Beyond School

Did I ever mention I’m addicted to weekend blog think-alouds?

You might know that last week, Somebody Up There damned me with a colossal - and unheard-of - global Skype failure, ten minutes before my big Google Earth World Skype Tour with educator-experts from around the world.

I just re-discovered Google Lit Trips while reading Joe Wood’s blog (lots of people seemed to like that Screencast-o-matic teaching idea), and downloaded a .kmz Google Earth file that was a “literary tour” of one of my very favorite novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s a very cool way to see the geography of literary works, and worth checking out on that score alone.

But it got me thinking about another way to do the Google Earth / Skypecast presentation, in an asynchronous way, using links to recordings of interviewees that are “pinned” to their location on Google Earth.

It would be a “best-of-both-worlds” thing to have interviewees record a “canned” comment on, say, Yackpack, and pin that recording to their location as a Plan B (and, come to think of it, as a permanent archive of the presentation when saved as a .kmz file), while at the same time having as many guests on Skype in real time for a synchronous, real-time conversation as Plan A.

Does that make sense?

This is all part of a bigger realization I’m having about what learning is. What I mean is this: The whole Google Earth Tour / Skypecast parent presentation was an idea I had, but did not know how to do. So, in terms of real-world pedagogy, I was a “student” under pretty ideal learning conditions: I had a project in my head that I was excited about pulling off; I had a problem to solve, because I didn’t know how in blazes to do it; I knew some tools that could do it, if I learned them; and I used the “bricolage” method - who was that French anthropologist who came up with that idea? Another dead college memory - to create knowledge out of the “found” things at hand: Google Earth’s help menu, people in my network, my blog to hyperlink “shout-outs” to my invitees, etc. There was no rule-book, and, but for an Act of God, it would have worked.

My point? It was all “real-world project-based learning.” Nobody taught me, nobody assigned me this, and there was no prescribed teacher checklist to get this thing done.

Better still: due to cosmically improbable hiccups, my first attempt failed. So. I. am. STILL. LEARNING. Moreover, I’m LEARNING HOW TO NOT QUIT IN THE FACE OF FAILURE.

Which brings me to this DEPRESSING QUESTION: How can I create real-world learning opportunities like this for “students” in the fake world of schools? Because of that effing institutional imperative to brand all student activity with a grade, schools teach “students” to avoid ambitious projects, and cling to the safe and easy, to escape having an “F” seared into their schooly hides.

It’s exactly the wrong learning for the future citizens in my classroom.

Colorful eagles, in cages LABELED canaries
Originally uploaded by qwurky.

Interesting development on Support Blogging’s listing of edublogs: the list of individual student bloggers is growing. I’ve been banging this little drum for months about this (most recently on a comment on Scott McLeod’s “Top Edublogs” post - and see the afternote for Scott’s awesome response*), and was frustrated to see, month after month, the handful of fine student bloggers in my classrooms in Seoul listed there all by their lonesomes, while the list of adult talkers continued to grow apace.

And not to play the prophet, but I’ve said more than once that non-American schools can lead on this (since American schools are facing social and institutional intimidation on this front) by growing this list. Americans can follow when they see that students from other countries aren’t getting torn apart by wolves because they blog.

And Lo! The list has grown thanks to our “Antipodean” friends in Australia (”ta,” Jo!) and New Zealand (I can’t tell who posted those! - Update: Eureka! It’s Lynn of “Rambling Reflections.”).

One thing I notice about the way we’re listing these blogs is that it’s hard to tell what age groups each student belongs to. It’s my own Yank-centric fault, since I used the American-based “grade levels” of my school instead of something more universally understandable. If we want to play match-maker for our student, we need to fine-tune that.

I’m curious, too, to know what, if any, parental and privacy steps were taken before adding the students to the lists. Another thing to fine tune.

Finally, I had a Skype chat with a senior (17) who left my school last week to go to Los Angeles, and she’s interested in becoming not just a student blogger, but a student edublogger, participating in the conversations about education in this so educator-centric sphere - the first in the “LearnerTalk” idea Scott Schwister and I have been talking about.

I’d love to talk to a few teachers interested in inviting their own select students to engage as equals in the edublogosphere on maybe a shared blog a la LeaderTalk. They wouldn’t be doing homework on these blogs. They wouldn’t be doing it for grades. (Sorry, but both of those types of student blogging are still to a degree “schooly,” inauthentic, and infantilizing.) They’d be doing it because they want us to hear what they have to say, from their own experience, about education anything-point-oh.

We can make this happen. A simple parent permission form consenting to the “adultilizing” of this core of young educational philosophers should do the trick, with a bit of further guidelines in place.

Any takers?

–

Fourth on Lake Austin
Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

*I just discovered some new responses to my comment on Dangerously Irrelevant. Scott McLeod has offered to sponsor a LearnerTalk blog, add the users, and even pay for the hosting - way too cool, and a great example of can-and-will-do leadership. Vivek in India and Kelly in Saskatchewan express interest. So we seem to be seeing a new milestone in the edublogosphere: the beginnings of democracy with the inclusion of our student Silent Majority. How freakin’ cool is that.

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.

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

“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.

1. Denver [↩]