Beyond School

Dispensing with the Easy Stuff First: Guest Bloggers Bill Farren and Chris Watson

I wish I could say I was really taking a honeymoon, but it has to wait a week or three. More on that after I announce this week’s guest-bloggers, who have kindly agreed to take the helm while I float back down to earth from Saturday’s nuptial clouds.

Bill Farren will post his third weekly installment on Education for Well-Being (the full series*: my intro “Beyond ‘Did You Know?’ - A Video for Viral Times: ‘Did You Ever Wonder?’“; Bill’s first guest-post, “Education for Well-Being“; Bill’s second guest-post, “The Hidden Curriculum“; and Seoul sophomore Patrick Nam’s outstanding podcast interview with Bill for Project Global Cooling).

Also, Christopher Watson will make his first appearance. Chris teaches at Punahou High School in Honolulu and blogs at WatsonCommon, but is also my closest team teacher. Yes, I’m in Korea, and yes, he’s in the most remote Pacific island on the planet, but we’ve team-taught, brainstormed, and tried to trail-blaze constantly since collaborating on the 1001 Flat World Tales over a year ago. Chris’ imagination, as well as his penchant for organization and management, have made his blog a gold mine for me for the past year. He’s got full license to post as much as he’d like this week.

Now for the Tough Stuff: An Impossible “Thank You”

I shared my Korean wedding on this blog via Ustream for two main reasons: first, to include my family in the States and my friends from Twitter and elsewhere; second, to model the infinite possibilities of blogging to any and all educators and students who can’t see the history, the wonder, the playfulness, the power of it all.

Let me repeat that second point: Ustreaming my marriage was yet another attempt to teach the power of this new medium.

Deliciously enough, though, the result was a new discovery - a new learning - for me. I learned that, simply put, this new medium can unlock new forms of human kindness.

I only have time right now for three examples:

Carolyn Foote sent me a home-made Flickr card before the wedding:

Wedding present on Flickr - Photo Sharing! via kwout

During the wedding, Chris Betcher in Sydney started this “real-world project” Voicethread with my twitter friends (go ahead, click “play,” and be amazed):

And after the wedding, Frank in Mexico (whose blog has my all-time favorite header!) posted the full wedding chat on Ustream - I was “away from keyboard” for obvious reasons (the inlaws vetoed my bid to carry my Macbook to the altar) - and the Twitter history during the wedding as well (and more):

Clay’s Wedding 2.0: Blogged, Ustreamed, Flickr’d, Voicethreaded & Twittered so del.icio.us | Faces of Web 2.0 ★ 21st Century Teachers via kwout

That’s just the tip of the warmthberg - but it already exhausts my abilities to adequately thank (and Diane Cordell, I can’t even begin to describe your constant kindness).

Still, I want to pull one more teachable moment out of this: etymologically, the word “education” comes from the root “duc” - Latin for “to lead” - and the prefix “e-”, “out, away from”. In the Deep Old Sense, then, “education” is “to lead out” (and I’ll milk that vague connection to “Beyond Schooliness” for all it’s worth here, thank you).

What do these historically new acts of kindness have to teach us, we students of life? I’d suggest this: if you think you have nothing to write about as you face the blank screen, remember these people, and their fine gestures, and consider, instead of thinking, simply feeling. And create from that. Create some new form of kindness. Let your education “lead you out” - from yourself. Let it pull you to engage the world from the tip of your nose to the opposite pole.

I’m afraid I didn’t get that right, but that’s okay. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

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*Due to a technical error, I lost all the comments to these posts, but will restore them from my comments RSS feed as soon as the dust settles. My apologies to Bill and all for that.

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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

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As my 1:1 MacBook laptop school drives further into 21st century education - attempts to, anyway, despite getting stuck in the deep mud of 20th century teachers, parents, and students - I’m more and more realizing that it’s the early adopters who are the exponential change-agents.

Among the adults at my school, the early adopters fueling the shifts at our school are history teacher Jason Spivey (I posted about him on my guest-blogger post at Wes Fryer’s blog yesterday, and spoke of him in my Apple Distinguished Educator presentation video from Bangkok recently), middle school social studies teacher Anthony Armstrong, and my high school principal and vice principal, Rich Boerner and Robin Schneider.

