Between the By-Road and the Main Road

A Sorrow that Weeping Cannot Symbolize: John Steinbeck

2012-02-28T04:48:00.000-05:00

Oranges (2.2012 by M.A. Reilly)

February 27. John Steinbeck's birthday.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Steinbeck said: "Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed."

Literature is critical. Hope you'll share a work that inspires you to be better than you think you are.

Crowd-Sourcing Dreams

2012-02-27T22:10:00.000-05:00

It's not that Seth Godin is saying anything novel. But it is that he is leveraging via his appeal and his connections a will for others to think about learning and public schooling. I'm half-way through Godin's manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams and want to recommend that you take a couple of hours and read it and then get some others to do so as well and then let's talk about it and see what we can put together and what we can dismantle.

I know that a lot of artists stop by my blog and so I am appealing especially to you. Godin says that an artist "is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better" (section 39). I think we know that and certainly I recognize those qualities and actions in the work and heart of so many of you.

Godin writes (from section 39):

The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists
and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into
their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly
pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give
them a platform to do it.

The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.

I have invited Arne Duncan to a Google hangout I plan to host to discuss the manifesto and what in our national ed plan is supportive of a pedagogy of dreams and what is in the way of children dreaming powerfully. I'll post the date and time and let you know.

Painting Like a 3-Year-Old: A Keepsake

2012-02-26T12:39:00.000-05:00

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Pablo Picasso

When my son was a toddler, one of the things we routinely did was paint. He loved to mess around. I recently spent some time looking at two paintings he had done at 3 years of age. I can recall being taken by them and waiting days for the paint to dry. I then matted and framed each, thinking these would be important keepsakes--ones I would want him to have when he got older--ones I would have trouble parting with. This morning, I snapped a picture of each image and decided another way to preserve them would be to do so here, in this inbetween world.

I am reminded when I view them at his wild abandon as he painted with fingers, hands, arms, and now and then a brush. He seemed to have an instinct for color in the many ways he combined colors or perhaps it was more the absence of fear of error that prompted his experimentation. There also was movement that typfied his art making--not so unusual at 3. Making art is a full body experience, especially when you are a toddler up to your elbows in paint. It is something we would do well to recall as we age. And then there was the kindness: "Mommy, for you," he said offering his art so freely in a manner that still makes my heart hurt just a bit. I can recall the paint more on him than the paintings as he reached out with his hands.

These things: color, movement, and kindness are the story. The absence of making an error is the gift.

A decade has past and now this child is teenager and I want to say to him:

Be wild, let instinct guide your steps.
Abandon the fear of failure that often dogs our steps as we age.

Make mistakes.

Seek color and movement in the way you chose to live.
See possibility in yourself and especially in others.
Remain generous.
Remain kind.

The Poem as Character Sketch

2012-02-24T18:20:00.000-05:00

Silk City (by M.A. Reilly, 2011)

We often think about fiction when thinking about the exploration of character. In this post I am suggesting a few narrative poems that contain strong character sketches. I wonder if the brevity and intensity of each poem might help learners recognize and name characteristics of character, as well as help them to also name direct and indirect methods authors use to establish a character.

Character 1

View more PowerPoint from karrinheart

"Pauline Barrett" by Edgar Lee Masters
Pauline Barrett

Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon’s knife!

And almost a year to creep back into strength,

Till the dawn of our wedding decennial

Found me my seeming self again.

We walked the forest together,

By a path of soundless moss and turf.

But I could not look in your eyes,

And you could not look in my eyes,

For such sorrow was ours—the beginning of gray in your hair,

And I but a shell of myself.

And what did we talk of?—sky and water,

Anything, ‘most, to hide our thoughts.

And then your gift of wild roses,

Set on the table to grace our dinner.

Poor heart, how bravely you struggled

To imagine and live a remembered rapture!

Then my spirit drooped as the night came on,

And you left me alone in my room for a while,

As you did when I was a bride, poor heart.

And I looked in the mirror and something said:

"One should be all dead when one is half-dead—

Nor ever mock life, nor ever cheat love."

And I did it looking there in the mirror—

Dear, have you ever understood?

Edgar Lee Masters

"Revenge" - Taha Muhammad Ali

"Phenomenal Woman" - Maya Angelou
"The Floral Apron" - Marilyn Chin (Video of the poet reading)
"Tornado Child" - Kwame Dawes (Video of the poet reading)

"Supermarket in California" - Allen Ginsburg

"The Weary Blues" - Langston Hughes

"You Go Girl" and "A Letter to My Mother" - Taslima Nasreen

"One Boy Told Me" - Naomi Shihab Nye

"Portrait of a Woman" - William Carlos Williams (Audio recording of the poet reading)

An Experiment: Thinking about School Environment

2012-02-23T13:58:00.000-05:00

from here.

In 1915, John Dewey wrote the following about 'old education':

from here.

Some few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the city, trying to find desks and chairs which seemed suitable from all points of view--artistic, hygienic, and educational--to the needs of the children. We had a great deal of difficulty in finding what we needed,and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: 'I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which children work; these are all for listening'... It's all made 'for listening'--because simply studying lessons out of a book is another kind of listening;it marks the dependency of one mind upon another...If everything is on a 'listening' basis, you can have uniformity of material and method. The ear, and the book which reflects the ear, constitute the medium which is alike for all (pp. 21-23).

So a challenge: Take a look at the classroom, school, or district where you work. Is it designed for listening? For working?

Mining Educational Thought through Photographs of Street Play

2012-02-22T13:17:00.000-05:00

Image by Martha Cooper from here.

While Martha Cooper was a staff photographer for the New York Post (1977 - 1980) she learned that "The city's poorer neighborhoods had the richest street life." She left her job at the Post and began documenting across the world, children's street play. In thinking about what she had learned while in New York, she writes:

Children often played for hours without adult supervision and frequently supervised younger siblings themselves. As I photographed these kids, I came to admire their creativity, energy, humor and willingness to share. I marveled at the simplicity of their homemade toys and at their imagination in playing with them.

Images by Martha Cooper from here.

Maxine Greene (2007) tells us that imagination is "the capacity to break with the ordinary, the given, the taken-for-granted and open doors to possibility." She tells us that a way to describe imagination is as a "passion for possibility."

A passion for possibility can be seen in the images Cooper makes of children at play. In contrast to Cooper's images made in the streets, I wonder about the images we make at school. Is there enough room in the lived curriculum for the unexpected? Is there enough room for children to imagine in ways we cannot and will not predict?

I think about the images Cooper made of children at play and how these images illustrate the power of a child's imagination alongside Greene's definition of learning as imaginative play. This thinking makes me wonder how often we explore imagination inside of school and just how natural it is for children to employ their imaginations when they are beyond the school door.

Agency seems to matter.

All of this gives me pause and makes me wonder how we might invite the world that children compose outside of school inside our classrooms. Imagine what we might learn if there was enough space for play that we did not orchestrate.

Works Cited
Cooper, Martha. (2006). Street Play. Berlin, Germany: From Here to Fame Publishing.
Greene, Maxine. (2007). Imagination and the Healing Arts.

Death, Certainty, and the Common Core

2012-02-21T00:12:00.000-05:00

The Cover to a Child's Personal Narrative

1. First a Story

Last week, a ten-year-old boy stopped me while I was visiting his classroom and asked me how I liked the cover to his composition. He then handed the piece of yellow construction paper to me. At the time he had not added the RIP or the tears. As I read the title, I stopped unsure if I was reading correctly and reread. It took me a few seconds to find a voice to ask him about his narrative.

He passed two handwritten pages to me and I read them learning that his favorite uncle had died breaking up a mugging, with a bullet to the center of the forehead. He talked to me about how his uncle was his mother's older brother, her favorite too and how he and his uncle use to watch a special TV show together. I told him that his narrative made me sad and how reading it reminded me that I needed to reach out to both of my brothers, if for no other reason than to say hello.

That's important to do, he told me as he added the tears and the RIP to the cover.

2. Then Another

Beneath the rhetoric of school reform are children's lives--fragile, resilient, and often tragic. I think about this child and his powerful need to tell this story--a story I imagine he will tell again and again in different ways throughout his life. Against this, I also think about those who would have us believe that story has limited place at school. David Coleman, Common Core author joked about personal and persuasive essay when he discussed the Common Core with an audience of educators. Coleman told the audience that narrative and persuasive writing were the two most often prescribed school texts and why that was wrong. He said:

The only problem with these two forms of writing is they don't get you very far in college and career readiness. Otherwise they're terrific (laughter). That is it is rare at a job that the boss says, 'Johnson, I want a market analysis, but before that I want a compelling narrative about your childhood' (again laughter).

An unintended consequence of the Common Core can be found in the certainty that frames so much of Coleman's utterances. He appears to be so sure that his thinking is right--right for an entire country. With no actual experience against which to measure his remarks, Coleman continues on--perhaps unaware of what his careless rhetoric will displace--a child's powerful need to make sense of a favorite uncle's death through story. What concerns me more than David Coleman is the audience of administrators and Department of Education folk who sat there and laughed. Was there no one in that audience brave enough, bold enough to say to Coleman: Wait, you don't know what you're doing. Let me tell you a story about a child from...?

3. Even in Business, or is it Especially in Business?

Humans, regardless of age, have a powerful need to tell stories. Stories matter--not only for ten-year- old boys from the Bronx whose favorite uncles die, but also for those earning their keep in various businesses. Coleman got it wrong in his contrived scenario about market analysis.

Market analysis is informed by story. One might say it rests on story.

Consider Seth Godin who writes:

I was brainstorming with my friend Jay today and he put this picture into my head.

Most of the time we do the work. The work is our initiative and our reactions and our responses and our output. The work is the decisions we make and the people we hire.

The work is what people talk about, because it's what we experience. In other words, the work tells a story.

But what if you haven't figured out a story yet?

Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn't spread.

On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you're living it.

Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald's? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories... from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations.

Same is true for that little consulting firm down the street vs. McKinsey. While the advice may end up being similar, each firm lives a story in who they hire, how they present themselves, etc.

The story creates the work and the work creates the story.

Muriel Rukeyser expressed our need for story, clearly, artfully--years ago when she wrote:

Time comes into it.
Say it. Say it.

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.

We are the stories we tell. If we fail to tell and receive stories, we fail to be. Ten-year-old children innately know this. Perhaps, some among us still need to learn it.

Increasing Vocabulary through Transmediation: Newspaper Reading & Collage Journal

2012-02-19T21:19:00.000-05:00

"Democracy in Turmoil" (Collage made in response to NY Times, 2.18.2012)

In this post I want to share what I have been doing lately with a collage journal and how I think it can be an excellent method for increasing students' interest in reading a daily newspaper which in turn will increase vocabulary. Three things to keep in mind:

Vocabulary is acquired through direct and indirect methods, although the majority of one's vocabulary is acquired through heard and read texts.
Rare words are often the type of words that learners have difficulty knowing. Newspapers are an excellent source of rare words.
Transmediation helps to deepen learning as the meaning made in one symbol systems often does not translate intact to another symbol system. This requires the learner to 'reread' and interpret.

During the last week, I have composed a daily response to what I have read in the newspaper. In my case, that paper is The New York Times. What I have found is that how I read the newspaper has altered as I am reading across articles, advertisements, letters, and images. Further, I am attending to single words and headlines in ways I simply did not do prior to keeping the journal.

In this Slideshare I explain about vocabulary acquisition, transmediation, and the specifics of creating a collage journal.

Reading Newspapers and Keeping a Collage Journal: Increasing Vocabulary through Transmediation

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Creating the e-Collage Journal

Another way to create the collage is to access an online newspaper and to read and/or listen to articles and to peruse images.
Make screen shots (command + shift + 4 keys on a Mac; home key and power key on an iPad, iPod touch) of the images and text you want to use in your collage.
Import images into a graphics program. I use Adobe Photoshop, although Illustrator would work as well.
Create the collage and upload to an e-journal.
This is an example of a collage I made in this manner.

"An American Crisis of Identity" Collage made from NY TIMES, 2.17.2012

If you try this, please let me know how it works for you and I hope you'll share any collages you compose.

