The next time you show “Did You Know?” to anybody involved in education, please consider showing this new video by William Farren, an educator in the Dominican Republic, as a vital counter-point:
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I’ve invited William to either guest-post here, or better still, be the guest for a student podcast for my Project Global Cooling activity, which is in sore need of traction after months of failed effort.
Invitation to Dialogue to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod:
Karl, Scott, as two of the biggest voices about 21st century education, due in no small part to the embrace worldwide of the “Did You Know?” video, I hope you’ll take a moment to make whatever comments come to mind after watching the video, either on your own blogs or, for the sake of conversation, in the comment thread to this post (or both). And without meaning to be in any way antagonistic or inflammatory, I’d like to ask if you see any possibility of either giving time, in a future version of “Did You Know?”, to sustainability and green learning, or at the very least to helping William’s video get as much exposure as “Did You Know?”
More Background
Here’s some background to my worry about “Did You Know?” being used so uncritically to frame our educational imperative for the 21st century. It’s from a post I wrote back in July, 2007, called: “Did You Know? There’s More to the Future than Economics.” I only include the last half, which is a response to a Diane Cordell post about “student voice” that includes the following quote:
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. –Piaget
The next generation, which we’re teaching now to be replicants of our own problematic lifestyles, are damned if they’re not equipped - or even conscious of - the world of their future. It’s been said a million times: “Our past is not their future.”
The one wrinkle I see in letting students decide what to learn is this: they are only aware of what their community - parents, teachers, preachers - make them aware of. And that community is generally not cognizant of the shape of the future, busy as it is with its own daily round and daily diet of soft news.
So I still see a role for adult educators to serve as sort of “futurist guides” to the next generation of adults.
Karl Fisch is already an example of someone playing that role, however unintentionally, by virtue of the viral reach of his “Did You Know?” video. According to that vision, largely a condensation of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the future to prepare for is one of economic competition with China and India.
But there’s more to our young people’s future than economics - especially when most of those economic practices are unsustainable. All this talk about “21st century workplace skills” disturbs me to no end for its trancelike oblivion to the unsustainability of that workplace.
Friedman actually mentions “green innovation” as one of those skills, incidentally, but that’s not mentioned in “Did You Know?”, so educators are largely not thinking of it. This isn’t Karl’s fault, since that video wasn’t intended to be anything more than a district edtech professional development presentation. But it’s taken a life of its own, and educators are so wowed by the flash of the animation they don’t seem to think beyond it to what else awaits in the future.
There are other futures we need to alert this generation to that are more fundamental, in my view. Global Warming and Climate Change, combined with the Peak Oil situation, top the list.
If we adults don’t use our capacity for being more informed, beyond the media, about the future we’re creating for our young, they have nobody to educate them in what is relevant to their future. We’ve surrendered our role to the larger forces of culture and media that are stuck in the status quo.
I can’t thank William Farren enough for taking such time and care to self-produce this video. It’s an inconvenient truth, but no less true for it: the hidden curriculum does matter. For all the talk we do about caring for kids, we seem to forget the grandkids - and all the other species on this planet - when we forget to teach the whole future, and not just the (problematic) need for economic competition.
Related reading: “The Year of Global Cooling and Understanding by Design” - project-based learning across the curriculum, for a sustainable future.
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14 Comments
Clay, the video is terrific, but more so, the “more background piece” is brilliant and I’m sorry I missed your previous post on this. I am drawn to this critical framework largely because much of my doctoral work was situated in post-industrial, post-modern theory.
The message here is a hardsell, and not just to government and industry. The problem is that it these ideas remain revolutionary and putting them into any sort of meaningful practice means great lifestyle and philosophy changes.
My Faculty is currently going through a renewal, toward a social justice or “education for a better world mandate. I’m excited about the changes, but we are seeing already in our work with undergraduates is that it is very hard to change the values and ideas in the indoctrinated.
I love the video, but IMHO, there needs to be a series of these with ideas in bite-size pieces for the audience. It’s a lot to take in at one time, and I would love to see how the message of this video and “did you know” are compared/contrasted. I think new ideas are best brought in when critically compared to the norm.
Great work, great post, and I really hope you are able to engage those you target, and many others.
Alec Couros’s last blog post..How Kids Cheat
Clay: read these when you can.
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC27/Orr.htm
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/374/nature_deficit_disorder?page=2
Dina’s last blog post..and speaking about what feeds you?
Clay, excellent post. I blogged about this exact problem just the other day:
http://www.getrealscience.com/jhenderson/?p=72
Dina is right to send you to the work of David Orr and Richard Louv. If you have the time (and the intestinal foritutude), I recommend the work of Chet Bowers and the educational eco-justice movement:
http://www.ecojusticeeducation.org/
Bowers is a difficult read, but his ideas are salient once you distill them down into managable pieces. Many of us are trying to figure out the intersection between technology and sustainability within the reality of global/local economies.
I’ll let you know if I ever figure that out. In the meantime the journey is really fun. Thanks for this post.
Clay,
Thanks for giving Bill props here. I work with Bill here at Carol Morgan and I am continually impressed with his passion and vision for what direction he feels (and many of us, especially reading your blog) education in the 20th century should be moving. Like you said, kids will only want to learn about what they know or perceive to know (maybe). It is our job to blast those doors wide open and show them the other side to things they already “know” and both sides to the things they have no idea about. Interconnectedness in all things needs to be stressed and we need to de-fragmentalize (not sure if that is a word) education as we know it. If everything in nature is connected than is every part of knowledge also connected? Keep up the good fight, always a pleasure keeping up with your thoughts.
Clay - I spent the entire time just nodding my head “yes” to that video. Thanks for posting that.
