Beyond School

I don’t want to spoil the new Harry Potter movie for anyone who’s not seen it, but I saw it last night and, hot on the heels of the “Convergences” post I wrote a day or two ago, saw the film mostly as a critique of schools when they’re at their irrelevant worst.

I’ll just say that this is a thought-provoking film for educators. Much more grown up, too, as Harry is in this sequel - despite the school’s best efforts to ignore that reality. That’s the conflict that interested me.

The whole thing can be viewed as an allegory about a world beyond the schoolhouse with real problems, and a schoolhouse determined to ignore that fact - at the world’s peril. Substitute “climate change” (or your own pet challenge) for “he who cannot be named” (Voldemort), and you’ll see how much this story goes beyond fantasy.

Equally important - it’s good fun.

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Following up on that last post questioning whether it’s time for the very idea (and institution) of “school” to die, a thought experiment:

Create a real-world project with all the right ingredients:

• relevance: it’s not a school exercise that ends up just another class project on the web, primarily designed to make students learn content they’ll forget within ten years (to be generous), and to give teachers something to grade

• citizenship: it’s about “enlightened community self-interest,” saving our own skins from the guaranteed miseries that will define the 21st century by helping effect some prudent changes now, while (maybe) there’s still time

• fun: it invites youths to organize a youth version of the worldwide Live Earth concerts (high school, college, and other local musicians at festivals on Earth Day ‘08 - plenty of time ’til April), and to create a website to stream those concerts, create meaningful digital content, and contribute to their communities through engaged citizenship (really, look at the Live Earth website and tell me why our students can’t create the same thing for the monthly global price of maybe 20 bucks - a dollar per country, say - and you know, really, it’s on me. I’ll spring for it.)

• empowerment: it pushes students beyond their schools, instead of sequestering them inside them, to experience the challenges of persuading their community to make practical changes, which is a pretty good definition of real “empowerment.” It liberates them from infantile school-based “projects” like “cafeteria reform,” “prom committee,” debating “school uniforms,” and writing for their “school newspaper” to broaden their sense of belonging to the world, not the school.

• learning: from the persuasive speaking skills to the scientific research skills to the managerial, organizational, and digital production skills, a campaign like this offers learning only limited by poor imaginations

You get the idea - especially if you’ve been reading this blog since mid-June (the “world citizenship” tag includes all those posts).

Now here’s the experiment:

Send invitations to participate to the three social groups most in touch with youth in industrialized nations:

1. Educators affiliated with schools
2. Youth leaders in churches
3. Parents affiliated with home-schooling / deschooling communities

In your own thought experiment, tell us what you think would be the answer to the questions in the following polls. (I’m aware that polls are unscientific and that school, church, and home-schoolers communities are diverse, so go with your gut, if you can. And add an “other” if I you think I left a potentially valuable youth group out.):

Me? I think the home-schooled / deschooled youths are better situated to contribute to this project than the other two. So I’m going to post this on a few of their websites.

Again, the poll is not the thing. It’s the question about which institutions create the most relevant and socially responsible youths that interests me here.

Thanks for playing. Comments would be interesting too

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I just spent an hour watching the closing keynote address at NECC ‘07 by Dr. Tim Tyson, principal of Mabry Middle School. The engaged filmmaking by the Mabry Middle School students is “world-changing,” literally. One example among many, from watching these students’ short films: I won’t buy chocolate - or anything else, for that matter - from Nestle or Mars, because of their film, until those corporations make some changes. Something about choosing my taste for Snickers over my distaste for slavery in other countries strikes me as a bit wrong. I hadn’t thought about it clearly until seeing these students’ films. Thanks to them for waking this adult a bit more from his consensus trance.

One of the many remarkable things about these films are the student reflections featured in each. Teachers reluctant to connect classroom learning to real world citizenship might find these middle school citizens will change their worlds too.

And Dr. Tyson’s closing remarks encapsulate so well what I’ve been trying to articulate since discovering I was “Nobody” that I had to pause the video and transcribe. Here they are:

It’s not about Technology and Connectivity. I wish we would move beyond that in the discussions in our profession.

The effective educator in this age of hyper-connectivity is the educator who collapses the distance between children and meaningful contribution.

Our children today crave project-driven learning experiences that allow them to immediately see the relationship between what they learn in school and what they live in their day-to-day lives.

They want school to go beyond preparing them for next year. They want to be prepared to make a contribution today!

Meaningfulness is the product of connectedness, of sharing, of contribution.

We need to stop simplifying this life experience of [students] into discreet, disconnected learning experiences that have the meaningfulness distilled right out of them.

Our children have the untapped capacity to make the world a better place today.

Over and over, those wonderful words: contribution, meaning, the world. Not just information, not just literacy, but “making the world a better place.” In other words, “Real-World Project-Based Learning for the Digital Age.”

Idealistic? Yes. But what’s wrong with ideals?

I take my hat off, too, to the teachers, parents, and administrators of the Mabry community for the courage to “teach controversy.”

That’s education.

It’s an unforgettable 45 minutes. Rating: Thumbs to the stratosphere.

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Working on this project is fun. No teacher, no students, just a fledgling community. No grades involved. Funny how different that feels.

