Beyond School

We expect my presentation to start around 7.30 p.m. That would make it:

• Thursday 11 a.m. in London
• Thursday 12.30 a.m. (ouch) in Hawaii (sorry, Chris! I owe you! Or you can send me a YackPack voice message?)
• Thursday 4.30 a.m. (carrumba) in Denver (Karl, how about a YackPack message?)
• Thursday 5.30 p.m. in Bangkok
• Thursday 8.30 p.m. in NSW, Australia
• Thursday 6.30 a.m. in New Jersey
• Hey Vivek in India - you game?

The actual Skype talk itself would probably come about 15 minutes later, but I’ll give you a heads-up call at the times above. Please confirm I got your times right?

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I can’t keep a secret. I promised Chris in Honolulu and Michele in Arapahoe that I wouldn’t announce the launch of the 1001 Flat World Tales website until we did some clean-up. But - wait, wait - oh, heck, I’ll keep my promise. I’ll hold off on announcing the website for a day or two. We need to put the bios of the authors and editors, link to their blogs, upload their podcasts, and otherwise prepare for the launch party.

I’ll just say that the site includes the first 15 or 16 stories from the 130 written in the first high school workshop.

Since our goal really is 1001 student writings, and several new and returning schools are on board for the coming school year (and you’re always invited too), I’m still going to embed this screencast-o-matic tutorial about the wiki workshop itself, and the publication of the winning stories on the soon-to-be-unveiled website. It’s 9 minutes walking and talking you through the idea, the process, the set-up. (If you click on the embed, it will take you to the much larger screencast at my Screencast-o-matic channel):

A caveat: I chose to host the website on Wordpress instead of Edublogs because the image editor was giving me trouble there. I may regret that later, but didn’t have time to wrestle with it. I had to get this monkey off my back before going back to school on Monday!

Update: Wordpress.com is even more restrictive with Java and Flash embeds than Edublogs is. That’s what drives me crazy about Wordpress, and keeps me with Blogger. Anyway, I went back to Edublogs and solved the problem of image editing - a very un-intuitive place to enable the Rich Text Editor hiding in the “My Profile” page.

More later.

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bettySeptember005.jpg
Originally uploaded by digitalteacupdotcom.

Who hit fast-forward?

On Monday, it’s back to school for teachers at Korea International School.

Since I’ll be 3/4 tech coordinator, and since the high school is making its debut as a 1:1 Apple laptop school, the field is fertile for connecting classrooms. Blogs, wikis, Skype conferences, webcam, film, podcast: you name it, we should have teachers willing to try. (We also have many laptop carts for k-8, so this is totally open.)

So if you have a project that’s looking for people, either leave a comment soon, or email me at clayburell [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll try to help make it happen.

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“See, Hear, Speak No Evil” by AndyRamdin on Flickr

[Update: This post is extends a critique of my own teaching, and typical schooling in general, that I wrote last week in "I'm Nobody. Goodbye to All of That." Makes sense to start there, if you haven't read it already.]

I have a headache and a neck-and-shoulder ache, but we all know how thoughts wing away if we don’t snare them on take-off. This might be clumsy, but here goes.

I think I’m figuring out a way to make school more relevant - at least in my classroom. And how to liberate the young adults in my high school classroom from the diapers the classroom makes these infantilized physics-, calculus-, and Shakespeare-capable young adults wear and, worse yet, find natural, in the first place. I think I’m figuring out a way to give them the initiation into the world of adult citizenship, adult community, adult participation, adult empowerment, which they wish I’d invite them to enter.

You remember how angry you were, when you were in high school, to be treated like a kid by the adults, don’t you? How you knew you were capable of more than the adults allowed you to show? I think I’m figuring out how to stop being one of those adults myself, now. And how to stop being one of those teachers.

