Beyond School

[Fourth in a series: 1. My Intro to Bill: "Beyond 'Did You Know?' - 'Did You Ever Wonder?'"; 2.  "Education for Well-Being"; 3. "The Hidden Curriculum"; 4. "Random Acts of Deceleration".  It's been an honor to have Bill guest-blog here.  We need vision like his.  You can subscribe to Bill's Education for Well-Being site here. -- Clay]

I’d like to give a huge “thank you” to Clay for inviting me to guest post on Beyond-School and for helping promote the concept of education as an instrument of well-being. His desire to do what’s best for students, the planet, and for education in general, inspires.

The Age of Paradox

This from a book I’m currently reading:

“We live in the age of paradox. Our buildings are taller, but our purposes shorter. We have more labor saving devices, but less time for neighbors and friends. We have more money but less fairness; more weapons but less security; more power over nature, but a less-stable nature than ever before. We have more science, research, and intellectual capability than ever, but less common sense and good judgment in our public affairs.” David Orr, Design on the Edge

Ours is also a time of skills—skills that far outstrip purpose. We have the skills to put people on the moon, move whole mountains, create 100,000 different chemicals, and build stealth bombers. I’d like to argue, following Orr’s thinking, that it’s not a lack of skills that will keep us from succeeding. It will be a lack of reflection on the values needed to wisely manage an ever-growing skill set.

Almost exclusively, the educational dialogue today centers around the skills students will need in order to succeed in the 21^st century. Discussions about the values needed for success happen with much less frequency. I’m guessing this has to do with the fact that many consider the teaching of values beyond the purview of educational institutions, especially secular ones. There is some validity to this. Who is to say what values should be taught? So as not to walk onto this slippery slope, I’d like to frame the discussion differently. Instead of arguing about whose values should to be taught, I prefer instead to look at the concept of value itself.

We can study value. By doing so, we will be better able to direct our limited cognitive, material, and emotional resources towards more fruitful ends. Our skills can be put to better use. There is an ever-growing body of information about value that is shattering many ideas that are currently the standard fare in our curricula. Redefining Progress believes “that if policymakers measure what really matters to people—health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being—economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability.” The burgeoning field of true cost economics allows us to get a better picture of value that goes beyond the incomplete view taught in most classrooms today. “True Cost Economics is currently creating a sizable ruckus in the academic world, and its value as a system of thought is starting to be recognized by the economic establishment.” [Underline added; source: Utne] We currently spend vast amounts of money training people for military service and for jobs associated with the military industrial complex. (M. I. T. has been dubbed the Military Institute of Technology in the popular press.) Vision of Humanity put out an interesting study which looks at the economic value of peace (among other benefits). On their site they state, “Although we have the concept of a war industry and the economics of war, few people would relate to a peace industry and the economics of peace. Yet it is evident that business wishes to invest in areas where there is minimal violence. The economic benefits of peace seem obvious.”

Natural capitalism and the understanding of ecosystem services can also help us better judge value. During his annual Independence Day address to congress, Leonel Fernandez, president of the Dominican Republic, referring to a $2.6 billion deal struck with gold companies giving them mining rights on the tropical island, announced to applause, “This will be the largest investment ever realized in the history of the Dominican Republic.” One wonders though, had the leadership of this fragile island been better educated in the issues of value, would they have struck such an unfavorable deal? It’s easy to look at $2.6 billion as pure gain when no consideration is given to what is lost.

The paradoxes we see today are largely the result of our pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, our ideas about what will make us happy are often wrong. On the positive side, subjective experiences like happiness are starting to be studied scientifically. As this new area of inquiry matures as is given more prominence, schools would be wise to incorporate the findings into procedural and curricular domains. The scientific evidence available to date should have schools questioning the pursuit of high test scores in the name of high-paying jobs. (For more about our poor choices related to happiness, watch this video:

Author Juliet Schor, in her book Born to Buy, notes in a survey of students that, more than half agree that, “when you grow up, the more money you have, the happier you are,” and 62 percent say that, “the only kind of job I want when I grow up is one that gets me a lot of money.” She later goes onto say, “American children are deeply enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending, and they are getting more so. We find that the more enmeshed they are, the more they suffer for it. The more they buy into the commercial and materialist messages, the worse they feel about themselves, the more depressed they are, and the more they are beset by anxiety, headaches, stomachaches, and boredom.”

If educational institutions have as their mission the improvement of lives, then they should consider how they are preparing students to critically deal with the dysfunctional value systems that permeate our lives. If looked at objectively and approached scientifically, we can discuss the pedagogy of values as easily and frequently as we do that of skills.

Bill Farren

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If I’m sharing a lot of student bloggers on Beyond School lately, it’s because we only launched our high school-wide blogging program back in mid-January. Two short months later, I’m seeing sparks of genius here and there.