Recommended Graphic Texts for Social Studies, Grades 7 - 12

2012-02-18T21:44:00.000-05:00

Amir. 2011. Zahra's Paradise. Illustrated by Khalil. New York: First Second.

Anderson, Ho Che. 2005. A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King. Jr. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics.

Bruchac, Joseph. 2010. Dawn Land. Illustrated by Will Davis. New York: First Second.

Buhle, Paul. 2005. Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. New York: Verso.

Coy, John. 2003. Around the World. Illustrated by Antonio Reonegro and Tom Lynch. NY: Lee & Low.

Delisle, Guy. 2010. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.

---------------. 2008. Burma Chronicles. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.

--------------. 2007. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.

From Metro.

El Shafee, Magdy. 2012. Metro. Translated by Chip Rossetti. (Banned in Egypt by Mubarak. Egypt's 1st graphic novel.) New York: Metropolitan Books.

Flowers, Arthur, Manu Chitrakar & Guglielmo Rossi. 2010. I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King. Jr. Illustrated by Manu Chitrakar. India: Tara Press.

Geary, Rick. 2011. The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. New York: NBM Publishing.

Gliden, Sarah. 2011. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days of Less. New York: Vertigo.

from The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders

Guibert, Emmanuel. 2009. The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders. New York: First Second.

------------------------. 2008. Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope. New York: First Second.

Helfer, Andrew. 2006. Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. Illustrated by Randy DuBurke. New York: Hill & Wang.

from Anne Frank: The Ann Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography.

Jacobson, Sid & Ernie Colon. 2010. Anne Frank: The Ann Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography. New York: Hill & Wang.

-----------------------------------. 2006. The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. New York: Hill & Wang.

Lagos, Alexander & Joseph Lagos. 2011. The Sons of Liberty, Vol. 2. Illustrated by Steve Walker. New York: Crown.

------------------------------------------. 2010. The Sons of Liberty, Vol. 1. Illustrated by Steve Walker. NY: Crown.

Mizuki, Shigeru. 2011. Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Montreal, Quebec: Drawn and Quarterly.

From A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge.

Neufeld, Josh. 2010. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New York: Pantheon.

Rodriguez, Spain. 2008. Che: A Graphic Biography. Illustrated by Paul Buhle. New York: Verso.

Sacco, Joe. 2010. Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel. New York: Metropolitan books.

------------. 2002. Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Bosnia 1992-1995. Forward by Christopher Hitchens. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books.

Sacco, Joe & Edward Said. 2002. Palestine. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books.

Satrapi, Marjane. 2007. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon.

Shahin Tarek. 2011. Rise: The Story of the Egyptian Revolution as Written Shortly Before it Began. CreateSpace.

Sowa, Marzena. 2011. Marzi. Illustrated by Sylvain Savoia. New York: Vertigo.

Spiegleman, Art. 1996. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon.

Tan, Shaun. 2007. The Arrival. New York: Arthur A. Levine.

Thompson, Craig. 2011. Habibi. New York: Pantheon.

Tran, G.B. 2011. Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey. New York: Villard/Random.

Youme & Anthony Horton. 2008. Pitch Black. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press.

From Bye Bye Babylon

Ziade, Lania. 2011. Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975-1979. Interlink Publish Group.

Zinn, Howard. 2008. A People’s History of an American Empire. Illustrated by Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle. NY: Metropolitan Books.

Keeping a Collage Journal Based on Daily Newspaper Reading: Channeling Peter Jacobs

2012-02-15T17:56:00.000-05:00

Peter Jacob's Daily Collage. From 12.07.210

What is a Collage Journal

Peter Jacobs, collage artist, has been creating a daily collage culled from images from that day's newspaper for seven years. Jacobs writes:

The Collage Journal is now in its seventh year. I produce a collage solely from the images and texts of that day’s newspaper. The Collage Journal's 2091+ collages reside in over 187 Strathmore books. I have thus-far used 46 cutting boards, 298 Exacto blades, and 212 glues-sticks. As consistent as the newspaper is printed, each day I sit down and construct/reconstruct my visual response and internal feelings in that morning’s collage. Like a written journal, a visual journal incorporates both personal and external experience. The Collage Journal extends the external experience to the world, having the palette of the newspaper’s dissection of stories and images. The newspapers also bring the world of advertising, which is somewhat surreal in their placement to their neighboring articles. I believe this juxtaposition creates a de-sensitizing and detachment in the reader/viewer to the gravity of the news. The Collage Journal has become integrated in my daily life as a meditation, contemplation and re-evaluation of culture and identity. I have not decided on an end date for this series. Quite possibly, the newspapers will stop production before The Collage Journal ends.

Creating a Collage Journal in Social Studies or Humanities Class

I wondered about this process, not only as an art expression, but also as a visual journal that might serve as a record of daily newspaper reading. How might creating a daily or weekly collage based on the reading from a single day's newspaper influence how one reads? How might this practice over time deepen a person's knowledge about current events? What might happen if creating a daily or weekly collage was a standing choice assignment that was privileged work in social studies or humanities courses? The materials needed are fairly minimal and although I would certainly recommend a lesson on how to use an X-acto knife--the rest is rather minimal.

I decided today to try out this idea. I read the New York Times with an eye to making a collage. I was surprised that I read the paper differently as I found myself interested in examining how articles and advertisements from across sections collided, aligned, and might be juxtaposed. Were there themes or terms that crossed sections and articles? I noticed four things as I read:

How the word global is used so often and in different contexts
How interest in and news about Iran stretched across several sections
That the word war showed up in advertisements and in the first section of the paper repeatedly
That the advertisements suggested a world that was less global and far more privileged.

With that in mind I created my first entry in my new collage journal.

I made the collage in a Canson Mix Media journal (9" x 12" , 98 lb paper). I used an X-acto pen (finest size) to cut the images I wanted from the newspaper and did so on top of a cutting mat. I used an UHU clear glue stick (acid free) and some gesso. I then captured the collage with the Camera+ app (which I would recommend as a daily phone camera) on my iPhone.

Below is the completed collage I made based on reading the New York Times on 2.15.12.


Collage Journal, Day 1 (2.15.12 by M.A. Reilly)

Reading Memoir in Grades 8-12

2012-02-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

Abeel, Samantha. (2005). My Thirteenth Winter: A Memoir. New York: Scholastic.

Samantha Abeel diagnosed with dyscalculia in grade 7 recounts her struggle. Might also be paired with Abeel’s poetry and story book (Illustrated with watercolor paintings by Charles Murphy), Reach for the Moon (2001).

Armstrong, Lance. (2001). It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. New York: Berkley.

Armstrong’s account of his life after being diagnosed with cancer and how he fought back.

B., David. (2006). Epileptic. New York: Pantheon.

David B’s graphic autobiographical account of living with his brother, Jean Christophe, who is epileptic.

Beah, Ishmael. (2007). Long Time Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Beah’s account of being a child-soldier in Sierra Leone.

Beals, Melba Pattillo. (2007). Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. New York: Simon Pulse.

An account by Beals, who was one of the nine Black teens who were first to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, AR in 1957.

From Fun Home

Bechdel, Alison. (2007). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner Books.

Bechdel’s graphic memoir of life with her father, her father’s death, growing up in the 1960s-1970s in rural Pennsylvania, and being a lesbian. Bechdel’s father was a high school English teacher and owner of a funeral parlor.

Bryson, Bill. (2006). The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. New York: Broadway.

Bryson’s funny and poignant memoir of growing up during the 1950s.

Corrigan, Eireann. (2002). You Remind Me of You: A Poetry Memoir. New York: Front Street.

An account of three years by Eireann Corrigan of her eating disorder and being a teen.

Crutcher, Chris. (2004). King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography. New York: Greenwillow.

YA author, Chris Crutcher’s account of his adolescence growing up in Cascade, Idaho and his understandings as an adult.

Gantos, Jack. (2002). Hole in My Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Gantos’s account of his jail time, how it gave rise to his work as a writer, and an introspective look at adolescence.

Golabek, Mona. (2003). The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival. Grand Central Publishing.

A daughter’s retelling of her mother’s life as a young teen when she is sent to London for six years as part of the kindertransport. Annenberg has produced a video series in connection to this text: Teaching The Children of Willesden Lane.

Hickman, Homer. (1999). Rocket Boys: A Memoir. New York: Delta Books.

Retired NASA engineer, Homer Hickman’s account of building his first rocket. Set in the late 1950s in Coalwood, West Virginia, a mining town.

Jang, Ji-li. (2008). Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.

Set in China in the mid 1960s, Jang recounts her coming of age during Mao Ze-dong’s Cultural Revolution.

Marshall, Paule. (2009). Triangular Road: A Memoir. New York: Perseus Books Group.

With the concept of water as a unifying theme, Paule Marshall recounts her writerly life. Originally given as a series of talks at Harvard University.

McCourt, Frank. (1999). Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. New York: Scribner.

McCourt’s account of growing up, Irish Catholic, in Limerick, Ireland.

Molnar, Haya Leah. (2010 ). Under a Red Sky: Memoir of Childhood in Communist Romania. New York: Frances Foster Books.

An account of living under communist rule in Bucharest, Romania, postwar--at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s as recalled by Molnar.

Myers, Walter Dean. (2009). Bad Boy: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins.

Walter Dean Myer’s account of growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and what it means to fit in to ‘the group’ and to be one’s self.

Satrapi, Marjane. (2004). Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon.

A memoir-in-comic form of Satrapi’s life as a young girl in Iran after the Shah is disposed recounting what it was like to grow up during the Islamic Revolution. The first of two accounts. The story is continued in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return.

Smith, Hilary. (2012). . San Francisco, CA: Conari Press.

A witty and yet telling account of being a young woman diagnosed with bipolar.

Smith, Larry & Rachel Fershleiser. (2009). I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs By Teens Famous & Obscure. New York: HarperTeen.

600 teens chronicle their lives using 6 words to do so. For example Amanda L. writes, “I’m army boots. Ready for battle.” Anna-Lise M. writes, “Hung myself. Sister found me. Alive.” Hannah D. writes, “Don’t believe in love. Only science.”

From Maus I

Spiegleman, Art. 1986. Maus 1: A Survivor’s Tale My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon.

Spiegelman’s autobiographical comic-book account of his relationship with his father, Vladek, Vladek ‘s experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland, and the effects of the Holocaust on Vladek and his son’s lives. In the text, the Nazi’s are portrayed as cats, Jews are drawn as mice, Poles are pigs, and Americans are dogs. The story continues in Maus II: A Suvivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1992). Pulitzer prize winner.

Wasdin, Howard E. & Templin, Stephen. (2012). I Am a SEAL Team Six Warrior: Memoirs of an American Soldier. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Howard Wasdin’s account of being a SEAL on mission in Africa.

Student On-Line Essays/Memoirs

Gabriella7. Alzheimer’s and My Dad. Teen Ink.

On-line essay published by Teen Ink that recounts author’s account of her memories of her father who died from Alzheimers. Here’s a memorable line: “I remember one of the last times I saw my dad at the nursing home where he lived. That place scared me, with its odd smell that was a mixture of industrial cleaner and despair.”

Trying for Fire or Why Technology Has Never Been Just a Tool

2012-02-14T12:05:00.000-05:00

Ranunculus by Katinka Matson.

I was thinking about the art of Katinka Matson whose work is featured at the top of this post. She composes using organic materials, a flatbed scanner, and a computer. Her artist statement opens:

New technologies equal new perceptions. We create tools and then mould ourselves through our use of them. - Katrinka Matson

At the same time, I had a tweet stream open and was glancing at a series of tweets that situated technological tools as being less important than a teacher's content or pedagogical aims. The argument went something like this:

Technology is just a tool. We can't forget that.
Technology just helps you to accomplish the learning. It isn't the learning.
What you are learning must come first, not the tool.

I am pretty sure that I don't agree with the premise that the technology is just a tool. Not now and really not ever, especially when we see partial signs that suggest some of us are shifting from emphasizing schooling to privileging learning anytime, anywhere and with anyone. In such a world, is the tool secondary to a teaching intention? Does the tool shape us? Have tools always shaped us? Might it be that neither matter and matter in the same breath? Is it really about either/or, teacherly intention or tool? Could it be about both/and or perhaps neither?