It occurs to me that this should be easy for a high school language arts teacher who has managed one Big Project - albeit it an ultimately trivial one - on web 2.0. I’ve already written about that, and have students in Seoul actually acting on it, with the year-long Global Cooling Project. That’s step one: re-design my fay little web 2.0 student showcase from the merry-go-round blue-print of last year - gee, kiddies, isn’t this fun? - to something modeled after the real-world campaigns in the adult world. Need examples? Check out the presidential campaigns in the US using YouTube, check out Live Earth’s website and its actions, praise goodness, beyond the “producing informational products” fetish of the current stage of our “school 2.0″ visionaries (that’s not aimed at you, Will). As if going from text only verbiage to multimedia verbiage is going to change anything.

Going back to Suzie Boss and the WorldChanging.com article, and back to the talismanic power the tagline of her forthcoming book holds on me now - “Real World Project-Based Learning in the Digital Age” - it’s clear that the notion of school should evaporate as much as possible when designing projects for my young adults. John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary, Giuliani, even Bush (if he ever learns to email and use “The Google”), Gore, Micheal Moore: all these adults use the media and the read-write web to “produce informational constructions of meaning” (as we so clumsily put it) for real world, relevant, important purposes. And here’s the rub: these world-changing adults are all still “learners” engaged in their own, adult, versions of “real world project-based learning.” It’s not like web 2.0 is old hat to them, either. You can bet your last dollar they’re learning up a storm on a minute-by-minute basis in all these campaigns.

Again, the difference: they’re applying that learning with a real-world purpose that can produce real-world change, for problems that matter. In school, our projects are usually lacking that vital element. Again, they’re just nice little diversions that for some tragically unfathomable reason we, as teachers, generally cannot think beyond. (Maybe it’s very fathomable, this shackling force. Maybe it’s simply fear of parents, administrators, community leaders, or the fear of being uncommon generally - though why trying to make engaged citizens out of young adults is a controversial issue among educators, of all people, is indeed tragic.)

So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.

Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader - as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen - instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.

I know. Wordy. I have a headache. I’ll move on.

The task of last year’s 1001 Flat World Tales “project”? (For those of you who don’t know it, it actually managed to get over a dozen schools from four or five continents writing together on a wiki in self-contained k-12 collaborative workshops, though some of those workshops crashed and burned. The one my students participated in with Arapahoe¹ and Honolulu made it to the end of the two-month unit.) That task was something like, “Write a story that reveals your local culture for readers from other cultures.”

Cindy Barnsley, who worked on the project in Australia (with Shanghai and Serbia - it crashed, but not without lessons learned, so it wasn’t a failure), has taken me to task for damning my own baby, and she’s partly justified. The conceptual objective of the project was a more conscious, more critical, understanding of the students’ own, and their global peers’ “Other,” cultures. The skills? To use process writing coupled with the 6 Traits of Effective Writing to refine those writing skills, giving and receiving peer feedback from across the globe.

I’m not saying it’s garbage, Cindy. I’m saying that, when all is said and done, and all that energy in bringing together, in my workshop alone, 130 students from the Korean peninsula, the mid-Pacific Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains - when all that energy has been expended, what’s the result? Students have written a story for their English class. And it’s been published in a little e-Book (sorry, but I still think it’s true in the grand scheme of things, though I loved some of the writing that happened there).

Couldn’t that immense amount of energy have been expended on something more consequential?

Yes. And how it could, by the way, is the idea that spurred me to sit down and write this post now. Here’s how:

Real-world literature - the great works we tame in our classrooms - invariably consists of precisely the critical thinking and literacy skills we aimed to develop in the 1001 Tales. But that project was fatally flawed by it’s lack of real-world literature’s concomitant element: a social problem worth criticizing.

“Reveal your culture” is so pathetically fay and schooly by that standard.

These young adults are screaming their critical attitude toward the roles we’ve limited them to in our culture in everything they do, from their attitudes to their music, fashions, and past-times. They live in passive revolt against what schools, parents, communities at large are doing to them. And having no constructive outlet, they either self-destruct or seek solace in the trivial.

So why not let them write about that?

A bit more: They’re also woefully oblivious to the burning issues of their futures (and that pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming admission that schools fear relevance.

The logical corollary? Fear makes schools irrelevant.