But having a few adults that get it at school isn’t enough. You need students to get it too. The effects of over a decade of schooliness, I’m discovering, prevent most high school students from getting it at all. I’ve joked on Twitter about the need to create de-programming workshops for schoolified students along the lines used for ex-cult members (hm - school as cult: there’s a post idea). So I’m really pleased to see students who do see it, and rise above the herd who don’t.

Introducing Patrick Nam, a Quality Student Podcaster

Patrick Nam is one such student. He’s in Project Global Cooling, and he used Skype, ecamm’s $15 USD Call Recorder download (Mac only), and GarageBand to record and edit this podcast interview with my guest-blogger Bill Farren (see his two posts over the last eight days below), creator of the “Did You Ever Wonder?” video and “Education for Well-Being” website. Here’s the podcast embed:

I admire Patrick’s care for production values in his podcasts, as well as his ability to interview adults with the confidence that should belong - but doesn’t, as a rule - to young adults like himself. So many of our students are scared to relate to adults, to talk to them, to learn through conversation. Patrick is not socially stunted in this way. I hope other students at my school see how cool Patrick’s podcast projects are as real-world ways to learn and create. When was the last time any of them interviewed an expert on the other side of the planet, and published it for the world as a digital radio show?

He’s definitely our best school podcaster. For more, see his interview with Lindsea of Project Global Cooling, Hawaii (and Students 2.0) here. And check out Patrick’s blog here (he podcasts an interview with me there about Apple Remote Desktop and student rights to privacy at school - quite a scoop, since I explain how students can hide files from teachers’ prying eyes). His podcasts make good models to use for your students. Patrick knows a podcast is more than hitting “record” and then posting it. Patrick knows quality.

Me? I’m Asking, “What is Schooliness?” on Wes Fryer’s Blog

Come join the fun with a history of schooliness and a wicked invitation to some Open Thread goodness on Wes Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Help make a Schooly Devil’s Dictionary in the thread!

“What is Schooliness?” - Discursus and Open Thread (Clay Burell guest-post 2) » Moving at the Speed of Creativity via kwout

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By Bill Farren on teaching

[Clay here: In a wonderful bit of musical blogs, I’m guest-blogging on Wes Fryer’s Speed of Creativity this weekend, while Bill Farren is continuing his guest-blogging stint about his Education for Well-Being.  Read Bill’s first guest-post here, and his Education for Well-Being website as well.  And if you want to involve your classrooms in some exciting projects, see the comments to the first guest-post.  Now, here’s Bill:]

Much of what is learned in schools isn’t the result of a lesson plan. It’s often the result of a lack of planning, lack of ideas, and lack of reflection. Take the building students call school. How was it built? What materials were used? Where did those materials come from? How is it run? Who decided how it should be built? What’s taught inside of it? The answers to these questions form another curriculum that often goes unnoticed. David Orr refers to the architecture of school buildings as a kind of “crystallized pedagogy” with its own “hidden curriculum that teaches as effectively as any course taught in them.”

School, London (source: seir at Flickr)

Let’s take a look at some of the questions above by posing even more.

Did the building’s designers take into consideration its location? Did they work with the advantages and challenges of the site in mind? Or did they use a one-size-fits-all approach? Does the design take advantage of available sunlight to provide lighting, heat and electricity? Are buildings situated and designed in a way that they take advantage of prevailing winds? Is rainfall used for advantage? Is local expertise–the kind that has taught desert dwellers and tropical inhabitants to design effectively over thousands of years–incorporated into the design? Is material local; or has it been shipped from afar at great expense to budget and planet? Depending on the answers to these questions, the unwritten lesson might be one of sustainability, harmony, efficiency, nuance, practicality, mindfulness, consideration for others, long-term thinking, intergenerational justice, and the importance of wellness. Or it might be about short-term thinking, man “conquering” nature, mass production, cheap energy, dismissing “primitive” local culture and proven simplicity in favor of high-tech, “sophisticated” “solutions”. It might be about faulty economics, taught by constructing energy-intensive buildings that are initially believed less expensive to build but prove much more expensive to own and operate over their lifetime. (As this video demonstrates, designing efficiently in terms of systems, has shown to increase first costs by only 1- 5% in many cases, and in others, actually lowers first costs as compared to standard construction processes. Operating costs in terms of energy purchases and maintenance are dramatically reduced for the life of the building. Design and construction makes up only 2% of the total costs of a commercial building over 30 years. The other 98% is from operations, maintenance, finance and employees.)

