Beyond School

I know I’ve been a handful lately. Posts too long, thoughts too convoluted. “Think-alouds are messy.” Sorry.

Worst of all, I’ve been shrill at times. That comes from what I see as an education system blindered beyond the school boundaries, and educators largely unwilling to reflect on that.

But I’m more and more hopeful now, because I’m finding other writers mentioning similar things in their own parallel universes.

Here, for example, Will Richardson writes about what I want to call “So What? 2.0″:

Yes, we can have kids create movies and podcasts and wikis and all sorts of artifacts that have meaningful purposes and messages. And yes that’s all good, but at the end of the day, all that’s about is being able to use the tool to do the same stuff we’ve done in the past only put it into a new form and offer it to a wider audience. The pedagogies haven’t changed.

Yep. Web 2.0 as “just another way to turn in homework.” Will continues:

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

I can’t help but want to ask if there’s not an even bigger question or two.

First, why not rethink the necessity of creating projects that have a final end, that are ever “over”? [Update: I see now that that's Will's point.]

While I’ve been slamming my own 1001 Flat World Tales project for its ultimate irrelevance, the one design aspect I do think has merit worth considering is this: it’s what one Spanish edublogger called “a never-ending” one. That “1001″ is not hyperbole, but a conscious choice to create a project that is as open as YouTube and Facebook to continued contribution and engagement by old and new participants alike. Was your 1001 story not accepted for publication by the student-teacher publishing team? Revise it and re-submit it next year. Always open. And don’t forget to check back for the annual addition of more tales from more students around the world. The book will grow like the Arabian Nights. And you, dear student, were, and still are, part of this new, never-ending project.

If I were a student who worked on this project last year, I’d be interested to watch it unfold next year, and do more than watch. Add images, comments, whatever. And I’d be curious about it every year after that.

The designing of projects with finite end-dates – which makes them “artifacts,” historical relics – is arbitrary. It’s a product of the limitations our profession puts on our thinking. Learning through a project finishes with a grade. On to the next one. Lock this one up as a showcase of “what I did in my [your discipline here] class.” It doesn’t have to be that way.

And that’s another reason I can’t let go of the potential of “Project: Global Cooling.” (That’s right, the Seoul students gave it a name yesterday in a meeting at my apartment. No more tortured labeling. ) That project is designed to be real, not an artifact. It’s designed to invite content and connections from students worldwide in precisely the same way the real-world “Live Earth” project is going about it. Fun with music, critical thinking with issues, digital skills and literacy development with content. And local action to tie it to engaged citizenship – pro or con. “Teaching the controversy,” as Doug puts it, and not “indoctrinating.”

This doesn’t mean grades can’t figure in the equation. Assign arbitrary deadlines and give the credit then. But since climate change isn’t going to be an artifact any time soon, and worldly students, anyway, are aware of that, the project will hold continued relevance.

The fun factor will help there too.

Which brings me to my second “bigger question,” after some background: Will Richardson is writing about citizenship (he’s even writing about Live Earth). Christopher Sessums is. David Warlick is. But it always seems to be compartmentalized in a separate space from “literacy and learning.” Will, possibly -strike that – definitely ironically, points to this compartmentalization of “knowing” and “community doing” in the title of the post: “Before We Get Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging, Let’s Save the World.” David Warlick’s “Do You Have What it Takes to Become a Citizen?” is an occasional piece for America’s July 4 Independence Day (and the “citizenship quiz” it links to is depressingly knowledge-based, which isn’t David’s fault. As if engaged citizenship ends with knowing a lot, and is something we think about on fireworks day. I beat you by 5 points on the quiz, David ).

So my second question: Why is citizenship a side-issue divorced from learning in our classrooms? Or if I’m wrong, where is it central to that?

Am I wrong to want to push the envelope and say that learning in all the disciplines can be applied to real-world issues while a) still satisfying standards and outcomes, and b) developing the literacies and new affordances of web 2.0, and c) reversing the infantilization and trivializing of our students? But I’ve already written about that in “The Year of Global Cooling and Understanding by Design.”

I’ll close with an idea so finely crafted by Christopher Sessums that it’s stirred me from my oblivion to his relevance to our conversations. It addresses my own rhetoric of late, and the rationale for it:

I recognize I am framing this issue in dualities that necessarily point to the poles as opposed to plowing a more fertile middle ground. My point is to suggest that if “we the people” are not careful and do not actively participate in this debate, then we could easily be left with fewer choices.

Sessums continues the thought with this must-read observation which, though framed in a different context, applies to this one as well:

The question of What kind of society do we want? is indeed a critical question, one not to be taken lightly. Getting members of society to really focus on this question, to engage in the debate, to participate in the conversation, is the $6400 question. When billions are spent annually on entertainment and escapism (pdf), getting people to focus on the critical questions will remain marginal at best. Yet change often starts at the periphery, at the fringes, before it becomes part of the larger conversation.

The nice thing is, some of these questions are starting to gain focus. See the cocomments for starters. Now if I can just soften the sharp edges of my rhetoric to invite more people in instead of, as I fear, driving them away with diatribe.

I’ll try. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

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