Beyond Parent Complaints to Principals: Let Them Comment on Our Blog

I just had the most interesting (and the only) parent complaint in my teaching career.

I don’t have time right now to go into it, but do want to hit a couple of ideas it sparked:

First, class blogs are transparent and social. Next year, I’ll invite–urge–parents and other community members to join the learning in my classrooms by disagreeing, voicing reservations, discomforts, emotions, whatever, on the class blog. The whole point of my first semester was to make my learners question all authority–have the Renaissance humanism experience themselves–so to have parents question my own authority would have modeled this perfectly. Real debates with parents, teachers, preachers, and all the other authorities in our learners’ lives are now possible thanks to web 2.0. Fascinating. The whole community now, not just the students, could be drawn into learning and growing together, negotiating meaning, sharing different points of view, etc. This is so much more vital than the old way–parent complains to principal behind closed doors. Why not complain to teacher on class blog? Any good teacher should be able to take criticism, defend her/his pedagogy, etc. Doing it transparently, for students, other parents, other community members to read, contribute to, and so forth, is an incredibly fertile option for us all to become learners.

I know this is idealistic. You realists out there–advice? feedback?

Second: The complaint itself would have never happened without web 2.0. We were able to make Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther, the Reformation, Galileo, and the Enlightenment more relevant by finding Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong’s “Call for a New Reformation” (1998) online–I love the post-Gutenberg twist, with the internet replacing Luther’s printing press as the way to spread the reformist’s ideas. Then one of my students found a video lecture by Bishop Spong on Google Video, and embedded it–with a very fine response to it–on her blog. Amazing: I hadn’t seen the hour-plus video, and became a learner via my student cum teacher’s blog–and it was a real learning experience for me. My decision, during a class that had refused to talk and discuss all semester, to simply let that video be a “guest lecture” in the classroom is what led to the parent complaint. None of this would have happened in the 20th Century. Fascinating.

Of course Spong’s ideas are controversial–so were those of Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Calvin, Galileo, and every other critic of the status quo. The interesting thing, of course, is that nobody was bothered when studying the reformers of the past. It was history–safe, irrelevant, stuff to regurgitate on tests and impress people by being able to uncritically summarize. Luther, being pre-Enlightenment and pre-Newton, is very easy to study without realizing the earthquakes his 95 Theses triggered in medieval Christian souls. Spong’s “theses” explicitly state that they take Luther one further by honestly facing the legacy of post-Newtonian science, and its implications for the Church. Now that’s a way for students to really experience the impact of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, “boring” concepts like “gravity” and “heliocentrism”, in a new–and yes, earth-shaking–light. It’s hard to feel controversy when it involves people who returned to dust 500 years ago; it’s hard not to feel it when it brings history home to where it belongs: inside your very ways of seeing the world.

But, thanks to the web, we can now update those 8-year-old textbooks with relevant, connected online content–and learn that history is in us now, that the ideas aren’t dusty and dead, and that they are indeed uncomfortable.

If only that discomfort could have been expressed–by student, parent, preacher, teacher, whomever–openly on the blogs. Imagine the real learning and growth that could have happened to all. (I invited students to invite them all to our class, either physically or virtually. Maybe next year somebody will accept.)

Now. How to do this better next time?

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