Perhaps this question of which to privilege is a poor question. Consider William Carlos Williams who at the end of "Deep Religious Faith" wrote:

They have quit the job/of invention. The/imagination has fallen asleep/in a poppy-cup.

And so perhaps, as Williams tells us this matter is less the chicken and egg scenario (as to which to privilege first) and more a matter of human invention--invention that happens alongside the imagination. Technological tools are portals to invention. Beneath such arguments of which is most important remain our compelling desire to invent and to imagine. Now Tim Seibles* knows this. Years ago, I happened upon a poem by him, from his book, Hurdy-Gurdy (1992, Cleveland State University Center) that remains with me and continues to inform the ways I see the world. For me, literature is like that, it too opens portals. The poem, "Trying for Fire," speaks to co-specifying realities of maturation and invention. Have a look:

Trying for Fire

Right now, even if a muscular woman wanted
to teach me the power of her skin
I'd probably just stand here with my hands
jammed in my pockets. Tonight
I'm feeling weak as water, watching the wind
bandage the moon. That's how it is tonight:
sky like tar, thin gauzy clouds,
a couple lame stars. A car rips by —
the driver's cigarette pinwheels past
the dog I saw hit this afternoon.
One second he was trotting along
with his wet nose tasting the air,
next thing I know he's off the curb,
a car swerves and, bam, it's over. For an instant,
he didn't seem to understand he was dying —
he lifted his head as if he might still reach
the dark-green trash bags half-open
on the other side of the street.

I wish someone could tell me
how to live in the city. My friends
just shake their heads and shrug. I
can't go to church — I'm embarrassed by things
preachers say we should believe.
I would talk to my wife, but she's worried
about the house. Whenever she listens
she hears the shingles giving in
to the rain. If I read the paper
I start believing some stranger
has got my name in his pocket —
on a matchbook next to his knife.

When I was twelve I'd take out the trash —
the garage would open like some ogre's cave
while just above my head the Monday Night Movie
stepped out of the television, and my parents
leaned back in their chairs. I can still hear
my father's voice coming through the floor,
"Boy, make sure you don't make a mess down there."
I remember the red-brick caterpillar of row houses
on Belfield Avenue and, not much higher than the rooftops,
the moon, soft and pale as a nun's thigh.

I had a plan back then--my feet were made
for football: each toe had the heart
of a different animal, so I ran
ten ways at once. I knew I'd play pro,
and live with my best friend, and
when Vanessa let us pull up her sweater
those deep-brown balloony mounds made me believe
in a world where eventually you could touch
whatever you didn't understand.

If I was afraid of anything it was
my bedroom when my parents made me
turn out the light: that knocking noise
that kept coming from the walls,
the shadow shapes by the bookshelf,
the feeling that something was always there
just waiting for me to close my eyes.
But only sleep would get me, and I'd
wake up running for my bike, my life
jingling like a little bell on the breeze.
I understood so little that I
understood it all, and I still know
what it meant to be one of the boys
who had never kissed a girl.

I never did play pro football.
I never got to do my mad-horse,
mountain goat, happy-wolf dance
for the blaring fans in the Astro Dome.
I never snagged a one-hander over the middle
against Green Bay and stole my snaky way
down the sideline for the game-breaking six.

And now, the city is crouched like a mugger
behind me — right outside, in the alley behind my door,
a man stabbed this guy for his wallet, and sometimes
I see this four-year-old with his face all bruised,
his father holding his hand like a vise. When I
turn on the radio the music is just like the news.
So, what should I do — close my eyes and hope
whatever's out there will just let me sleep?
I won't sleep tonight. I'll stay near my TV
and watch the police get everybody.

Across the street a woman is letting
her phone ring. I see her in the kitchen
stirring something on the stove, Farther off
a small dog chips the quiet with his bark.
Above me the moon looks like a nickel
in a murky little creek. This
is the same moon that saw me at twelve,
without a single bill to pay, zinging
soup can tops into the dark--I called them
flying saucers. This is the same
white light that touched dinosaurs, that
found the first people trying for fire.

It must have been very good, that moment
when wood smoke turned to flickering, when
they believed night was broken
once and for all — I wonder what almost-words
were spoken. I wonder how long
before that first flame went out.

Night (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I want to suggest here that we are at a moment in time when the wood smoke has turned to flickering and we need to recognize it as such. Technologies, that is--anything beyond our physical selves that we use to create, to alter a given reality are old and have never been neutral. The current ones allow those with access to compose alone or with others and to do so not only across vast geographies simultaneously, but also across time, throwing into uncertain fashion what it means to be in a present moment especially as remixing becomes more common, more easily doable. Whose present does a collaborated upon work of art exist in? What about works that are remixed? I think here of Walter Benjamin who in writing about mechanical reproduction in the 1930s said: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." Is remix based on mechanical reproduction an original composition existing in a specific time?

Technologies today are a type of time machine--portals to potential invention--ones that alter established borders such as social strata; political, economic, and physical geographies; ideological allegiances; and notions of time. In doing so our use of these technologies give rise to liberation and constraint.

An Offering (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Technologies have never been mere tools and we would be wise to remember that. Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford each wrote about the machine as being anti-social and oddly this may be an even keener truth today. Ellul in The Technological Society wrote, "Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did....The machine took its place in a social milieu that was not made for it, and for that reason created the inhuman society in which we live" (p.5). Ellul, in the same work, quotes Mumford who said, "The machine is anti-social."

The night has never been broken, for what it means to fear, to love, to want, to desire--evolves alongside the very technologies we think have freed us. The Internet is made and remade--for now an oddly inorganic thing that we compose as we are composed by it.

*Here's a link to hear Tim Seibles read the poem, Fearless, from NPR Weekend Edition July 26, 2003.

Centrifugal Force

2012-02-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Hurry Through (2/2012 by M.A. Reilly)

How are communities and schools ready for and responsive to what Anne Marie Slaughter (2011) in HBR describes?

Technologies that connect people to knowledge, services, and one another across the globe have acted as a centrifugal force, spinning functions and authority away from the center toward millions of previously silent and disempowered individuals.

Instead of being global citizens (has a homogenized feel to it), how do we help young people to understand the implications of a world where previously silent and disempowered individuals are gaining voice, influence, and presence?

Getting Lost

2012-02-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

Along the Way (2.11.13, by M.A. Reilly)

On my way home from visiting friends in Connecticut on Saturday, I got off the highway and took roads in a random fashion. This is a multimodal record of getting lost while on my way home. The music is performed by the Belgian choir Scala who perform U2's With or Without You. I used this selection as it was a gift from Jane and Robyn whose home I was visiting.

Instructional Segregation

2012-02-12T13:38:00.003-05:00

Sheep (Feb. 2012, by M.A. Reilly)

Lately I have been thinking about instructional segregation: the practice of sorting students into tracks based on 'perceived ability'. Ability is such a pernicious thing to begin with and when you tag on that our view of another's abilities is at best perceived--well that slope is more than slippery. Guy Claxton asserts that “in Western educational culture, the word‘ability’ is used as a synonym for ‘intelligence’, and is taken to refer tosome inner resource which explains or accounts for performance” (1999, p. 28). When we position students as being 'low ability'--a practice that often is used to explain instructional segregation--we also tend to believe that these students' 'inner resources' are not robust enough to warrant independent learning and instead these learners are given some 'proven' program designed to make up what is perceived as missing.

How do students understand these actions? Do we think they fail to notice their placement at school? What about students who are privileged? Do they carry with them an inflated sense of self? Dolores Delgado Bernal opens the essay, "Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Theory and Critical Race-Gendered Epistemologies: Recognizing Students of Color as Holders and Creators of Knowledge" by quoting Angela, a Chicana college student. Angela writes:

I have to say that I think my high school was pretty discriminatory because I feel that I wasn’t tracked into a college program and I think I had the potential to be. Except because I was from the other side of the tracks, no one really took the time to inspire me. . . . I had a high school English teacher who had asked us to write an essay. And I had written it about the death of my sister. And when she gave it back to me, she gave me a D. And she said it was all wrong. And I just couldn’t get how she was, first of all, insensitive, and then second of all, criticizing me on an experience she didn’t have and that only I could write about. And so that’s when I think I started to feel the discrimination, almost in the way, I guess in the expectations of what you talk about or what you don’t talk about in school. And what’s academic and what’s not academic.

Angela's comments give me pause and make me wonder:

How is knowledge determined at school? What constitutes 'content'?
Who's knowledge matters at school and why?
What is the role of agency in learning?
Who's knowledge is misunderstood, seen, or perhaps witnessed?
Who's knowledge is discounted, underrepresented and/or misrepresented?
What happens across time when what a student knows is never or rarely privileged at school?
What happens when the ways a student makes meaning are not permitted, understood and/or valued at school?
What types of instruction require sorting students into tracks?
Do we ask learners how they feel about tracking? Are there voices included in what we know?
What is the role of the imagination in learning and in teaching?

Some questions we might ask ourselves:

Is your district, school and/or classroom a venue of hope and if so, for whom?
Joe Kinchloe and Peter McLaren understand social theory "as a map or guide to the social sphere" (p. 281). What would a map of the social sphere of your district, school and.or classroom reveal if made by you, a student, or an outsider?
What is ability? How does your understanding of a learner's 'ability' function at your district, school, or within your classroom?
How do you recognize learners as holders and creators of knowledge?
An epistemology is a system of knowing (Ladson-Billings, 2000). What does your epistemology suggest about what you value and recognize as knowledge?
Highwater (1981) states: "The greatest distance between people is not space, but culture" (p.3). How are cultures represented in your district, school or classroom? What associational bridges are offered between and across cultures?
What stories and counter-stories are learners allowed to tell where you teach?
What strategies do you employ in order for subordinated learners to have voice?
What are the social complexities inherent in detracking? How do you ensure that the same system that gave rise to instructional segregation changes at the belief level so that tracking doesn't continue via grading, differentiation, or course selection?
If tracking is a type of master narrative, what counter stories do you tell?

A Few Essential iPhone Photography Apps

2012-02-11T21:46:00.000-05:00

There are lots of apps that can be used to make images. Here are a few I have been playing with lately.

Made with iPhone, processed with FX PhotoStudio app.

Made with TtV camera app, Argus02

Made with iPhone Camera, processed with Instagram app.

Made with Hipstamatic App.

Made with Nikon D80, processed with Lo-Mob app.

Made with iPhone, processed with TtV app, Brownie01.

Made with TtV Camera app, Rolleiflex02

Made with iPhone Camera and processed with PictureShow app.

Made with iPhone Camera and processed with Instagram app.

Made with TtV Camera App, Minolta Filter.

Made with Nikon D300 & processed with Instagram App

White Privilege, Classroom Discourse, and Being Other

2012-02-10T10:01:00.000-05:00

Where No One Speaks English (April 2011 by M.A. Reilly)

As a small childliving in Ireland, my grandmother practiced speaking Irish, a Gaelic language,with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow that skirted the lanewhere she and her family lived. Such were the times in the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom fromBritain--a time when British rule still prohibited the Irish from speakingtheir language of home. From the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland in 1169through the subsequent centuries of conquest, colonization, andgenocide--speaking Irish remained a punishable matter. Irish culture, language, and music werebanned by the British through the Penal Laws and through institutions, such asthe national schools. Irish Catholics were considered subhuman. Consider Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley (1860) who in a letter to his wife wrote:

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as out own.

Or Oxford historian James Anthony Froude who in describing the Irish wrote: "...more like squalid apes than human beings...unstable as water...only efficient military despotism...the wild Irish understand only force."

Prior to the Easter, 1916 uprising, Michael Collins, arepublican leader said:

We only succeeded after we had begunto get back our Irish ways; after we had made a serious effort to speak our ownlanguage; after we had striven again to govern ourselves. We can only keep outthe enemy and all other enemies by completing that task. The biggest task willbe the restoration of the Irish language (quoted in Ó Fiaich 1969: 111).