Penelope’s last blog post..Calvinists more likely to Cheat
Thanks for your post and the video. I’ve used the “Did you know video” a lot to provoke discussion in my classes, now I’ll include “Did you wonder” to balance the debate.
Ann F’s last blog post..Bubbleshare
Clay, thanks for posting this video. “Did you know” speaks to our fear of getting behind in the global economy, while this video speaks more to our search for meaning beyond the economy. Decades ago Ivan Illich was saying these things in “Tools for Conviviality” and “Deschooling Society”:
We have learned that for most the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school. — Ivan Illich
tom’s last blog post..Many years and a few terabytes later
Thanks for sharing the video. You’re right about Peak Oil and environmental degradation being major issues that will need to be dealt with by our students in their lives. Hopefully their generation takes the threats a little more seriously than the generations that came before them.
Ben Wildeboer’s last blog post..Design, presentations, and the power of the network
Hey - just getting caught up. I’m certainly not working on a version 3 of Did You Know? - can’t speak for Scott. I added Did You Ever Wonder? to the shifthappens wiki - http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/Various+Versions+of+the+Presentation, you’re welcome to start a new page on the wiki to start addressing this topic.
As far as the original Did You Know?, I’m probably in the minority, but I never really saw it as an economic argument. Sure, that was a small piece of it, but for me that was just an illustration of “the shifts,” not an end unto itself. My school was changing (first 6-8 slides), the world was changing (stuff about India and China - but I wasn’t necessarily viewing that as an economic crisis for the U.S. - just illustrating that things are changing - and what I want for U.S. kids I want for all kids), and technology was changing (amount of info, access to info, computing power) - all illustrating that it’s a different world and perhaps we should be thinking differently about our industrial age model of schooling. (And, for the record, none of Did You Know? actually came from The World is Flat, although it certainly influenced my thinking as I was putting it together.)
As far as Tough Choices, Tough Times that was mentioned in this video, I did blog about that as well - http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/01/blueprint-for-colorado.html, and I certainly agree that education isn’t simply about preparing future employees, but future citizens and just plain old happy, fulfilled people - I can dig for the links if you want :-).
I think the climate change discussion is slowly entering into our schools - not as fast as many of us would like - but that applies to a whole lot of good things I’d like to see in schools as well. But teachers are in a bind - they don’t determine curriculum all by themselves, and often the communities they teach in are not quite ready for those discussions. (The Congressman for the district that my school is in is Tom Tancredo - does that tell you anything?) That doesn’t mean we don’t advocate for that, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “Why aren’t they teaching this?” In the meantime, I drive my Prius and tell everyone how much I love it, buy my fluorescent bulbs, and try not to feel guilty about the resources the 800+ computers in my building are consuming . . .
Karl Fisch’s last blog post..“Open Up the World of Learning to Everyone Who Wants to Learn”
Clay and company-
A California congressman is working to make human influenced climate change part of the state curriculum. I agree with Karl-teachers are in a bind and their hands are tied. We know there is science behind what is happening and we know it is tremendously important for our young people to understand the science. However, it still seems to be a political issue. That is why it is important that states like California provide essential leadership:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,330932,00.html
Clay, you suggested that I post a link to the information about the 24 hour Global Earth Day 2008 Webcastathon that I’m helping put together. The idea is to have a 24 hour conversation about the health of our planet, with moderators signing up to take 1-2 hour blocks throughout the entire day (we’ll work of GMT time). Right now we have moderators from the UK, Wisconsin/USA, California and Vancouver/Canada. Please visit the following link if you’d like to learn more about the Earth Day 2008 Webcastathon: http://tinyurl.com/2scs6v
We also created a little sign up schedule for the day at the following URL:
http://enviroscims.wikispaces.com/Earth+Day
Sign up for an hour or two if you think this is something you’d be interested in participating in and moderating.
Thanks,
Matt Montagne
Middle School Instructional Technology Coordinator
University School of Milwauke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Matt Montagne’s last blog post..Parents as Partners Tonight!
@KARL,
Thanks so much for the response and the gracious offer. Seems like we’re all running to stand still these days, and I’m no exception right now (by way of apology for not replying sooner).
Bill Farren will be guest-blogging here for several weeks to follow up on the “Did You Ever Wonder?” video, and I’ve suggested he start the wiki page for the video as well. He’s more on point with this than I am.
Finally, I stand corrected on your sources for DYK, and tried to acknowledge the huge divide between the videographer and the video itself. I play the video myself for parents and others for the points it makes; I’m just glad to try to help Bill add to that message.
And ouch, do I hear you about the laptop school carbon increase. We’re working on proposals right now in Project Global Cooling to the admin that attempt to at least offset that increase from the laptops with reductions of the mindless waste in routine school operations. (And it’s not easy going.)
Thanks again, Karl, for taking the time and opening that door to Bill and others. Oh for the day when Green goes viral as readily as Tech does.
Clay Burell’s last blog post..Field Trips to Other People’s Podcasts
@MATT,
I passed your project on to a student in my school who wants to explore the possibility, so let me know if I can help more. Thanks and good luck. Sounds like a project worth repeating annually - maybe even incorporating with Project Global Cooling?
Clay Burell’s last blog post..Field Trips to Other People’s Podcasts
I am a teacher . I have often wondered how to break out of this “cog in the wheel” curriculum that we are given to “teach.”
Is there a place where info. is available??
I teach 4th grade.
Thanks
@Linda,
Go to Bill Farren’s Education for Well-Being website and search this blog for “Farren” to see his four recent guest-posts. Bill’s much more focused on this issue than I am, and has much more knowledge about resources.
Clay Burell’s last blog post..Let Tyranny Ring: Notes on Eggers, Part One
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