Who decided how (if) it should be built? As I mention in “Did You Ever Wonder?”, we teach about democracy but we could do better at allowing those in our schools to practice it. Were students or staff asked about what kind of building they needed or wanted? Were parents or neighbors involved? The answers to these questions teach a lot about power, influence, passivity, and expertise.

Does the building make an attempt to connect students with their outside world? Does it bring the outside in? Or are its occupants disconnected physically and mentally by artificial light, artificial climate, artificial sights and sounds, in a classroom dealing with artificial problems? Again, what’s learned depends on the answers to the questions.

What does the formal, intentional curriculum teach? Are students taught how to protect and nurture their environment? Does the school offer a formal curriculum that addresses the challenges we all currently face vis-à-vis living on a planet with a finite biosphere? Are classes such as sustainable architecture, sustainable economics, media literacy, ecology, biomimicry, oceanography or energetics taught? If so, are they mandatory or elective? When these classes are not offered or relegated as electives, what does that tell students about how we value their future? What message do students learn about the value adults place on the environment? What message does it give about our belief in our ability to change?

How is this formal, intentional curriculum taught? Do we teach students to think integratively? Are subjects combined with each other? Do we teach systems thinking, contextualizing what happens in the classroom? Or do we, as David Orr reminds us, promote “failure [which] occurs when minds are taught to think in boxes and not taught to transcend those boxes or to question overly much how they fit with other boxes.” (2004, p. 95)

Do we involve students in real-world problems, using their findings and ideas in real ways? Or do we teach that they should leave the “real thinking” to adults; that they should defer their contributions until they enter the “real world”? Aren’t they in the real world now?

Is furniture purposefully uncomfortable in an attempt to keep those using it awake? Are ideas and questions explored deeply, or are they merely skimmed so as to fulfill mandates? Does the school’s design inspire the mind or merely meet the building code requirements—rules, regulations, and bureaucracy being more important than the spirit or intellect. ?

How is the school run? Are resources like energy, water, and paper used efficiently? Is human capital used efficiently, or is there a lot of busy-work and down time? What is discarded? What is recycled? What is prevented from having to be recycled or discarded? Are doors left open on cold days? Are air conditioned rooms left open? Are lights, fans and air conditioners left on in empty classes? How do the adults in the school respond when they see resources being wasted? Is there an attempt to educate staff and students about ways to lessen waste? If not, what does that teach about the cost of energy, the cost of waste, or the importance of efficiency?

How is security portrayed? Is the glass shatterproof? Are the doors robust enough to withstand a heavy assault? Is the school’s entrance monitored by security cameras and equipped with metal detectors? What does the physical plant teach about security? Does safety come from a fortress-like defense that tries to keep the bad out, or might it come from what’s consciously taught and practiced within? Do we ask students to reflect on how a sustainable and equitable economy, cooperation and efficiency can provide us with security? Do we promote a culture of fear, tragedy and victimization or do we promote one of concern, inquiry and activism?

What is sold or advertised on campus? Are sugary juices, soft-drinks, candy, and other junk food available for purchase? Is it advertised? Are lunches provided by fast-food corporations? (And why is it always fast food? Why not slow food in unhurried, relaxed, healthy environments?) What do the contradictions about what is taught in health class and what appears on the cafeteria menu say about money? About the power of corporations? About power? What does the need for speed when receiving our daily nourishment say about the correct pace of life? How, and more importantly why, do we encourage a frenetic, harried, stressful existence?