More than one-hundredyears after my grandmother learned to speak her language of home behind ahedgerow, I sit here in the United States, thinking of this woman I never met,of a country, I too left, and wonder about the intersections among occupation,language, and stories. What does it mean to have to leave your language, religion, and rituals behindin order to survive? What does it mean generations later, when one’s nativetongue is strange sounding to the ear?

Althoughthese matters have historical importance,they are also relevant and contemporary as situating some as Other remains with us, (in)forms ouractions, and demonstrates our values and core understandings. One only needs topop into 10-minutes of the current Republican ‘debates’ to see other being displayed. I want to suggest here though that wecan (and I hope do) also look more closely at the work we do at schools andperhaps become brave enough to see our own hand at work in othering, especiallyfor those of us who are White and middle class.

Years ago at YorkUniversity, Edward Said delivered a speech in which he defined imperialism,colonialism, and empire. Saidsaid:

As I shall beusing the term--and I'm not really too interested in terminologicaladjustments--"imperialism" means the practice, the theory and theattitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory."Colonialism," which is almost always a consequence of imperialism,is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. As the historian MichaelDoyle puts it, "Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which onestate controls the effective political sovereignty of another politicalsociety. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic,social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy ofestablishing or maintaining an empire.”

My grandmother livedunder colonial rule. At the close of the 19^th century as a child inIreland, she was subject to British rule, an empire surely in decline, butnonetheless still a permanent force operating in her daily life. Although Empirescollapse, the groups who have been privileged via the Empire often remainprivileged well after the collapse, as the belief system that has set themapart and above from others is institutionalized and becomes the bearer of what‘normal’ and ‘right’ is. I want to suggest herethat much of what has informed what is ‘normal and right’ via past (andcurrent) Empires filters into our classrooms and schools, is reflected in our definitionof literacy as a singular, decontextualized matter. We see it in the text choices that fill our classrooms, theway we limit essay and narrative to ‘correct’ forms, and the belief and practice thatliteracies can be represented as a finalized list of skills. We operate as if there was one 'correct' discourse and those who do not have this discourse are inferior. We have not come that far from the thinking that informed Kingsley and Froude. Such thinking permeates ourdaily work and may be less than visible to us, depending on who we are and howwe live.

As a white woman, middleclass, and the mother of a child of color—white privilege is oddly noticeable,foregrounded. In this post I wantto take a few minutes to situate it, reveal it in its subtle and not so subtleforms as it operates in our schools. W.E.B. Du Bois warned in1903: “theproblem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote:

Hereinlie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaningof being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning isnot without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the TwentiethCentury is the problem of the color-line.

In the opening chapter,Du Bois asks the critical question of the last and I want to suggest thiscentury as well: How does it feel to be aproblem? He deftly surrounds this question with the discourse we speak:

Between me and the otherworld there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings ofdelicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All,nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort ofway, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly,How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man inmy town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outragesmake your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boilingto a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does itfeel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

It is this ‘real’question that we need to attend to, say aloud so that we can get beneath it andwrestle with how we situate those we consider ‘other’. Situating another as a problem represents imperialistic discourse--a belief, still with us today that informs pedagogical andcontent decisions, language and special education policies and practices, aswell as how we situate ‘potential’ – a pernicious term if ever there was--onsome learners and not others.

I hadoccasion a few years ago to speak with an elementary principal, Dr. Fallon (pseudonym). She explained that she didnot think of the children at her school as children of color—of any color. She did not see color, nor did anyoneat the school, she told me. She insisted that the faculty and staff simply saw children;not their race. Dr. Fallon iswhite. As I listened to her, I realized that she deeply believed she and thefaculty were race neutral. Suchthinking is White myth-making—stories we tell and retell ourselves that allowus to remain polite, non-confrontational, removed. If we claim to not see race, then we need not attend theunderbelly of racial discrimination—the ways children get situated as problems.

As I listen to Dr.Fallon, I was equally aware of the function of memory and recalled a story Ihad been recently told about a child, a teacher, and the failure to see race at the school where she had indicated all were race neutral.

“When you can act like a third grader you will beallowed to sit with the other children,” Mrs. Carls, a teacher tells Jae. Itis early October.

Jae, who is shy, easily embarrassed anddesirous to not stand out in social settings gets up from the table where henormally sits and moves across the classroom and sits by himself at the onedesk located away from the other children. He has been caught talking loudly to a friend seated acrossthe room, again.

This “event” is the last one in a long series ofchallenges that have happened only a few scant weeks into a new school yearwhere Jae has been seen by his teacher as being a problem. One might wonder if other children in thisclassroom call out? Or fidget? Is it truly possible that only this one child does both? Is it so unexpected that an 8-year-old will do such things?

Earlier that day, Jae had yelled, “Yes!” out loudapparently disrupting his class after hearing an announcement calling for theboys and girls to try out for the school patrol.

“Aaron didn’t hear the announcement,” Jae wouldlater tell his mother. “He had toknow. We were waiting for this. I didn’t mean to yell. I just got excited andwanted him to know we could try out. I didn’t want him to miss it.”

Being able to be part of the school patrol is aprivilege reserved for third graders. Jae and his friends had been waitinguntil they were in the requisite grade. It would be an opportunity Jae wouldnot come to know at this public school; a school situated in a largely white suburb.Because he blurted out, “Yes” and called across the classroom to a friend totell him the announcement, he was left behind when his teacher and all of theother children went to the tryouts. This was his punishment for talking out of turn.

Jae’s mother didn’t hear this story until laterthat night well after she had picked her son up from school, but said that shehad noticed that he was extremely quiet and withdrawn throughout dinner. Hours later, in tears, he finally told her thestory. She would learn that it was not only being left behind that injured Jae, but also hisbelief that his teacher did not like him as he is ‘different’ from the otherchildren. The other boys, Jae would explain, can call out.

“What did you do in the classroom by yourself?” Jae’smother asked him.
“I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I just had tosit there with Mrs. Nomba (an aide) and wait until my class came back.”

It would be an hour later when the white teacherand the 18 white children came back to the classroom—their voices raised in theexcitement that marks such occasions. Here they would find Jae, embarrassedby his misdeed, sitting alone.

It is in these small,perhaps even to some--inconsequential moments--that we need to pause and lookcritically for “White privilege” is an institutional matter. Peggy McIntosh explains: “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package ofunearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was"meant" to remain oblivious." She continues by saying that her schooling“followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whitesare taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average,and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as workthat will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’."

I think again of Jae’sprimary grade experience and wonder what did he learn about his self-worth thatday? What did being left behindecho? How might it have reinforcedracially charged encounters he had already experienced? What is the weight ofmemory a child of color carries and how might teachers better understand suchweight? What has Jae been learning each day in the classroom since? What undercurrents of white privilegethat is reserved for boys and girls whose skin is light and whose eyes areround has Jae internalized? Whatdid his white classmates learn that day about children who are located as“other’ by their teacher?

These are not smallmatters; ones we can tuck away with pleasantries and polite conversationsalongside promises to do better next time. We need to talk openly and at lengthabout the ways that white privilege permeates our schools and communities—evenif it means feeling discomfort. We need to look inwardly at our own actions andassumptions and critically and honestly interrogate ourselves. How do our actions reinforce privilege for some? How does such history inform how we see and fail to see children?

I am not writing aboutthe gross racial injustices that become front-page news. The ones read aboutfrom the comfort of one’s home and later talked about across expanses of lawnwith all the requisite outrage truly intact. It seems almost, easy, to gather these stories and wearthem as symbols of our sense of justice—as if such practice might absolve usfrom the seemingly smaller instances when we fail to stand up for what we knowto be right. Yet overt hate crimes such as the heinous killing ofAfrican-American James Byrd, Jr., chained to the back of a pickup truck anddragged to death by three white men in Jasper, Texas in 1998 or the murder ofAsian Mohammad Parvaiz, beaten to death by six white teens in West Yorkshire,England in 2006 have potential reiteration each time we fail to stand up andacknowledge the smaller, less obvious moments of racial injustice.

Exploring Transmediation & Rhizomatic Learning through Art Conversations

2012-02-09T22:52:00.001-05:00


Bluebird (Feb. 2012 by M.A. Reilly

(For Saturday @ Western Connecticut State University/ED822)

I. Exploring Transmediation through Art Converasations

What is transmediation? According to Semali, transmediation is:

The process of taking understandings from one sign system and moving them into another in order to make meaning or 'representing' meaning across sign systems. From Semali, L.M. (ed). 2002. Transmediation in the classroom: A semiotics-based media literacy framework. NY: Peter Lang.

Art conversation

View more presentations from Mary Ann Reilly.

Art Conversations (by M.A. Reilly, published in English Journal)

II. Engaging in Art Conversations

Engagement 1: You have been partnered and have been given a sheet of finger paint paper and paint. Track how meaning emerges and changes as you read/view/hear this Charles Bukowski poem, "Bluebird." Discuss the work, your feelings and thoughts with your partner using the finger paints. You are not allowed to actually talk, but instead need to converse using the paints.

I. ENTERING THE POEM

1. Listen to the poem.

from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s still singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

II. DWELLING IN THE POEM

2. View Tomas Ralph's short animated film based on the poem

Bluebird from Thomas Ralph on Vimeo.

3. View "Bluebird" a multimodal text based on Bukowski's poem and created by California is a Place.

Bluebird from California is a place on Vimeo.

4. View this is an animation of "Bluebird" created by Monika Umba.

III. LEAVING THE POEM

5. Listen to this a musical Composition by Sympathy 7 based on the Bukowski poem.

In December 2010 a friend recommended a poem by Charles Bukowski called Bluebird. During that time I was working on a musical piece but was unsure of its purpose. Upon reading Bluebird i knew instantly what i should do. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as i enjoyed composing it.

6. Watch Damjan Radovanovic film.

Bluebird from Damjan Radovanovic on Vimeo.

7. Watch SinChan's film.

Bluebird from SinChan on Vimeo.

III. Experience as a Moving Force

'Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into' (John Dewey. 1938/1997. Experience and education, p.38). Transmediation potentially helps to reveal the trajectory of an experience through the presence of multiple symbolic (re)presentations" (Reilly, 2010. "Opening possibilities through transmediation (p. 3).

Place your art conversation on the table alongside your peers.
As you view the art, consider what understandings you made of the poem, Bluebird. Did your understanding change as you engaged with the various artworks based on or influenced by the poem.
Did meaning emerge or change as you engaged in the art conversation?
Gallery Walk: NOw align your work with your peers and take a gallery walk. Are there any patterns across the artworks that you notice? Are there points of departure?
Think about these, make a few notes (chose whatever form you want) and let's talk about this in about 15 minutes.

IV. Rhizomes, Lines of Flight, and so on...

Rhizomatic Learning

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly

Lines of flight
View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

David Coleman, Dr. King and the Problem of Representation

2012-02-06T23:20:00.001-05:00

Following a link from Susan Ohanian and one from Grant Wiggins, I came across the same video by Common Core State Standards author David Coleman. Few things have stopped me as this video did. The purpose of the video, 'Text-Dependent Analysis in Action: Examples From Dr. MLK, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail," according to Mr. Coleman is to offer a model to teachers illustrating how to teach critical text analysis to students. Mr. Coleman remarks:

"Many teachers and others have asked us to show them a model of what that (teaching students to read with care, identify textual evidence & represent that learning) might look like...to meet the Standards."

So let me stop here and ask you to take a moment and imagine what Mr. Coleman will next do.

What do you see?

What do you imagine?

Below is a screen capture from the video. Take a careful look at this scene as it is unchanging throughout the 11-minute model teaching video. Mr. Coleman stands in front of a vanilla screen wearing a sports jacket and collared shirt and describes what he does when reading the opening to the letter.


Screen capture of David Coleman offering a Model Teaching Lesson sans Children

You may ask, "But wait a minute--where are the learners? Are there no children? No students?" These represent critical questions. In fact I would ask, Is it even possible to have a model of student learning that does not have learners represented? Can we call this a classroom model if the only one present is a man in a suit talking?

