• and most recently, The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman.
  
  

5. A Book That Made You Cry

Oi! This will give me away. I’ve been disturbed by a number of texts, but Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë really got to me when I was teaching a British Literature course.

6. A Book You Wish Had Been Written

There are a number of historical figures that I would love to read an autobiography of including Thelonious Monk and Sappho.

7. A Book You Wish Had Never Been Written

I can’t think of any books that I wish weren’t written. There are numerous movies taken from books that I wish were never made.


8. A Book You're Currently Reading

I am currently reading Exploring Technology and Social Space by J. Macgregor Wise. I pulled this book from a Ulises Mejias’ reading list. This text “elaborates a critical, philosophical, and epistemological framework from which to better understand our relations with technology and social space.” Definitely not bedtime reading. I am a big fan of magazines. I still subscribe to Wired Magazine and I can regularly be found reading Lynn’s copies of the New Yorker.


9. A Book You've Been Meaning To Read

I’ve recently order Teaching One Moment At A Time: Disruption And Repair In The Classroom by Dawn M. Skorczewski that I read about on Barbara Ganley’s blog and I can’t wait to get started on it. I am also looking forward to reading Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.

 
10. Now Tag Five People You Want to Hear From

1. Barbara Ganley
   
   
2. Stephen Downes
   
   
3. George Siemens
   
   
4. Ulises Mejias
   
   
5. Danah Boyd

Afterword:

There are a number of books that really had a profound impact on me that I read once but haven’t included above. They range from The Little Engine That Could to A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower to Plato’s Republic. This has been a great exercise that I encourage others to try it. As they say, you are what you eat:

   Eating Poetry
  
   Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
   There is no happiness like mine.
   I have been eating poetry.
  
   The librarian does not believe what she sees.
   Her eyes are sad
   and she walks with her hands in her dress.
  
   The poems are gone.
   The light is dim.
   The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
  
   Their eyeballs roll,
   their blond legs burn like brush.
   The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
  
   She does not understand.
   When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
   she screams.
  
   I am a new man.
   I snarl at her and bark.
   I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

-- Mark Strand

At least as old as Plato, embraced by Kant, and explored by many philosophers, spiritual leaders, artists, mathematicians, politicians, and humorists, paradox and other forms of antinomy have been informing our senses for centuries.

A paradox attracts our attention by emphasizing apparent contradictions that run contrary to intuition.

    They have ears but hear not.

    Any rule may have at least one exception... except this rule.

    What is the sound of one hand clapping?

    Who’s on first?

In other words, a paradox makes a marvelous teaching tool. Recognizing ambiguities, equivocations, and unstated assumptions that are the basis of most paradoxes has led to considerable advances in the areas of science, philosophy, mathematics, and social consciousness.

What makes a paradox so much fun is that it invites us to explore the outer limits of language and context, pushing our minds in directions beyond the assumed boundaries.

Throwing your hat over the wall

Here’s an example from writer, producer, director, actor Kevin Smith (06:04):

Some of my favorite quotes in this piece are:

Yeah, well most of us rational thinkers weren’t banking on a cartoon to offer us a viable glimpse into the future of technological development.

Where do you regularly find characters that push the envelope of reality, who defy existing laws of nature and convention to illustrate a point about our human condition? Look no further than cartoons, comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes, and SpongeBob Squarepants.

If more people threw their hats over the wall, we wouldn’t be sitting here in this mess right now. We would be zooming over it in the flying car.

Throwing your hat over the wall is an expression that I am not familiar with. Randall, the backward baseball cap wearing Zeno in the film, talks about daring to disturb the universe, to think above and beyond the rational, pushing his pal Dante (the driver) to imagine a different world free of car exhaust and traffic congestion. How often do we ask our students or ourselves these types of questions, allowing our minds to race around the other side of the wall? Is it a waste of time or could it be a creative exercise in imagining other realities?

Finally, Randall really socks it to poor Dante:

See, you’re what’s wrong with this country, hell with this world. You’re always thinking about your own comfort level. Never thinking about the rest of us. This country was built on sacrifice and nearly 30 years of living a life full of selfish foot pampering and intergender intercourse has made you too soft to throw your hat over the wall for the good of mankind. And what’s worse is, not only do you ruin it for the rest of us with the flying car, but you completely blow the notion of American nobility in the process. The children of the world have no heroic figure to emulate. So the future of mankind continues on its downward spiral into entropy and mass extinction until all that was once great about the human race lies buried in the primordial stew to which we’ll most certainly return. Thanks to you and ill refusal to reach for the stars and you’ll forever be remembered as the sad footnote in the book of life. The wimpy little scumbag who could of breached the chasm of becoming and being. But instead opted to cover his own ass and foot in the process.