The hidden curriculum is a powerful teacher. If we reflect on what is learned and not merely on what is taught, it will have fewer places to hide. What are the hidden curricula you’d like to expose?

Be well,

Bill Farren

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.” Jose Ortega y Gassetde

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By Bill Farren on video

I’ve invited Bill Farren, who teaches at an international school in the Dominican Republic, and with whom I’ve become acquainted in our Project Global Cooling project planning Ning, to guest blog on Beyond School once a week for as many weeks, really, as he desires. My hope is to help us all learn more, through his posts, about his Education for Well-Being idea and website.

Before I hand this post over to Bill, I want to first point to my original post featuring Bill’s “Did You Ever Wonder?” video, particularly to note that Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod graciously took the time to comment, to correct some of my own misstatements, and to generate some dialog that allowed us all, I hope, to understand each other better. The upshot of those talks might be summarized to state: a) Karl and Scott are not opposed to sustainability as a plank in the platform of 21st century education, and b) I’m not in any way denying the validity and importance of the points they make in the “Did You Know?” video. They can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s safe to say they are as supportive of the idea of sustainability becoming a “viral” idea as I am.
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For background, I’m also going to post both the “Did You Know?” and the “Did You Ever Wonder?” videos here for everybody’s convenience. Ye olde schooly comparison/contrast essay might serve a valuable real-world purpose by watching the two back-to-back - or showing them back-to-back to others.

“Did You Know?” by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod

“Did You Ever Wonder?” by Bill Farren

Now I can hand the mic over to Bill. And I really hope the comment thread becomes as valuable a resource for us all. There’s certainly a lot at stake here.

Education for Well-Being, by Bill Farren

I’d like thank Clay for inviting me to guest post here. It’s quite an honor to be able to do so and to be able to share some of my (humble) opinions about education and well-being with such a thoughtful readership.

A couple of summers ago I stumbled across an article having to do with well-being called the Happy Planet Index. The HPI ranks countries according to how ecologically efficient each is at delivering well-being to its citizens. It was interesting to see the country where I was born, Colombia, ranked number two out of 178; Honduras, were I once lived, ranked seventh; the country where I currently live, the Dominican Republic, ranked 27th; and I was unsurprised to see the USA ranked at 150. My experiences overseas, in countries considered poor, confirmed to me what was in the report: nations where people have more stuff and are able to hire more services, don’t necessarily produce more well-being for their citizens. The well-being that wealthy countries produce comes at a high price to the planet.

This made me reflect again on the current state of education: Why are we subjecting kids to an educational system that, for too many, dulls the senses, erodes natural curiosity, and forces kids to choose grades over learning, all in the quest for a high-paying job that will not necessarily make them happier or healthier? If someone wanted to create a system to reduce well-being for all, they need look no further than the current educational approach found in most schools. Losses pile up, one on the other, as first students have to endure, instead of enjoy school. Consequently, their ability to learn is diminished as inquisitiveness is all but extinguished. Finally, having never been adequately equipped to appreciate or care for their natural world, they will diminish their chances of living well on a planet with a finite biosphere. To quote David Orr, “Students are fed through a conveyor belt of requirements, large classes, deadlines, and general busy-ness. What they learn seldom ads up to anything like a coherent, ecologically solvent worldview.”

But of course, there are many opinions about the ultimate purpose of education. Mine is just one against the many other louder voices politicking for higher standards and harder work in the name of job protection. While economic well-being is certainly important, to think of it without considering how it interacts with, and is dependent on social and environmental well-being, is to deny the importance of people and places as sources of both happiness and prosperity. One of the main goals of Ed4Wb then, is to try to get more people thinking about the direction of education and to help education live up to its potential as an agent of good change. I believe that, despite all the talk about wanting to produce critical thinkers, education has done very little to expose students to critical thought or to world views that are not in the mainstream. Most textbooks for example, are produced by large corporations, who by their very nature have an obligation to benefit their shareholders, not necessarily students. Expecting these companies to publish anything that challenges the status quo in which they profit, is simply unrealistic.