I want to say here that Mr. Coleman's thoughtful inquiry into the opening of the letter is interesting. I can imagine that we might have a lot to discuss. But I would be quick to also say that such a discussion about text should not be mistaken for teaching. There is no teaching when there are no students. Children collectively co-compose the class. They are not vessel upon which we pour 'correct' interpretations. They are the living impulse that along with the teacher make a collection of people into a class.

That's the quiet secret that is missing from so many of these reform schemes and standardization. Teaching and learning are human enterprises. Fallible as they are beautiful. Representation is essential.

Now there is an irony to Mr. Coleman's model lesson without students as he is showing all of us how to critically read Dr. King's impassioned letter from the Birmingham Jail. What's unfortunate is the significant disconnect between Mr. Coleman's model and his failure to recognize that without students he has no model. Representation is missing and isn't it ironic given the very text he is critically analyzing? Dr. King's message is largely about the responsibility we have (especially those sanctioned with power) to ensure the representation of all, especially those who may be cast as 'other'. This important understanding is not lived in the actions of Mr. Coleman.

There are several sections in the letter where Dr. King conveys the importance of representation. But two sections resonate so loudly. Dr. King writes:

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

"Nobodiness." I think here of the absence of actual student bodies in the model Common Core State Standard lesson and want to suggest that this should give us pause. This is not a simple oversight. This is a philosophical failing--a moral problem that extends well beyond the video lesson. It makes me ask, Would an actual teacher, regardless of competence, actually fail to recognize that one cannot have a class without students? Is this not the primary understanding that we carry with us when teach? The class cannot exist without the children, the teens, the you, the me.

A bit later in the letter, Dr. King also states: "To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship, and ends up relegating persons to the status of things." When I read the Common Core State Standards or watch the Common Core expert modeling lesson, I do not see my son. That quirky 13-year-old who is flesh and blood, complicated and impassioned is not represented. Rather my child, like yours, is situated as the 'student' who is an homogenized, disembodied thing.

Is that the most we can want?

Now Mr. Coleman and I disagree about approaches to reading. As a coauthor of the Common Core, Mr. Coleman wants us to read like a detective. This insistence on close reading as the singular method is privileged every year in the Standards and yet it is simply one method. It is an apt method at times, but it fails to represent the whole of reading. Additionally, I would want my son, a child of color, to come to know Dr. King's letter through a more embodied experience. I want him to know the issues of representation in his bones, not just in his head. For my son, this isn't simply an academic matter. The issues of representation and justice may well be matters of life and death. In such instances, close reading is at best, a weak antiseptic.

Crowd-Sourcing Love: The Book

2012-02-05T08:35:00.001-05:00

Cover to new book.

Some of you indicated that you would like to see Crowd-Sourcing Love as a book. I gave this some thought and decided to add to the text filling it out and adding days so that it would be a full month of suggestions for free ways to say I Love You.

The book is 68 pages, 7 x 7 inches. Small enough for you to slip into a backpack or pocketbook and full enough to give you great ideas throughout a month.

The book is offered as an ebook, soft cover, and two hard cover versions.

I hope you will take a look.

Here are a few screenshots. You can preview the full book as well.

Teaching Visual Grammar: Method & Models for Students

2012-02-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for. —Georgia O’Keeffe

The other day I wondering about how we are deliberately teaching visual grammar and literacies. One way that I have introduced graduate students to visual grammar is through an engagement with shapes that Molly Bang outlines in her fabulous book, Picture This. The process I am outlining via this slideshare has been used by middle and secondary teachers very successfully with their students.

Picture this

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly

Playing with shapes in order to (re)tell a story or illustrate a phrase helps learners to internalize Bang's 10 insights about how shape influences the way we feel. After students have had the opportunity to internalize Bang's visual grammar, viewing still and/or moving images can help learners to apply what they have been leaning. Here are a few models that I appreciate for their visual and narrative work. As you view, you might see which elements are present in these works.

If you do this work with students, would you drop me a tweet (@maryannreilly) or a comment on the blog letting me know how it went? Always curious about such things.

Rick Mereki's Move

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Colin Hesterly's World of Motion

World Of Motion from Colin Hesterly on Vimeo.

Copete's Bubble Gum

Bubble Gum from Copete on Vimeo.

Next Level Pictures: 8 Hours in Brooklyn

8 hour span of video taping in Brooklyn.

8 Hours in Brooklyn from Next Level Pictures on Vimeo.

CrowdSourceLove: Day 10 - Dream Together

2012-02-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

In the Field (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

On this last CrowdSourceLove, I wanted to leave you with something that might extend well beyond Valentine's Day and thought about the necessity to dream, to share those dreams with the ones we love, and to dream together. Many years ago I had the opportunity to read Together--a lovely book-length picture book poem by George Ella Lyon.

The poem reads:

You cut the timber and I'll build the house.

You bring the cheese and I'll fetch the mouse.

You salt the ice and I'll crank the cream.

Let's put our heads together and dream the same dream.

I'll drive the truck if you'll fight the fire.

I'll plunk the keys if you'll be the choir.

I'll find the ball if you'll call the team.

Let's put our heads together and dream the same dream.

You dig for water and I'll make a pail.

I'll paint the boat if you'll set the sail.

You catch the fish and I'll catch the stream.

Let's put our heads together and dream the same dream.

Putting your heads together to dream the same dream.
A fine way to live and love.

CrowdSourceLove: Day 9 - Be Open to Play

2012-02-03T12:09:00.000-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

Pieter Bruegel, Young Folks at Play. 1560

However you/s/he/they define it.
Be open to play.
Embrace it.

We need to play.

Tuck away some time to simply play with the person(s) you love, to experience the interconnectedness of you and them and the environment.

Picture Books About Scientists & The Scientific Process for K-2 Children

2012-02-02T19:28:00.000-05:00

Aldrin, Buzz. 2005. Reaching for the Moon. Paintings by Wendell Minor. New York: Harper Collins.

Bardoe. Cheryl. 2006. Gregor Mendel: The Friar Who Grew Peas. Illustrated by Jos. A. Smith. NY: Abrams.

Brown, Don. 2003. Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries. NY: Sandpiper.

Bruchac, Joseph. 2004. Rachel Carson: Preserving a Sense of Wonder. Illustrated by Thomas Locker. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.

Burleigh, Robert. 2009. One Giant Leap. Illustrated by Mike Wimmer. NY: Philomel.

Engle, Margarita. 2010. Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian. Illustrated by Julie Paschkis. NY: Henry Holt.

Holub, Joan. 2006. The Man Who Named Clouds. Illustrated by Paige Billin-Frye. Morton Grove, IL: Albert Whitman & Company.

Hurst, Carol Otis. 2001. Rocks in His Head. Illustrated by James Stevenson. NY: Greenwillow.

Locker, Thomas. 2010. John Muir: American Naturalist. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.

Martin, Jacqueline Briggs. 1998. Snowflake Bentley. Illustrated by Mary Azarian. Houghton Mifflin.

Mortensen, Lori. 2010. Come See the Earth Turn: The Story of Leon Foucault. Illustrated by Raul Allen. San Francisco, CA: Tricycle Press.

Nivola, Claire A. 2008. Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai. NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Paul, Ann Whitford. 1999. All By Herself. Illustrated by Michael Sterinagle. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

Pinkney, Andrea. 1998. Dear Benjamin Banneker. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. NY: Sandpiper.

Ray, Deborah Kogan. 2004. The Flower Hunter: William Bartram, America’s First Naturalist. London: Frances Foster Books.

Rohmer, Harriet, Ed. 2009. Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet. Illustrated by Julie McLaughlin. San Francisco, A: Chronicle Books.

Stone, Jerry. 2009. One Small Step: Celebrating the First Men on the Moon. CT: Roaring Brook Press.

Winter, Jeanette. 2011. The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with Chimps. NY: Schwartz & Wade.

-------------------. 2008. Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin.

Scientific Process (Observe; Compare; Sort & Organize; wonder, predict, hypothesize; Experiment, test, Explore; Infer & record results to represent understanding; Extend, Expand & Apply)

Burns, Kylie. 2010. What's Going On? Collecting and Recording Your Data. NY: Crabtree Publishing Company.

--------------. 2010. What's Your Problem? How to Start Your Scientific Investigation. NY: Crabtree Publishing Company.

Challen, Paul. 2009. What's Going to Happen?: Making Your Hypothesis. NY: Crabtree Publishing Company.

Dotlic, Rebcca Kai. 2006. What is Science? Illustrated by Sachiko Toshikawa. NY: Henry Holt.

Doudna, Kelly. 2006. We Are Wise, Let's Hypothesize. NY: SandCastle.

Hyde, Natalie. 2009. What's the Plan? Designing Your Experiment. NY: Crabtree Publishing Company.

Johnson, Robin. 2010. What Do We Know? Drawing Conclusions and Answering Questions. NY: Crabtree Publishing Company.

Lehn, Barbara. 1999. What is a Scientist? Photographs by Carol Krauss.Minneapolis, MN: Millbrook.

Lionni, Leo. 1974. Fish is Fish. NY: Dragonfly Books.
Rusch, Elizabeth. 2007. Will It Blow? Illustrated by K.E. Lewis. Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books.
Serafini, Frank. 2008. Looking Closely Across the Desert. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.

------------------. 2008. Looking Closely Along the Shore. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.

------------------. 2008. Looking Closely Around the Pond. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.

------------------. 2008. Looking Closely in the Rain Forest. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.

------------------. 2008. Looking Closely Inside the Garden. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.

------------------. 2008. Looking Closely Through the Forest. Tonawanda, NY: Kids Can Press.

Shower, Paul. 1993. The Listening Walk. Illustrations by Aliki. NY: HarperCollins.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 8 - The Literary Meal

2012-02-02T08:00:00.001-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

speak the words by Lenoirrr

*Thanks to Lenoirrr for use of her fabulous image, speak the words. Very appreciative. You can also find her work on her personal website.

THE LOVE COOK
By Ron Padgett

Let me cook you some dinner.

Sit down and take off your shoes

and socks and in fact the rest

of your clothes, have a daquiri,

turn on some music and dance

around the house, inside and out,

it’s night and the neighbors

are sleeping, those dolts, and

the stars are shining bright,

and I’ve got the burners lit

for you, you hungry thing.

from Brooke's blog.

One only has to think of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749) and the connections among literature, food, and sensuality become rather apparent.
Food and literature. Literature and romance. Food and romance. All are connected, aren't they?

So this installment of CrowdSourcingLove is about cooking.
Cook together.
Or cook for one another.
Spend some time in the kitchen.

To inspire you here are a few recipes from Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate.

from Esquivel, Laura.(2002). Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and home Remedies. New York: Anchor. Kindle Edition.

Link to recipes

QUAIL IN ROSE PETAL SAUCE

12 roses, prefarably red
12 chestnuts
2 tsp. butter
2 tsp. cornstarch
2 drops attar of roses
2 Tbsp. anise
2 Tbsp. honey
2 cloves garlic
6 quail
1 pitaya

Brown the quail in butter and season with salt and pepper.

Remove the petals carefully from the roses. Ground the petals aith anise in a mortar. Separately, brown the chestnuts in a pan, remove the peels and cook them in water. Then puree them. Mince the garlic and brown slightly in butter; when it is transparent, add it to the chestnut puree along with the honey, the ground pitaya and the rose petals, and salt to taste.

To thicken the sauce slightly, you may add two Tablespoons of cornstarch.

Last, strain through a fine sieve and add no more than 2 drops of attar of rosses. As soon as the seasonings have been added, remove sauce from heat. The quail should be immersed in this sauce for 10 minutes to infuse them with the flavor, and then removed.

The quail are placed on a platter, the sauce is poured over them and they are garnished with a single perfect rose in the center and rose petals scattered all around.

“…as Tita was answering this question, saying that her secret was to prepare the
mole with a lot of love, Pedro happened to be nearby, and that they looked at each
other for a fraction of a second like conspirators, remembering when Tita had
been bent over the grinding store; for the eagle eye of Mama Elena saw the spark
that flew between them from twenty feet away, and it troubled her deeply” (p.
79).