Etymology time: “Educate” - “to lead out.” If we’re afraid, as educators, to lead our students “out” to anything important in the real world, what exactly are we doing? I mean, besides paying the bills and perpetuating worldly ignorance?

So back to those “burning issues”: Diane got me thinking about the need for educators to serve as “futurist guides” to remedy the “soft news diet” of mainstream media and community ignorance of what scientists of all stripes, social as well as natural, are unable to get us to notice. (Another etymology check: “science” - “knowledge”; one hopes schools would defend science, especially in the anti-scientific US, against its detractors, but I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing more cowed, fearful, silent educators.)

Again: “Our past is not their future.” If the international community of scientists is dismissed as crank Cassandras by the Bush administration, by fundamentalist churches, and by all the followers in our communities of the information campaigns so powerfully managed by both of those camps, how do our children stand a chance of meeting future challenges if we’re afraid to talk about them? We’re like the current Democratic congress: we have the power, but we fail our constituents by fearing to wield it for the best interests, scientifically-grounded, of that community and of the globe.

So instead of a writing project that limits students to expressing what they already know too well - that they’re subtly ticked off and passively rebellious over their infantilization and the irrelevance of schools - why can’t we, as “futurist guides,” “lead them out” to questions posed by science about their futures?

That’s another “problem worth criticizing via literature.” Students around the globe comparing artfully-crafted, critically-observed notes in story form of the “consensus trance” of their local community as it trashes their futures with nary a thought. Students being encouraged to authentically express whatever satirical, lyrical, tragic, comic, or utopian variation on this theme suits them. Or to challenge the premise. This is not indoctrination, but “teaching the controversy,” as Doug so sharply frames it.

Or are we so afraid to educate (instead of merely teach) that we can’t even ask open questions like: “Is global warming a problem?”

If so, isn’t school kind of like studying for the SAT on the deck of the Titanic - post-iceburg?

Parting shot. On July 9, I mentioned in my little “personal commencement” post, which announced my graduation from the web 2.0 church and conversion to the church of relevance, that one of my new goals is to become “less of a teacher and more of a community leader, and to expand my relationship with the young adults in my community beyond the 9-month term.” Something like that, anyway.

One of the things that has disturbed me in that respect is this: I’ve had expressions of interest from surely more than 30 adults about the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” project targeted to culminate, “flat world community service” style, on Earth Day of next year. I’m literate enough in the science to think it’s worth continuing to “flog” this idea on this blog, as Jeff Wasserman so pricelessly (and accurately) put it. I’m trying to be the change I want to see, and I insist that the time to get young adults involved in starting the “real-world project-based learning” so historically relevant to their futures is now, in the summer - before school swallows them back into homework and SAT-world for nine fallow months beginning soon. These young adults are free right now to be relevant. And if I’m right, some of them would like the opportunity to be invited into that relevance and treated like they could have some fun doing something good.

So here’s what’s bothering me: If 30 educators have expressed interest and even joined the project Ning, but only one has managed to produce a single young adult - while over 20 students here in Seoul are working on it, during summer, with no grades involved - does that indicate something troublesome about our relationships, as youth leaders (we are youth leaders, like it or not), with our youth? And is that troubling thing possibly rooted in some strange perversion of adult-youth community relations caused by the fact that schools make teachers “want vacations from the kids” because . . . beyond assigning them work, disciplining them, and branding them with grades, we don’t have human relationships to them?

I fear the answer is too often yes. If not, why are no world youths being told about this by their educators during the summer? Is it that hard to pass an email invitation to a few young adults in our communities, when we spend nine months a year with them? What’s going on there?

Finally: Cindy Barnsley’s blog has a great conversation going right now about “dissenting voices” and the need for them. (See cocomments in the sidebar too.) I hope it goes without saying that I shouldn’t have to apologize for any statements critical of the status quo. I’m here to field comments and learn from those that teach me. (And Dana, did this help you understand what I’m getting at?)

–
Photo 2: “The Ghosts of No Evil” by lindes on Flickr.
Photo 3: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” by Auntie P on Flickr.
Photo 4: “Fear Squared” by seetwist on Flickr.
Photo 5: “Fear Limited Edition Tee” by spcoon on Flickr.