Below, with the help of interested people, are just some ideas that Ed4Wb would like to advance:

· Counter the idea that school, in order to be effective, must be hard, painful work for the student. I realize that probably everyone reading this here believes school should be enjoyable. However, I’m guessing we’ve all met too many educators, parents and policymakers who believe medicine must taste bad in order for it to work. Unhappily, for too many, it’s hard to understand that education is a remedy that works best when sweet.

· Debunk the belief that people have to choose between the economy and the planet. As the authors of Natural Capitalism remind us, “The environment is not a minor factor of production but rather is an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy.” We would be wise then, to teach our kids how to protect their most important source of economic well-being.

There is plenty of innovative thinking happening right now that demonstrates how acting green not only is profitable in the long term, but also in the short term, often beating returns on investments from capital markets without the downside risks, all the while improving the environment. Why invest your money in stocks like gold mining corporations that will degrade the environment when instead, you could invest your money in items like efficient appliances, solar water heaters (or in companies that make them) which will not only improve the environment, but also give you great, risk-free returns?

The incredible amount of waste in modern society presents huge opportunities for wealth creation while at the same time increasing the habitability of the planet. Paul Hawken points out, “That inefficiency is masked because growth and progress are measured in money, and money does not give us information about ecological systems, it only gives information about financial systems.”

· Discredit current economic doctrine: “For all their power and vitality, markets are only tools. They make a good servant but a bad master and a worse religion. This theology treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billion years’ design experience as casually discardable, and the future as worthless.” (Authors, Natural Capitalism) We would do well to expose our students to innovative thinking like that found at New Economics Foundation whose motto is: economics as if people and the planet mattered. “Education as if people and the planet mattered” is Ed4Wb’s principal message.

· Put forward the idea that most of our biggest problems aren’t due to lack of technology, lack of resources, lack of knowledge or lack of intelligence, but instead, are due to a lack of congruence with what it is we are told to believe and with the way a planet with a finite biosphere actually functions. We are taught, through a half trillion dollar a year industry called advertising, to value that which isn’t needed at the expense of that which is. There is an uncritical acceptance of the belief that economies can grow indefinitely within a finite biosphere. At some point, we’ll have to start wondering if more, faster and bigger is really progress. Do we really need another artificial island off the coast of Dubai?

· Promote the idea of nature as teacher. Help eliminate the arrogant posture that what we humans create outshines what nature produces. We’re proud of our Kevlar, steel and plastics. However, we don’t mention too loudly that we require huge energy inputs and use various toxins to heat, beat and treat these materials into existence. Nature makes materials that are just as effective, if not more so, using very little energy at low temperatures, all the while, improving the environment in which they are made. 3.8 billion years of trial and error could teach us something.

· (The following idea was put forth by David Orr in his book Earth in Mind but has not been carried out yet.) Create, through a Wikipedia-like / sourceforge.net collaboration (you!) a ratings system to rank and rate schools according to how much well-being they help produce. The school ratings available today (i.e. US News and World Report) push an agenda of speed, elitism, testing, and consumerism, while in the process, stressing kids out and diminishing the kind of learning that will serve them and their planet. Something else is sorely needed that will give students better information while also acting as an agent to promote better education. The ratings would look at how ecologically responsible a school is in its daily operations, how beneficial its curriculum is at promoting wellness, how healthy and happy its students are while attending school, and finally, it would look at what kind of life work is produced by its graduates.

Changing institutions is never easy. However, I believe it’s worth trying. I also believe there are two important factors that should help us consider whether to act or not: 1) We are seriously messing with our chances to live well on this planet. Our numbers are huge. Our desires are infinite. Our ability to physically alter our biosphere is unprecedented. Our institutions of production and marketing are out of control. Actually, they are in control and answer to no one. 2) In a world of del.icio.us, Google, YouTube, Wikis, Nings, e-mail, blogs, Skype…different points of view finally have a chance. Call me naïve.

“Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could do only a little.” Edmund Burke

I would love to hear your ideas on how to help education become an instrument of well-being. Thanks for reading and for helping expand the discussion. Be well, Bill Farren

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