TURKEY MOLE WITH ALMONDS AND SESAME SEEDS

1/4 chile mulato
3 chiles pasillas
3 chiles ancho
a handful of almonds
a handful of sesame seeds
turkey stock
a hard roll (1/3 concha roll)
peanuts
1/2 onion
wine
2 squares chocolate
anise
lard
cinnamon
pepper
sugar
seeds from the chiles
5 cloves garlic

Cook a turkey.

The almonds and sesame seeds are toasted in a griddle. The chiles anchos with their membranes removed, are also toasted - lightly, so they don't get bitter. Do this in separate frying pans. Afterwards the toasted chiles are ground on a stone along with the almonds and sesame seeds.

When the almonds and sesame seeds have been thoroughly ground, mix them with the stock in which the turkey was cooked and add salt to taste. Grind the cinnamon, cloves, anise and pepper in a mortar, adding the roll last, after frying in lard with chopped onion and garlic.

Next, combine the mixture with the wine and blend well.

Combine all the ingredients in a large pan, add the cut up turkey, the chocolate, and the sugar to taste. As soon as the mixture thickens, remove it from the heat.

CREAM FRITTERS

1 cup heavy cream
6 eggs
cinnamon
syrup

Take the eggs, crack them and separate the white. Stir the 6 egg yolks with the cup of cream. Beat until the mixture becomes light. Pour it into a pot that has been greased with lard. The mixture should be no more than an inch thick in the baking pan. Place it on the heat over a low flame and allow to thicken.

Remove the pan from the heat and allow the custard to cool. Cut into small squares.

Next, beat the egg whites so that the custard squares can be rolled in them and fried in oil. Finally, the fitters are served in syrup and sprinkled with ground cinnamon.

CHOCOLATE AND THREE KINGS' DAY BREAD

2 lbs. Soconusco chocolate beans
2 lbs. Maracaibo chocolate beans
2 lbs. Caracas chocolate beans
4-6 lbs. sugar, to taste

The first step is to toast the chocolate beans. Toast them until the moment they give off oil. When they are done being toasted, they are cleaned using a hair sieve to separate the hull from the seed. Beneath the metate in which the chocolate is to be ground, place a flat pan containing a hot fire, once the stone is warm, begin grinding the chocolate.

Mix the chocolate with the sugar, pounding it with a mallet and grinding the two together. Then divide the mixture into chunks. The chunks are shaped by hand into tablets, square or round. Set out to air.

THREE KINGS' DAY BREAD

30 grams fresh yeast
1 1/4 kilos flour
8 eggs
1 Tbsp. salt
2 Tbsp. orange blossom water
1 1/2 cups milk
300 grams sugar
300 grams butter
250 grams candied fruit
1 porcelain doll

Break up the yeast in 1/4 kilo of flour using your hands or a fork and adding 1/2 cup of warm milk a little at a time. When the ingredients are well blended, knead briefly, form into a ball and let rest. Let it grow to double its size.

Use a kilo of flour to form a well on the table. Place all of the ingredients in the center of this well and begin kneading starting in the center and gradually adding a little of the flour from the well until all the flour has been incorporated.

When the leavened dough has risen to twice its size, combine it with this other dough, blending them perfectly until the dough comes off your hands easily.

Use a scraper to remove any dough that has stuck to the table. Place the dough in a deep container that has been greased. Cover with a napkin and wait for it to rise to double its size. It takes approximately 2 hours for this. It has to rise three times before it goes in the oven.

When the dough has doubled in size for the 2nd time, remove it from the container, place it on the table, and form it into a strip. If you wish, you may place some candied fruit down the middle. If not, place the porcelain doll at random anywhere. Roll up the strip, joining one edge to the other. Place the bread seam down on a greased and floured baking sheet. Form a ring with the dough, leaving enough space between the edge of the sheet and the dough since it has to rise in size one more time.

After the bread has doubled in size the third time, decorate it with candied fruit, glaze it with a beaten egg and sprinkle it with sugar. Bake in oven for 20 minutes and let it cool.

Listening to Teachers

2012-02-01T09:46:00.000-05:00

8 a.m. this morning

Edward Said wrote that “a beginning is acceptedas a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship isover” (1975, Beginnings: Intention andMethod, p.76). I have been thinking about this insight in light ofconversations and email exchanges I have had with teachers as they readied themselves for a new schoolyear. It's taken me some time to wind back to these email exchanges--to understand them. Being beyond a moment often helps me to reframe it. Against two teachers'stories, I am also remembering the many 'opening to a school year days' I have been involved withas a former assistant superintendent and here, now-- I wish that Ihad understood more about these beginning days--understood how to listen better, earlier.

8 a.m. this morning

In writing about the partially unknown beginning,Said explains “that we make and accept it [such beginnings] at the same timethat we realize that we are ‘wrong’” (p. 78). I wonder how often we acknowledge that in our day to day work. Said's words help me to keep centered the reality that fictions are co-constructed on apage as well as in a classroom, school or district. This way of knowing is a doorway. Perhaps, even one we need to walkthrough.

In the current push for Common Core Standards and national mathematicsand reading/writing assessments for every breathing child ages 8 to 18, I suspect we are missing that teaching andlearning are human enterprises, temporally located, fictitious and oddly real. It is in the co-joining offictions and realities that a text’s identity is made—be it on paper or in thelived-curriculum of a classroom--or in the opening day exercises when admins often set the direction for a school year.

8 a.m. this morning

Said explains that this blending of fiction and reality hold constant, “solong as we have language to help us and hinder us in finding it, and so long aslanguage provides us with a word whose meaning must be made certain if it isnot to be wholly obscure” (p.78).

Hmm. Language. Whose language gets voiced on opening days of school? How set are we to listen--to hear? We often speak of ensuring student voice in the classroom and I wonder how often we afford the same essential need to teachers?

From the Midwest, a teacher writes to me and says:

Okay,let's start out with the bad news and move along to the good. No students this week. It's all professional development. Monday was special. We all came in pretty enthusiastic: newyear, clean slate, no negotiating like last year. Greetings from the super first, where we get a mixedwelcome. Welcome back, you're thebest staff ever, and by the way, here's the newspaper article ranking all thecounty schools and we're 13th in test scores. Go team! Staffmeeting in the afternoon, and the principal comes in to inspire us some more. By the way, this year there will be noelectronic devices, no food or drink in rooms, no sitting on the floor (that'sbad, and no one is learning when they are sitting on the floor with a book), nostudents ever leaving the room unsupervised, no allowing students to sit on thefloor in the hall to spread out around a large project that couldn't fit on adesk, etc, etc, etc. No no no no no... Thou shalt not....I'm very excited to beback. Glad you're all here too. By the way, we need to talk about thefirst day, Tuesday, which is a half day. In the morning each grade level will meet in one room with their teamand go over the handbook and the rules. Then it's down to the gym at 8:30 for the principal to give his go teamspeech here's how to behave, and then we figure out what to do with the lastcouple hours. Second day of school is picture day, so there will be periodicdisruptions. Third day of school:three drills are scheduled - fire, tornado, and lock down. Have a great year.

Middle school staff used to be a lively,fun, loving group. We sit insilence. Questions? Silence. I'm thinking that ph.d program'ssounding pretty damn good about now. This is how we're
expectedto set the tone at the beginning of the year.

Remember Carl? Science teacher across the hall from me? Older guy? Toldyou he got into teaching for the money? That guy has taught me more about character and ethics and how you teachit and live it with kids than anybody. He's crushed, hurt, doesn't want to end his career under this cloud,couldn't bring himself to retire while things are as they are. I realize I've been going to him andlooking for hope, but there isn't any there. He tells me he found a story the summer that he's beenlooking for for years - something about a bucket that a grandmother sends a kidout with and just says bring back something. He's beenwanting to use it to demonstrate trust for his students. Here, you've done well, go sit outsidefor a few minutes beneath the tree of knowledge and bring meback something in this bucket. Butwait, we're supposed to go over the handbook. We can't let the kids wander off alone. After a long, depressing
conversation,we finally decided that we're going to set the tone our own way and wait to getin trouble.

Tuesdaymorning I'm no longer excited to get out of bed and go back to thatbuilding. But on the way to work Istart thinking about Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I'm kinda sappy and every time I readthe first page about the sad city, so sad it had forgotten its name, I get alittle choked up. As I'm thinking aboutthis text, it occurs to me that that's what we are: so sad we've forgotten whowe are. Long story as short as Ican make it, I brought out the book and sharedthe first page with Carl and talked about it with him. I dropped the idea on as many staffmembers as I could yesterday, and I think we've come to the agreementthat we're going to pull back together to re-establish who we are and what webelieve in and act accordingly rather than doing what's dictated. I'm feelingmuch more optimistic now. I believe we can take back our building.

700 miles East, another teacher returns to schoolfor the first day and is given an oath to sign. The first statement reads: “I believe in and support the science of teaching.” This is an oath the teacher is requiredto sign and display in the classroom and this comprises the most important opening message the superintendent thinks to provide. He tells the gathered staff, "All teachers must sign and display the oath in the classroom."

“Whatis this?” I ask after the teacher forwards the thirteen statements.

“Weget this each year and we’re suppose to sign it. Last year I crossed out science andwrote in art and then put it on the wall.”

“Whatare you going to this year?”

“I’mthrowing it out. It’s insulting.”

8 a.m. this morning

I collect stories as much to hear the language, as to remind myself how critical it is to know (as much as one can) another person's story. Early in Haroun an the Sea of Stories (Rushdie), one of the more important questions gets posed: What's the use of stories that aren't even true? (p. 22).

In some ways, stories are alll we have--these utterances that are part fiction, part someone's truth. Stories help me to wonder: What is it we privilege in publiceducation anymore? Who are ourleaders? Is anyone listening to teachers?

8 a.m this morning

Yesterday I read an annual update by Bill Gates and have been thinking a lot about how he might spend some of that money in a way that would surely (in)form education. Had I his ear, I would recommend that he fund the collection and distribution of teachers' stories. These could be audio, video, or written--collected by other storytellers, photographers, videographers. Ten thousand stories. Ten thousand teachers whose voices we stand a chance to hear telling us about their teaching and learning. I know we would learn immeasurably. Think of it as a new Federal Writers Project for our time: good for the economy and good for children and schools.

Said tells us that a beginning "is often that which is left behind" (p.29). Our apprenticeship is over. We need to listen.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 7 - Explore Together

2012-02-01T07:33:00.001-05:00

New York Neighborhood. (M.A. Reilly, 1/2012)

Shut your eyes and see.

- James Joyce

Bundle up, if need be.
Take a walk through the neighborhood.Together.

Talk or not.

Spend some time away from in-the-home distractions.
Take pleasure in one another's company.
Explore, one another, together.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 6 - Voice

2012-01-31T08:14:00.001-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

Wild Nights! Wild Nights! (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

- Emily Dickinson

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Read to one another and/or listen to love poems together.

A few poetry recommendations:

"First Poem for You" - Kim Addonizio

"Chance Meeting" - Susan Browne

"Beautiful Signor" - Cyrus Cassells (Scroll to the bottom of the page)

"Night Club" - Billy Collins 

"A Soft-edged Reed of Light" - Julia Copus 

"American Smooth" - Rita Dove (Video) 

"The Weight" - Linda Gregg 

"XXI The World" - Jen Hadfield

"Those Winter Sundays"  - Robert Hayden

"Mossbawn Sunlight" - Seamus Heaney

"After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" - Galway Kinnell(Video)
 

"Parkinson's Disease" - Galway Kinnell

"Passing Through" - Stanley Kunitz

"Recreation" - Audre Lorde

"In Time" - W.S. Merwin (Perhaps my favorite of the group)

"Love" - Czeslaw Milosz 

"XX"  - Pablo Neruda (Spanish Video Reading, English Video reading)

"First Love" -Jan Owen 

"As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other" -Kenneth Patchen  

"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (excerpt) = William Carlos Williams (Audio)

"Love Song" - William Carlos Williams (Audio)

"When You Are Old" - William Butler Yeats (Read by Colin Farrell)

5 things I want my teacher to know about me Or Why I Would Opt Out of School

2012-01-31T07:37:00.000-05:00

Cristina (@surrealyno) challenged me to write five things I would like my teacher to know from the perspective of a child. This was a challenge I accepted and wrote, but could not post. I simply couldn't push publish and wasn't sure why, so I slept on it and was awake at 4:30 this morning thinking again. When I though about my younger self--such a vulnerable child--I came to the realization that I wouldn't choose to participate in school if offered that choice. Bottom line: I wouldn't go to 'school' now as I would find it too restrictive, too 'otherly' directed.