Here’s a silly video in which we recap our goals for next week’s “working meeting”:

Find more videos like this on The Global Cooling Collective

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I know I’ve been a handful lately. Posts too long, thoughts too convoluted. “Think-alouds are messy.” Sorry.

Worst of all, I’ve been shrill at times. That comes from what I see as an education system blindered beyond the school boundaries, and educators largely unwilling to reflect on that.

But I’m more and more hopeful now, because I’m finding other writers mentioning similar things in their own parallel universes.

Here, for example, Will Richardson writes about what I want to call “So What? 2.0″:

Yes, we can have kids create movies and podcasts and wikis and all sorts of artifacts that have meaningful purposes and messages. And yes that’s all good, but at the end of the day, all that’s about is being able to use the tool to do the same stuff we’ve done in the past only put it into a new form and offer it to a wider audience. The pedagogies haven’t changed.

Yep. Web 2.0 as “just another way to turn in homework.” Will continues:

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

I can’t help but want to ask if there’s not an even bigger question or two.

First, why not rethink the necessity of creating projects that have a final end, that are ever “over”? [Update: I see now that that's Will's point.]

While I’ve been slamming my own 1001 Flat World Tales project for its ultimate irrelevance, the one design aspect I do think has merit worth considering is this: it’s what one Spanish edublogger called “a never-ending” one. That “1001″ is not hyperbole, but a conscious choice to create a project that is as open as YouTube and Facebook to continued contribution and engagement by old and new participants alike. Was your 1001 story not accepted for publication by the student-teacher publishing team? Revise it and re-submit it next year. Always open. And don’t forget to check back for the annual addition of more tales from more students around the world. The book will grow like the Arabian Nights. And you, dear student, were, and still are, part of this new, never-ending project.

If I were a student who worked on this project last year, I’d be interested to watch it unfold next year, and do more than watch. Add images, comments, whatever. And I’d be curious about it every year after that.

The designing of projects with finite end-dates - which makes them “artifacts,” historical relics - is arbitrary. It’s a product of the limitations our profession puts on our thinking. Learning through a project finishes with a grade. On to the next one. Lock this one up as a showcase of “what I did in my [your discipline here] class.” It doesn’t have to be that way.

And that’s another reason I can’t let go of the potential of “Project: Global Cooling.” (That’s right, the Seoul students gave it a name yesterday in a meeting at my apartment. No more tortured labeling. ) That project is designed to be real, not an artifact. It’s designed to invite content and connections from students worldwide in precisely the same way the real-world “Live Earth” project is going about it. Fun with music, critical thinking with issues, digital skills and literacy development with content. And local action to tie it to engaged citizenship - pro or con. “Teaching the controversy,” as Doug puts it, and not “indoctrinating.”

This doesn’t mean grades can’t figure in the equation. Assign arbitrary deadlines and give the credit then. But since climate change isn’t going to be an artifact any time soon, and worldly students, anyway, are aware of that, the project will hold continued relevance.

The fun factor will help there too.

Which brings me to my second “bigger question,” after some background: Will Richardson is writing about citizenship (he’s even writing about Live Earth). Christopher Sessums is. David Warlick is. But it always seems to be compartmentalized in a separate space from “literacy and learning.” Will, possibly -strike that - definitely ironically, points to this compartmentalization of “knowing” and “community doing” in the title of the post: “Before We Get Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging, Let’s Save the World.” David Warlick’s “Do You Have What it Takes to Become a Citizen?” is an occasional piece for America’s July 4 Independence Day (and the “citizenship quiz” it links to is depressingly knowledge-based, which isn’t David’s fault. As if engaged citizenship ends with knowing a lot, and is something we think about on fireworks day. I beat you by 5 points on the quiz, David ).

So my second question: Why is citizenship a side-issue divorced from learning in our classrooms? Or if I’m wrong, where is it central to that?

Am I wrong to want to push the envelope and say that learning in all the disciplines can be applied to real-world issues while a) still satisfying standards and outcomes, and b) developing the literacies and new affordances of web 2.0, and c) reversing the infantilization and trivializing of our students? But I’ve already written about that in “The Year of Global Cooling and Understanding by Design.”

I’ll close with an idea so finely crafted by Christopher Sessums that it’s stirred me from my oblivion to his relevance to our conversations. It addresses my own rhetoric of late, and the rationale for it:

I recognize I am framing this issue in dualities that necessarily point to the poles as opposed to plowing a more fertile middle ground. My point is to suggest that if “we the people” are not careful and do not actively participate in this debate, then we could easily be left with fewer choices.

Sessums continues the thought with this must-read observation which, though framed in a different context, applies to this one as well:

The question of What kind of society do we want? is indeed a critical question, one not to be taken lightly. Getting members of society to really focus on this question, to engage in the debate, to participate in the conversation, is the $6400 question. When billions are spent annually on entertainment and escapism (pdf), getting people to focus on the critical questions will remain marginal at best. Yet change often starts at the periphery, at the fringes, before it becomes part of the larger conversation.

The nice thing is, some of these questions are starting to gain focus. See the cocomments for starters. Now if I can just soften the sharp edges of my rhetoric to invite more people in instead of, as I fear, driving them away with diatribe.

I’ll try. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

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