Randall gets quite heavy handed here and puts Dante in quite a box. Either Dante allows himself to be “diddled” by the inventor of the flying car and his friends or face ruining the future of humankind (!!!).

Without becoming too heavy handed myself, I like how this film humorously illustrates the importance of non-sensical, paradoxical thinking. Like Wittgenstein, we can use nonsense as a means to climb up and beyond our current understanding of things. In this sense, paradox serves as a ladder that allows us to get off the ground and see things from a different perspective.

In the realm of educational technology, the current Blackboard patent claim is a wonderful paradox that has gotten people to respond in a number of thoughtful and creative ways (See Downes’ coverage by typing “Blackboard in his websites’ search box). The DOPA controversy too has people climbing ladders all over the states and throughout Europe attempting to find reasonable solutions to knee-jerk legislation.

Paradox provides an opportunity to explore the unconscious assumptions associated with much of reality. They allow us to play with notions of sense/nonsense, misconceptions, disequilibration, and other cognitive conflicts. This is where is where real learning, real action, begins.


So I will leave you at the fifth gate of Seung Sahn's Twelve Gates:

Master Hyang Eom said, "It is like a man up a tree who is hanging from a branch by his teeth; his hands cannot grasp a bough, his feet cannot touch the tree; he is tied and bound. Another man under the tree asks him, 'Why did Bodhidharma come to China?' If he does not answer, he evades his duty and will be killed. If he answers, he will lose his life.

If you are in the tree, how do you stay alive?

Commentary: "Aigo, aigo, aigo!" Who died? Your mother or your son? It appears clearly in front of you.

When it comes to thinking about re-visioning and transforming education in light of the wave of innovation sweeping information and communication technologies (ICT)  (see Downes' E-Learning 2.0 article) several key points surface in my mind.

Teaching and learning (i.e., education) is a social phenomenon that involves critical elements (meaning, practice, community, and identity - Wenger, 1998) that shape and define how we participate and essentially how we learn. Computer technologies like wikis, weblogs, social bookmarking and social networking sites provide a space where meaning, practice, identity, and community can converge regardless of where a participant is located (see Siemens' Connectivism).

In other words, for students enrolled in a course on forensic sciences or teacher leadership, the classroom can take shape outside traditional definitions of classroom meeting space. Meatspace has evolved into an active Meet-space. Learning as such becomes a more engaging process of connectivity, bridging people, places, and things (e.g., ideas, data, information, nodes, etc.).

The formal/physical learning environment known as the classroom can still provide a marvelous time and space to engage people, places and things, yet ICTs have given educators an opportunity to expand the physical boundaries. Barbara Ganley who teaches in a traditional classroom environment explicates this idea in greater detail where she describes how the use of blogs in her course “accelerates inquiry by linking us to a wide range of resources and thus the greater conversation within our discipline as apprentices and experts, and it provides a place for the class to engage in discussion, in reflection and in learning construction outside of class. Class never ends.”

In the example above, the community becomes the text, a place where ideas, data and information, converge and are decoded and encoded in both meat- and virtual space. Guided by the instructor, the collection of students that forms the class/the community, learn how to study, observe, and make sense and meaning out of each others' work, each others' texts.

I'm not suggesting this can only be done using information and communication technologies. I am wondering if through the use of such social software, instructors/facilitators are better able to make teaching and learning, production and consumption, more transparent? In this sense, learning is not so much about receiving but more iterative, that is, more about producing (informed through the receiving).

It appears if thoughtfully structured, the course text is no longer that which is produced by publishers, but shifts to the student-as-producer. The traditional textbook becomes the basis or the launch site for the community generated text.

As Downes puts it:

This approach to learning means that learning content is created and distributed in a very different manner. Rather than being composed, organized and packaged, e-learning content is syndicated, much like a blog post or podcast. It is aggregated by students, using their own personal RSS reader or some similar application. From there, it is remixed and repurposed with the student's own individual application in mind, the finished product being fed forward to become fodder for some other student's reading and use.

Do learners have the right to take charge of their own learning? If so, what challenges will this place on the dominant bureaucracies responsible for curriculum standards and design?

This much called for shift from instructor-centered to student-centered design can feel quite chaotic and subversive given the history of hegemonic control exerted by educational designers and administrators. Yet if we observe carefully, most institutional design and control is created in response to events and ideas; imagination and vision is most often and at best an afterthought.