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1. Denver [↩]

[This post is a watershed for me, stuffy as that may sound. Many loose threads needed weaving. I apologize for the tone, which I fear is typically more self-important and more harsh than I would like. I also apologize for the length. I hope you'll read it through, and thank you if you do. Update 13 July 07: Be sure to read the conversation with Doug and others in the comments following the post. And the thinking extends in this "Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: on Fear and Irrelevance in Education" post.]

* * *

1. I’m Nobody

Suzie Boss, writer of the upcoming Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, to be published by ISTE this fall, interviewed me via Skype* (thanks to a referral by the ever-helpful Jeff Whipple of Whip Blog) for an article recently published on the Worldchanging.com website entitled “Education: Connecting the Lonely Profession.” It goes without saying that it was an honor to be mentioned in the same paragraph with Wes Fryer, Julie Lindsay, and Vicki Davis. It was Julie and Vicki’s Flat Classroom Project, after all, that inspired my idea to take the traditional language arts writing workshop onto a flat classroom collaborative wiki, and make it a never-ending global project: the 1001 Flat World Tales**. It was also an honor to appear at all on Worldchanging.com, which I’d subscribed to in Bloglines many months earlier. There are few more important blogs out there for real-world problem-solving in the Age of Mindless Waste and Warming.

That being said, though, that interview with Ms. Boss came at a pregnant moment in my own journey not just as a teacher, but as an earthling. I had just taught a unit of satire in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels - and the multimedia Yahoo Project we finished that unit with - probably changed my thinking more than it did my students’. Swift’s novel nailed human folly with the timelessness that makes it the classic it is. The Yahoos he pillories in the novel are alive and well today, inside us all. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were most painfully present in our schools, in my classroom - in my teaching.

Here I was, assigning four dozen 15-year-olds to take action addressing whatever “Yahoo-caused” problem in the world disturbed them via a digital storytelling product and a plan involving the use of web 2.o to create positive change about their chosen issue, and thinking I’d done my job at inculcating a sense of citizenship and agency in them. “Think big,” I told them. “Look at the Flat World Tales: it was an idea in January, and by May more than a dozen countries were participating in the project. Use that as a lesson to see how possible it is to use web 2.0 to create real change.” I was pretty proud of that. Until.

I started listening to my students talk about how bothered they were about The Big Issue affecting their futures: global warming (and I’d love any deniers out there to comment so we can debate this). They were bothered about it because “Nobody’s doing anything about it, and we know it’s a problem.”

That set off my 5-alarm Hypocrisy Detector. Sure, the attempt to be “Classroom 2.0″ with the 1001 Flat World Tales was not your run-of-the-mill way to deliver a lesson - it was inventive, it was fresh, and it had pedagogical potential to improve both engagement and literacy. But. In terms of its content, its basic objectives, it was nothing new at all. Just a traditionally irrelevant and arbitrary, teacher-dictated little exercise in writing a nice little story for school with other nice little students stuck in their classrooms around the world.

It wasn’t “Beyond School” at all. It was Classroom 1.0 with web 2.o bells and whistles. In terms of vision, it was still “school-y.”

“Nobody’s doing anything about it.” It kept on echoing. My pride in the 1001 Flat World Tales collapsed as a result. I wasn’t “teacher 2.0.” I was one of the “Nobodies” that frustrated students by my complicity in schoolhouse irrelevance.

The rest is history, unless you were at NECC or Disneyland while I was writing a dozen posts in Korea that you didn’t read upon your return. Here’s the short version:

1. I read that over 200 universities in the US had signed a “carbon neutral” pledge in recognition that they, as educational institutions, had a responsibility to set an example in responding to the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity was the key factor in global warming.

2. I blogged about that pledge, asking why K-12 schools aren’t following suit, and Jeff Wasserman blogged about that post in a Very Strange Coincidence that set the Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0 project in motion. (Were I superstitious, I would have thought that coincidence a sign. I suppose I did see it that way, somewhat.)

