Beyond School

Shifts are happening more and more quickly in my world. I’ve seen too many inspired visions crash on the shoals of reality to celebrate these shifts yet, but they do make me hopeful.

They’re happening with a few select students: Lindsea in Hawaii (I often want to call Lindsea “my favorite student,” but I’ve never met her outside of Skype, Twitter, blogs, and the 1001 Flat World Tales workshops where we met a year ago) and Patrick in Seoul are becoming the 21st century students I (we?) need to point to as examples, for teachers who need to see what we can only talk about. I’ve already blogged about them recently, and will return to them soon in more in-depth posts. (But see Jenny Luca’s post about their visits from Hawaii and Seoul into a classroom in Melbourne today to discuss Project Global Cooling with the Australian students: Connecting, creating, collaborating on real-world global citizenship.)

I’m equally tempted by hope because shifts are happening with my school administration. My principal, Rich Boerner (next year’s director), approved my course proposal for an elective class next year - the only one I’ll teach, as I spend the rest of my time as K-12 21st C. Learning Coordinator. I want this class to be a showcase of what the students with the right stuff - confidence, creativity, motivation, vision, courage, playfulness, outside-the-boxedness and beyond-schooliness - can do, given a classroom with an open network, MacBooks for all, and a certain kind of teacher (which means, for better or worse, me).

I was just on “Shanghai Jeff” Utecht’s and “Taiwan Dave” Carpenter’s Shifting Our School’s podcast with Chris Betcher* from Sydney, Australia. I shared my course description there, and Jeff said some listeners on the Ustream chat asked me to post the course description.

So here it is, without any claims to it being a silver bullet. Any feedback between now and next August when this class starts is more than welcome. So are any offers to connect our students next year, without teachers, by simply saying: “There are students in Korea, Hawaii, Australia, and elsewhere following Youthnet on Twitter (and on the Youthnet wikispace). You students wanting to find others to do collaborative projects can find each other there. Let me know if you need feedback on anything.” And then we teachers just focus on the quality of those projects, assessing by “sitting with” and guiding in whatever ways we can. (And in my class? Students will suggest their own grades, and justify them by showing what they learned about creating, collaborating, learning, and communicating, as well as by showing me they were not lazy or dull.)

Here it is:

Advanced Writing and Multimedia Projects:

For real writers and creators: Love to write, to speak, and/or to make films? Wish there was a class where you could work on your own ideas, your own projects, and learn advanced podcasting, film-making, writing/blogging, social networking? This class is for you. You design your project(s). You develop them however you want them to go. And you get feedback from your teacher on the quality of your writing and other multimedia (radio/podcasting, movie-making, blogging, social networking strategies). If you choose, you can learn to market your project for world attention. It will be yours to continue in coming years, when class is over.

Projects can be: creative or non-fiction, text-only, multimedia-only, or mixed. Interaction and collaboration with world students in Australia, the USA, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America via Skype, Twitter, and other tools is encouraged, but not required.

Pre-requisite: By interview only. Bring evidence that you actively write, podcast, make movies, etc; and be able to describe the project idea(s) you want the freedom to work on in school.

We’ll see how this goes. Realistically, I only hope it adds a few more “lighthouse students” to the world stage, like Lindsea and Patrick.

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Photos: Biandronno’s trampoline by otomatuah; Isle to Red Door by StephanosP