Here’s another one: A 30-page Comic Life comic book from Beatrice. I featured it in my presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute in Bangkok back in December (video here), but at that time, it was locked in a private class Ning. With the help of my Twitter network - particularly Scott Meech in Chicago and Adrian Bruce in northern New South Wales, Australia - I was able to find a WordPress plugin that creates full-screen slideshows of Flickr photo sets. Beatrice exported her Comic Life pages as jpegs, uploaded them to Flickr as a set, and embedded the set as a slideshow in this post on her blog. I can’t recommend the comic highly enough: it’s a satire on the GPA mania of parents and schools, and its destructive effects on parents and children alike. Both the plot and the graphic design - not to mention the imagination - are first-rate. And this girl is a mere 15.

Here are a couple teaser shots. Follow this link to the full book, and also browse Beatrice’s showcase of paintings and photoshop illustrations for a glimpse of the non-verbal potential of student blogging. Beatrice’s dominant intelligence, she tells me, is visual. And she gets how ideal blogs can be to showcase her portfolio.

Be sure to leave her a comment. And by the way, this copyrighted material is used by permission from the artist.

I’m so glad we aren’t using the blogs as prescriptive homework assignments. The things we discover about these individuals we lump into the “student” label can be wonderfully surprising, when they have the freedom to post what they choose.

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[This is guest-post number two by my long-time global partner Chris Watson in Honolulu, with whom I've collaborated in Seoul for over a year now. See Chris' first guest post here. -- Clay]

Remixing Curriculum: An Interview with Lisa Stewart

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. The areas of focus were: brain plasticity, learning styles, reading development, emotional responses, and mindsets. If you’re interested in more details in these areas, I’ve been posting my notes, albeit slowly, to Watsoncommon. What I want to write about in this post is a question I asked at the conference for which there wasn’t a research-based answer.

It goes like this:

I was in a session about engaging students’ emotions with curriculum and leveraging their brains’ social needs with activities in class. As you can imagine, the examples covered in the session were things like group work, task-specific stations, anticipatory sets that give students the opportunity to generate the essential questions for a unit. And there was all kinds of brain research to show that these kinds of activities trigger the best hormone balance for long-term, meaningful learning to happen. My question was if virtual social environments and activities also create the same ideal brain chemistry for learning.

Apparently, there is no research in this area yet, according to the presenter. So at my school, this has become somewhat of a guiding question. What are effective practices with technology and what are the results? And there are a handful of teachers who are purposefully employing and reflecting on new kinds of activities with these questions in mind. To frame the creation of these activities, we’ve been using Marzano’s research on effective instruction as structure: Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing, Reinforcing efforts and providing recognition, Practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting objectives and providing feedback, Generating and testing hypotheses, Cues, questions, and advanced organizers. Let me know if you’re interested in the full article.

Lisa, mentioned in my first guest post, is one of the teachers (she’s a technology resource teacher too) designing and implementing activities in her class that not only use the technology but explore these essential questions. The other week, I subbed her class and learned about a remix project that she’d given to her students. It was an opportunity to create a nonlinguistic representation of their understanding of Holden Caulfield. In this podcasted interview, Lisa describes the design of the assignment, some observations of the products, and how it led to a different kind of essay. Also embedded below are some example projects, one of which she references in the interview. The Voicethread blew me away! Enjoy.

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Hot off the TED presses: A brain scientist shares her experience of what can only be called mysticism from, of all things, a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.

It’s nice to hear scientists describing these experiences without recourse to the religious Books of old. One doesn’t need to read a book to encounter the Divine, nor to personify it with a name.

It’s a truly beautiful, captivating talk. We really should, in English and speech classes around the world, throw out the textbooks and schooly assignments, and simply watch TED to learn what a great speech is. What sort of unit would this be: each student giving his or her own TED talk, his or her own “idea worth sharing.”

You won’t regret watching this. It’s sublime.

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Sometimes an introduction is unnecessary. Let me just announce this new student blogger debutante by letting her show you her stuff. All I’ll say by introduction is, warts and all, I love the sheer joy in writing she displays in this post - not “schooly,” not academic, but wonderfully creative, thoughtful, and writerly, with a voice deserving my megaphone.  I’m going to post the first half, and hope you click through to read the rest on her blog. Announcing the inimitable 15-year-old “Flying Backwards,” and her post:

Language Barrier

Though many people are offended when someone teases us Asians about our horrid “Engrish,” it’s quite hard to defend our stance when we have grammatical atrocities like these plastered across the malls in Korea:

^ Apparently, when I “put first step” in their shop (Artbox), I “can have a big smile“. “Can.” But not necessarily. It’s optional. I could have a big frown if I wanted to. Or a big dump.

^ I’m not even going to TRY to decipher this one. But one thing I know for sure is that this sign does NOT make me “everyday smile and happy.” More like “everyday make odd finger gestures at grammatically mangled signs“

The people who were in charge of creating these signs for Artbox have not just butchered the English language, they have strangled it, hacked it up with a ten-foot long machete, and then proceeded to eat its raw flesh. In the rain.

Ironic considering that most Korean mothers will gnaw off their own hamstrings in order for their child to become fluent in English. I mean, even the CIA factbook has gone through the trouble of mentioning that “English [is] widely taught in junior high and high school.” (If you want proof CLICK HERE and look under the “Languages” part of the factbook.) . . . .

[Again, click here to read more.]

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