3. In the intervening 3 weeks, I’ve written a dozen or more posts developing the idea. In the midst of that, Suzie Boss interviewed me about her WorldChanging.com article (ironically, her interest was in the 1001 Flat World Tales, which I’d come to view as too “school-as-usual”). But the title, or, more precisely, the tagline of Suzie’s forthcoming book - “Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age” - worked a spell on me. Real World. My world, the students’ world, the students’ future. Projects that were relevant to that. That was key.

And the title of the website Suzie’s article appeared on: WorldChanging. That too was key. As a teacher, I’d been “World-Ignoring,” creating nice little exercises to connect students with other classrooms around the world, but not to connect with the world itself. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to reinforce the disempowerment and infantilization of adolescents around the world. School-y. “Beyond School”? Again, a joke.

Yeah, the students thought it was more interesting than most of the stuff they have to put up with in schoolhouses. But it was still just homework. Nothing WorldChanging, nothing that taught them that they have the potential to affect this world for the better. Nothing that encouraged their empowerment. Nothing that gave them the opportunity to apply their learning to something that mattered to them, or to discover that, if only schools would let them, they could learn about the limits of their own power to make change in the world.

I was keeping these young adults in diapers, checking their homework, teaching them that changing the world was something to leave to others. Our purpose was to teach them what a metaphor is, and a synecdoche. Leave the fate of the planet to politicians and prayers, and other such time-tested solutions. Depend on anything but your own skills and agency to avert catastrophe.

4. I invited my AP Literature students, strangers I’m getting to know on our AP Lit Summer Reading Ning, to begin organizing the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” here in Seoul, so it can all come off by Earth Day next April. Over 20 of these young adults are active on it now, and a dozen met me yesterday for a Sunday afternoon planning session at a downtown cafe. I left early, because they were so all over it, they didn’t need me - which was what I’d hoped would happen.

On the Global Cooling Collective Ning I started, another member I’d invited sent out over 100 invitations to other “Classroom 2.0″ adult types. About 20 of them joined. 20 of my students also joined. So far, the students are active, while the adults are, with a couple of exceptions, pictures on the “Members” box. But maybe they’ll contribute at some point.

That’s about it, on that front.

* * *

2. Goodbye to All of That

On New Year’s Day, 2007, I started this blog. I named it “Beyond School” and, in the months that followed, thought I was being true to the aspiration so vaguely adumbrated in that title. A lot has happened in the seven months since that time that has energized my professional life beyond my wildest expectations, and none if it would have occurred if I hadn’t started participating in the edublogosphere.

But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It’s not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I’ll continue using). And it’s definitely not about “Classroom 2.0,” since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.

Putting “what it is about” in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It’s about not being “a Nobody doing anything” when my students are looking for “Somebody doing something” about what they care about. It’s about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It’s about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It’s about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It’s about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It’s about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.

It’s about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.

That’s the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on “real-world project-based learning” along these lines?

—

*I podcasted part of that conversation, in which Ms. Boss was kind enough to indulge a 15-minute “think-aloud” about the Year of Global Cooling project, which was then a four-day-old (obsessive) idea, in an earlier post.

**I’m incredibly excited, by the way, to report that Dana Huff of huffenglish, one of my favorite English teacher blogs, dropped me a message on Wikispaces saying she wants to participate in the ‘07-’08 iteration of the 1001 Flat World Tales - talk about “connecting the loneliest profession” with a vengeance! Dana’s the kind of English teacher I dream of having in the classroom next door. And now I will, virtually. Too cool for words. More on that later, I’m sure. With Dana on board, and the logistical lessons learned about flat classroom projects under our belt from the first run last year, this year will surely see a focus on improving the project’s pedagogy. Dana’s been studying Wiggins’ and McTighe’s Understanding by Design for her summer vacation, and has inspired me to do the same. So this looks like fun. You’re invited too, by the way. See the 1001 Teachers wiki to sign on.

But it should be clear that I’m ambivalent now about the value of the 1001 Flat World Tales. I wonder how it can be modified to make it more relevant, and less school-y.

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