Here's what I had intended

to post:

Me in Ireland. Circa too many years ago:)

I learn & play anytime, anywhere, anyplace. The borders between formal and informal spaces of learning interest me and I prefer not to be limited. In short: I prefer but/and to either/or.
I often don't even see the proverbial box, let alone do I easily think inside it. I ask you to trust my process and afford me great latitude to learn which means that location, context, time, and direction need to remain in our collective hands.
I like to go outside and walk about. I like the rain and getting messy. Being outdoors is important to me. Travel is important to me. I want to connect.
I live a wide-awake life in a connected world and desire tools of my choosing to think with/through and the time to do so. Choice matters greatly to me, including the choice to say no. Please don't restrict my capacity to compose.
I think team trumps solo most of the time, but not all of the time. It is important to me to have both solitary time and team time. Did I mention choice?

So how realistic might it be to find a school where these five conditions were present? Even with that aside, I still would not opt for traditional school. The world has decidedly altered and new options are present. I would want to chart my own course and be able to design learning, not simply participate. Years ago I attended an experimental college as an undergraduate where I was able to design my college study. This was valuable to me. I think about this for my son, almost 13, and know that both my husband and I are not so sure he will actually attend high school--and certainly not for four years. We would like to explore alternatives to high school with him. I can't imagine him sitting in x periods a day, five days a week, 40 weeks a year and dutifully going from course to course. This seems less relevant than being in the world. This is not to say that we don't want excellent teachers for him. We do.

Excellent teachers are life altering.

I'm no longer convinced though that excellent teachers can only be found at that place called school. Truly, we want more for him.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 5 - Say, Yes

2012-01-30T08:08:00.000-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

Etta and Butch Go For a Ride (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

...Yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”

From Ulysses - James Joyce

Say, Yes.

Being 12 & Being Literate: Looking at Boys' Out-of-School Multimodal Texts and Game Play

2012-01-29T12:10:00.003-05:00

From Redstone Tutorial, Part 3: TNT Canons

Before the printing press existed, those training for scholarly roles wrote down word for word what a master or teacher read from his text. This text, of course, was most importantly the Bible; and one might suggest from an anthropological perspective that this may explain the inherent belief among those of the SAE world view the validity of the printed page regardless of what one's senses may tell one. An individual's own experience becomes secondary to what the accepted point of view may be, which is of course, precisely what the "Book" says. - Terry Tafoya. (1989). Coyote's Eyes: Native Cognition Styles. Journal of American Indian Education.

Copying isn't composing. Much of what I see my son doing at middle school resembles the pre-printing press times. For example he recently had to access a teacher's notes from an online site and copy these into his physical (paper) notebook. In this post I want to take a look at the important literacies that young boys are participating in that are done outside of school.

As many of you know, I have been taking an extended look at my 12-year-old son and several of his friend's Minecraft play this last year. In part, I have been trying to understand the boys' literate behaviors that emerge during their game playing and making multimodal texts, such as: screencasts, livestreams, and videos. By observing the artifacts the boys compose, I have begun to note some similarities and important differences between adolescents' literacies developed during play, and those privileged via school-based essayist assignments*.

Additionally of interest to me are the literacies these young boys engage in, specifically I am wondering about how they:

connect with others across the globe through Skype and multiplayer game sites
collaborate to build/rebuild/remix, maintain, and refine fictional worlds; make and upload multimodal texts to the Internet; write code; develop and maintain a Minecraft server; attract, support, and ban server clients; and develop and enact a business plan
compose written code and multimodal texts (such as: screencasts, trailers, livestreams, videos)
contextualize environments in which play occurs
participate in on-line play

This post represents some tentative thoughts and I welcome your insights.

Screencasts, Essayist Prose and the Problem of Authorship and Audience

One important difference between the literacies these adolescents develop as a result of out-of-school play and essayist prose style privileged inside school relates to the authenticity of author and audience. In thinking about essayist authorship and audience, James Gee (1990) writes:

A further significant aspect of essayist prose style is the fictionalization of both the audience and the author. The 'reader' of an essayist text is not an ordinary human being but an idealization, a rational mind formed by the rational body of knowledge of which the essay is a part. By the same token the author is a fiction, since the process of writing and editing essayist texts leads to an effacement of individual and idiosyncratic identity (pp. 60-61).

In contrast to essayist prose, the mulitmodal texts developed by the boys are imbued with voice (often literally) and they are created with specific audiences in mind. For example, when I ask my son who he imagines the audience to be when he makes a Minecraft screencast, he says that the viewers will likely be gamers interested in the specific topic, but who don't know how to do what he is explaining. The author, like the audience are ordinary and may well become participatory in some aspect of the play. Many of the texts the boys compose are how-to screencasts related to games. To give a sense of audience, one of the boys, James (pseudonym) routinely has between 5,000 and 15,000 viewers for each of his 300+ video uploads on YouTube. This represents a sizable audience.

In the comments section of one video, a viewer wrote:

dude this lets play is gold i watched this and bought mysims agents/thanks to you man/i like these lets plays very cool!

James responded, "Never thought that I would influence someone/thats great and am glad you like it so much."

There are significant philosophical differences between essayist prose and the literacies the boys compose. When "literacy" is understood as being a transferable commodity not influenced by any social context and considered an independent variable, an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) is being embraced. An autonomous model of literacy is based on the belief that any student learns skill x and who the learner is, is not, the context of where the learning is occurring and when is meaningless. The skill is understood as being independent from actual human context. Stripped of gendered, social, racial, historical, technological, and economic overtones--literacy learning exists as a cognitive task to be mastered.

In contrast to an autonomous model, a group of theorist, the New London Group**, published an influential paper, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures in the Harvard Educational Review (1996) that asked us to understand that "literacy" learning is multi-dimensional and socially situated. Skills do no exist outside of a given context and how we learn and even come to name something as a "literacy skill" is culturally determined and bound. Literacies are not isolated events.

An autonomous belief about literacy (note the singularity) informs the pedagogical decisions one might make. For example, if you believe that 'literacy skills' are transferable commodities, then having students complete practice worksheets in order to develop correctness and to attend to surface structures of writing would make sense. Similarly, one who held this belief would likely believe in the production of a single correct product.

In contrast, the boys' literate behaviors are steeped in multi-literacies as social practice.

The Essay as Multimodal Text

In education we make much of essayist prose style and certainly here in the States with the Common Core, the focus on essay is even more pronounced. Methods to help students learn to compose essay often range from simply assigning the task to engaging learners in a process approach. It is not unusual for students to be provided with professional and student models of essays. What I believe is less usual is for teachers or learners to map essayist composing skills on to other types of texts that students want to compose, such as videos when possible.

Several years ago I was teaching a group of 8th grade students. One of the students helped me to learn that writing skills could be learned by composing other types of text. I chronicled this in Difficult Flows and Waves: Unfixing Beliefs in a Grade 8 Language Arts Literacy Class (English Education, 1998).

As the school year progressed—hyperlearning occurred. For example, I watched as Tony’s command of writing responses to EWT-like writing prompts improved, even though he was not spending much time actually doing this specific activity. Rather, Tony spent a lot of time creating Hyperstudio™ projects by working with story boards. To do this he had to begin to organize information and locate pieces of the information on different Hyperstudio™ cards. He also had to create transitions and did so by using musical cues that served to join his cards into a coherent whole.

“I need a button, here,” Tony tells me one morning, pointing to a written
essay he had been working on.

“A button?” I ask, unsure.

“Yeah, you know, like when you move to the next card.”

“Oh, like a transition,” I say, beginning to see that Tony understands that the essay is like a Hyperstudio™ composition.

“Yeah.”

I suspect Tony drew upon that deeper structure of thinking he frequently
used to create his Hyperstudio™ projects when writing responses to EWT
prompts. Tony had indirectly learned how to elaborate and better organize
his written responses by creating and using story boards when composing
through hypermedia (p. 39).

Thinking about Tony makes me wonder if we have we begun to map our students' multimodal work in order to ascertain what similarities there might be between these works and the essay they are often assigned at school? Are there associational bridges we might build between work students choose to compose and the types of composing, such as analytic essay that are frequently assigned at school?

For example, if we look at this trailer produced by a 12-year old--are there entry points we might leverage to make sense of the work and relate it to school-text types? This represents this boy's first attempt at creating a trailer to advertise a Minecraft server. The text is meant to be persuasive.

Would it be possible to make use of this text as an entry point into a discussion about persuasion? Might this be a bit more compelling for the learner than the countless 'practice essays' he has been or will be assigned at school in preparation for state assessments? Might there be better transfer of learning if the studied text was one the child had composed?

What does this young boy know about point of view? About narrative? About linkages between story and persuasion? Community and persuasion? Citing sources? What does he still need to learn? What confusions are present in his text?

I can't help but think how different learning might be, if we began with the important products students are composing out of school and worked from there.

*Essayist examples from CCSS: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence; Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content

**Theorist included: Courtney Cazden, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, USA; Bill Cope, National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia, Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, University of Technology, Sydney, and James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia; Norman Fairclough, Centre for Language in Social Life, Lancaster University, UK; Jim Gee, Hiatt Center for Urban Education, Clark University, USA; Mary Kalantzis, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia; Gunther Kress, Institute of Education, University of London, UK; Allan Luke, Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; Carmen Luke, Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; Sarah Michaels, Hiatt Center for Urban Education, Clark University, USA; Martin Nakata, School of Education, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia.

Work Cited
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 4 - Listen As If Your Life Depended On It

2012-01-29T07:53:00.000-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I have been posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and I have invited you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

M.A. Reilly, 2/2012

Listen, as if your life depended on it.

Close the paper, the screen, the video game. Silence the phone. Quiet the world. The laundry will wait and the 16 things you thought to do today. 

Set aside the pile of work you brought home. Unplug and connect.

Right now, right here, lean in and just listen to the one you love.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 3 - The Found Poem and the Altered Page

2012-01-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I have been posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and I have invited you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

Mixed-Media altered page by Seth Apter. Found here.

The found poem. With words, or images or both.  Like the love letter, this handmade offering is one to treasure. A found poem is one you make from an already established text. 

From Wikipedia

1. Altered Page and Found Poem

Found Poem/Altered Page by Sherry Chandler. Found here.

An easy method to make a found poem as visual art is to simply take a page from a text and color the words you don't want using a black crayon (use a light touch) and then circle and color the words, phrases, that you want to remain.

Sherry Chandler takes the opening page from James Joyce's Ulysses and alters it, forming a poem in the process. This is her poem:

Buck Mulligan
mounted the round gunrest
blessed gravely thrice the tower
the awaking mountains

Stephen Dedalus,
displeased and sleepy
leaned
looked coldly

soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please.
One moment. A little trouble about
the loose folds of his gown,
sullen oval jowl

Stephen Dedalus
wearily halfway
watching him still

2. Found Poem and Altered Art Page

A found poem can be incorporated on an altered page.  Beginning with a random page from a book or a newspaper sheet, isolate the words you want to remain--the one's that are your written poem.You might want to tape over the words/letters you want to remain. Then cover the remaining page with white gesso, thinned white glue, or gel medium. Apply this lightly so that some of the words can bleed through a bit. 

Then it's time to play with a bit of color, if you like, photo transfers, line drawings, etc.

Found Poem, with gesso, watercolor, and image. (M.A. Reilly, 1/2012). Source: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter III, p. 6.

3. Altered Pages 

The altered book can feel like a big, big project. Worth doing, for sure--but it might not fit well into a two week window. I like the idea of taking a few pages and altering them as an extended composition. These can be presented together as a completed composition. I love Will Ashford's work and find his art is highly motivating. He couples sets of pages together as slideshows. Works well.

Will Ashford's work.

The idea behind this gift is discovering what you feel by working with words and image and conveying what you come to discover to the one you love. 