In Teacher Leadership (2004), authors Ann Lieberman and Lynne Miller argue that

Schools must accommodate themselves to the changing economic realities. In order to educate the workforce and citizenry of the future, they have to keep pace with marketplace demands as well as with technology and its effects on the way people communicate. People used to go to school because that is where the knowledge was (W. McIntyre, comments delivered at the annual conference of the New England Research Association, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Apr. 2003). Now, public education has lost its monopoly on learning; almost anything can be found on the Internet. As schools compete with virtual academies and private providers for students, they have to make the case that they are better than their competitors at teaching people how to think critically, evaluate sources of information, and participate as full citizens in a democracy (pg. 3).

What strikes me most in the debate over the transformation of learning environments from 1.0 to 2.0, is how the role of the teacher becomes a critical nexus for change. Again, borrowing from Lieberman and Miller, teachers can challenge the status quo and the assumptions that currently have a hold on our public schools. Teacher leaders can be the advocates for new forms of accountability and assessment. They can be the innovators in the reconstruction of norms of achievement and expectations for students. And they can become the stewards for an invigorated profession.

It should also be said that although the Internet, ICTs, and social software afford a great means for interactivity and community bridging it does not always do so. Forming communities and opportunities for engagement requires time, effort, resources (both human and fiscal) and a great deal of trial and error. In The Social Life of Information (2002), Brown and Duguid note that “[i]f society ignores the need to address both geographical and social distance (or assumes that Moore's law will fix the problem), new technologies may only polarize further an already divided educational system” (p. 226). Brown and Duguid not that what separates one teaching and learning environment from another are the types of access they afford. Consequently, access to resources and expertise is still an issue and a potential barrier to knowledge growth and meaningful connectivity.

Another critical factor that should be mentioned regarding integrating the Internet technologies into our schools is a basic resistance to change. Even with an abundance of research that demonstrates the effectiveness of technology in teaching and learning environments, resistance to adopt these technologies exists on a host of levels ranging from limited resources, limited classroom space, to time, effort and training, as well as an individual educator's pedagogical belief system. In a broader ecological sense, teachers and educators are members of a keystone species, that is, they have an affect on the other species around them, and external educational innovations like the Internet and social software represent an invasion of an exotic species that has the potential of surviving, perishing, overpowering, or co-evolving where new traits and properties become adopted that support the environment on the whole.

Resistance to integrating new technologies into educational environments is a compelling argument on many levels. It underlies an important point regarding how computers are perceived in education. Some uses of technology are better suited than others in a particular learning environment and are more likely to endure and propagate. Thus the question of whether technology is effective in improving student achievement is not the correct one to ask. What is more important are the questions concerning educational policies/strategies and the prerequisite conditions for using technologies in the classroom.

Integrating the Internet and social software into the classroom is a complex and multifaceted process. As we stand today, there is very little research regarding which technology is most appropriate and effective for particular tasks. In my mind, this is a good thing. This is where creativity steps in - and this is what education is all about (i.e., trying out ideas, experimenting with software, making mistakes, reinventing, etc.). More importantly, effective and appropriate use involves the competent and committed involvement of people. To this end, Internet search engines and social software such as weblogs, wikis, and social bookmarking sites provide a rich and resourceful environment for educators and learners of all ages. The Internet serves as a robust and active ecology to connect, collaborate, and aggregate numerous ideas and contributions of others, which permits people to further their understanding and share it with others. In this sense, social software contributes to peoples' ability to co-create knowledge that they can continue to draw from, reflect upon, and further refine. The challenge of implementing technology in educational environments is enormous, and yet so are the potential benefits. Consequently, the only real limit is the human imagination.






Online reference:

Downes, S. E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine. Retrieved 27 August 2006 from http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&articl

Ganley, B. (2006). Moving Student Blogging Beyond the Classroom: Another Look. bgblogging. Retrieved 09 August 2006 from http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/2006/08/mov

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Retrieved 27 August 2006 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Offline References:

Brown, J.S. & Duguid, P. (2002). The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Fish, S.  (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lieberman, A. & Miller, L. (2004) Teacher leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Article not included in the essay, but useful:

Cutler, K-M. (2006) A new high-tech take on school group project: Teachers share lessons learned about wikis. The Boston Globe, August, 4, 2006. Retrieved 27 August 2006 from http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2006/08/04


Image:

Magritte, R. Clairvoyance, 1936. Retrieved 27 August 2006 from http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/