FYI: You may even want to submit your work to The Found Poetry Review (they are accepting submissions up until March 31, 2012 for the spring issue).

Have fun.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 2 - The Dance

2012-01-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I have been posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and I have invited you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

The Dance (January 2011, by M.A. Reilly)

Somewhere, someone is waiting for you to dance. 

They may be wanting to join you.

They may be unsure. 

They may be wanting just to watch.

You will need to be bold. 

This is a gift you give yourself.

A kind of tempered abandon.

When you can do so with another, true love. 

There's a lake, frozen just waiting for you to step out on or perhaps you are in a city and it's the laundromat which will be your backdrop.

It doesn't matter. 

You may be footloose, dancing down a staircase, dancing & singing in the rain, or you may be forging a new way to walk, or or a new way come down the aisle, or a new way to be presidential,perhaps you want to be dancing cheek to cheek, or perhaps you are kindling a desire to dance in the dark, or to wait for moonlight for a moondance (if so, full moon on Feb 7).

 Maybe you want to dance with a crowd? Or parallel dance? Or dance dreamy in a diner or bold in a bowling alley. All you need to do is hear it, feel it, so that it's easy to move your feet. 

Just snap your fingers.

Then go ahead and put on your red shoes or your bowler hat.

Or throw inhibitions to the wind...and tango, tango.

Really, 

the only question 

left 

is who will you share  

this dance of love with?

be cool.

be real.

be you.

and don't forget to have some fun.

Part III: Bold Schools - Community as Knowledge

2012-01-26T22:34:00.003-05:00


Community is Infinite (January 2012, by M.A. Reilly)

This is the third post in a series where I explore bold schools. In the first post I examined the learner as knowledge worker--a knowmad. In the second post I situated the teacher as time traveler. In this post I deconstruct the idea of content and connect it to community, rhizome, and complicated conversations. These posts were composed in response to Will Richardson's query about bold schools.

1. What Is Content?

from here.

In bold schools, 'content' is situated and experienced as stable and unstable, bound and unbound. In this manner, tensions are often present and we may characterized these tensions as rhizomatic. Although Deleuze and Guattari (1987) tell us: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (p. 25), they also remind us that "there exists tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome”(p. 15). At bold schools, what becomes important content is conditioned by lines of flight, stratification and context. Nothing is primary.

In traditional schools, content remains mostly a matter of stratification and is hopelessly decontextualized. Content is often seen as autonomous--something that can be listed and transferred to another to enact, to know, such as a list of standards and learning objectives that have been developed elsewhere and handed down to the teacher to enact. In such schemata, the most we can hope for is mediocrity. The 'stuff' we learn has always been a movable force, incapable of being fully contained. Learning is non-orientable and each time we position it in a limited space we kill a little bit of hope, narrow the range of what might be learned, while guiding learners to reach the unfortunate conclusion that x represents the whole of some matter.

In situating content as rhizomatic, it allows for possibility, not certainty; context, not decontexualzation. Experiential ways of coming to know, gain a foothold in such schools--a requisite for lines of flight. In an earlier post, I wrote:

Lines of flight represent the creative impulses we compose while thinking and doing that offer a seemingly novel way to disrupt concepts cast as dualities. In fact, one might argue that it is the duality that may at first spark the line of flight: a way of moving beyond what is given to explore what might be.

In bold schools--neither the State, the institution, the teacher, or the student own the curriculum. It is a shared matter that is made and remade based on emerging intention by learners, regardless of their role. You can't place it in a binder. You can't post it on the Internet and say it is our Common Core. This is a model for a past century. It cannot hold us in good stead now. Bold schools understand that curriculum--the content that is learned-- is a made thing that happens inside a context and is impervious to prior mapping. This is not to say that such curriculum isn't informed by State, institutional, teacher, or student resources. It surely can be. What is essential though is that it does not exist as a closed system.

2. Social Participation and Community as Sources of Knowledge

In bold schools, learning is recognized, even celebrated as being social, experimental, and experiential. Bold schools make use of digital and non-digital technologies in order for learners to connect, collaborate, contextualize, and create knowledge with others. Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) explain:

The learning that happens through blogs, social networks, and other new media may be deeply grounded in experience and personal expression, but it also arises from the contributions of multiple people and voices. Expertise and authority are dispersed rather than centralized, and once a digital space hits a point of critical mass, it is very likely that some member of the community will have valuable expertise to share about a given topic (Kindle Locations 924-927).

Thomas and Brown point at the role of community in content knowledge. A second shift in understanding how content is situated then, is to recognize the role of the community as knowledge maker. In "Community as Curriculum" Dave Cormier (2008) writes:

In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum.

A few years later (2010) he adds:

We need to return to community as a valid repository for knowledge, and away from a packaged view of knowledge and expertise. Knowledge can be fluid; it can be in transition, and we can still use it. We need to tap into the strength provided by communities and see the various forms of community literacy as the skills we need to acquire in order to be effective members of those communities.

Bold schools tap into and contribute to local and extended communities of practice. Neither the teachers, nor the students are contained by the school. They are mobile learners, who have presences beyond the institution, and in fact many who play a role in student learning will not be officially employed by the school. Networks abound. In bold schools the conversation is not about whether the students will have an Internet presence and will collaborate with 'strangers', but rather how such presence is mediated, conducted, and (re)presented.

The curriculum composed is generated in the lived moments of learning. As such, the rhizomatic possibilities become quite pronounced. In these schools there are bold teachers and learners who understand, even celebrate, that such curriculum is complicated conversation (Pinar, 2008) that occurs among the teachers, students, and extended community. In an earlier post, I defined complicated conversation, quoting William Pinar:

William Pinar tells us that curriculum is a “complicated conversation.” He suggests curriculum is situated in space and time where teacher, student, and text meet to co-produce self, other, and culture. The curriculum documents that are produced in schools and standards that are produced by states and nations offer possible curricula, but not the lived one. To mistake one for the other often leads to reenactment or miming and divorces "school curriculum from public life and school curriculum from students' self-formation" (Pinar, p. 186). Pinar writes:
Instead of employing school knowledge to complicate our understanding of ourselves and the society in which we live, teachers are forced to "instruct" students to mime others' (i.e., textbook authors') conversations, ensuring that countless classrooms are filled with forms of ventriloquism rather than intellectual exploration, wonder, and awe (p. 186).
Intellectual exploration, wonder, and awe cannot occur if learners are thought of as receivers of curriculum, be it the teacher who is handed the curriculum to deliver or the student who receives "the content". Intellectual exploration, wonder, and awe require an organicism that is not relevant, nor possible, when the task at hand is mere mimicry or translation.

The community, both local and extended, represent a new culture of learning that Thomas and Brown (2011) contrast with teaching-based education:

...the primary difference between the teaching-based approach to education and the learning–based approach is that in the first case the culture is the environment, while in the second case, the culture emerges from the environment—and grows along with it. In the new culture of learning, the classroom as a model is replaced by learning environments in which digital media provide access to a rich source of information and play, and the processes that occur within those environments are integral to the results. A second difference is that the teaching-based approach focuses on teaching us about the world, while the new culture of learning focuses on learning through engagement within the world. Finally, in the teaching-based approach, students must prove that they have received the information transferred to them—that they quite literally “get it.” As we will see, however, in the new culture of learning the point is to embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. The goal is for each of us to take the world in and make it part of ourselves. In doing so, it turns out, we can re-create it (Kindle Locations 374-387).

We cannot conceive of bold schools and do so in the former guise of the teacher-based (or I tend to think of this as State-imposed) approach to education. We need to stop asking, did the student learn X, and instead ask what did the students create and how and why did they do so?

In bold schools there is an understanding of, appreciation in, and a felt necessity to recognize teachers as caring intellects who know how to teach well and place responsibility for curriculum into their capable hands--a responsibility they share with learners and the larger community beyond the school. These are teachers who connect with the world beyond the school. They live wide-awake lives (Greene, 1988). Bold schools don't simply mouth platitudes about valuing teachers--they live it. In 2010, I had the pleasure of visiting High Tech High in San Diego. While there I spent part of a morning talking one-to-one with Larry Rosenstock. We talked about a lot of things, and one topic that resonates still was a discussion about a teacher who Larry described with great affection as being avant-garde and utterly essential to the school. He recognized that the teacher makes the school, as does the student and the community.

Bold schools are places where the critical role and brilliance of teachers are recognized and this knowledge informs how curriculum is understood. What this means in practical terms is that the teacher and his/her students are expected to make decisions about learning. This would not seem so amazing if not for the times in which we live. We have recast the role of many a teacher from decision maker to mime. Mimes cannot exist for any length of time at bold schools as they are sorely out of place. The culture does not support mimicking.

3. We Have What We Need

Bold schools may feel unfathomable--impossible. You might be tempted to begin to list all of the difficulties you might face in composing bold schools. You may begin to list the specific teachers you would need. The specific type of student you would want to enroll; the type of community where such boldness might best occur. You might begin to think about budgets, policy, boards, facilities and come to a halting stop, well before you have even gotten started.

You will need to resist these impulses as they allow for standardization to be used as an antidote to complexity. Resist. This has never been about you or me. Rather it is about us. There must be an us for bold schools to come of age.

Monika Hardy recently reminded me that we have what we need, with an emphasis on the we. I think about that for a while and recall having what we need is one of the 8 principles in Walk Out Walk On. I am reminded of South African community leader, Dorah Lebelo, who explains that leadership happens in concert with one's community.

I don’t exist outside my community; they create me. And I in turn create them by believing in their leadership, by trusting that we have everything we need to create the world we wish for (Walk Out, Walk On, p. 95).

Being bold requires the understanding that it carries with it an uneasiness. Deborah Freize, one of the authors of Walk Out Walk On explains that she helped to create the Berkana Exchange as she needed "a community of fellow pioneers, people willing to experiment with groundbreaking work, people willing to fail over and over again and yet to persevere in their yearning to create a new future" (p.233).

When I think of bold schools, I think of Michael McCabe ,who along with others, is composing The Kornerstone School in Wisconsin. This is a new venture, a public school serving students in grades 8 through 12. The Kornerstone School's Mission is:

Provide a learning environment where students’ passions direct the day-to-day learning. Students create projects and become active citizens in their community. Kornerstone School will provide students with the foundation to get into their profession of choice and make a significant impact on their community.

Passion matters. I think of the work I did with Scott Klepesch, Mark Gutkowski and others from Morristown High Schools when we began a Classics Academy. The Academy was begun as the result of four teachers' collective passion about classical times. The Academy which operates within a traditional public high school, includes student-selected mentors who are often external from the school. Although I have left the school system, I will have the pleasure this year of mentoring a student in the Academy, a talented photographer, Jon Stone, as he composes a final work for public exhibition in June. What connects Wisconsin and NJ is the idea of community as an evolving entity, privileging the passion of all learners, and the understanding that failure will accompany success. In our situation in NJ, we also made good use of visiting bold schools that were established. Specifically some of us went to Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia and High Tech High in San Diego, as well as visiting smaller, but nonetheless powerful innovations happening within schools such as Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, NJ. I hope this year to make it out to Loveland, CO to visit Monika and The Innovation Lab, another bold project.

This rests in our hands. Boldness has always been ours to compose and to come to know. It may mean that for some of us, we will need to walk out from the way--and perhaps even the place where--we currently work. Without question, boldness will require us to walk on.

Walk Ons find each other and connect. Together, they learn quickly, take greater risks, and support one another to continue their pioneering work. A new system is born from their efforts (Wheatley & Frieze, p.12).

Community is infinite.
Are you willing to chance?
To join?
To commit and walk on?

Works Cited

Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum. Innovate, 4 (5). Retrieved from http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=550

Cormier, Dave. (2010). Community as curriculum: Vol. 2. The guild/distributed continuum. Retrieved on 1.25.12 from here. Dave's Educational Blog: January 27, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Greene, Maxine. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New york, NY: Teachers College Press.

Pinar, William F. (2008). What is curriculum theory? Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Thomas, Douglas; Seely Brown, John (2011-03-12). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.

Wheatley, Margaret and Frieze, Deborah (2011-04-11). Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

CrowdSourcingLove: Day 1: The Letter

2012-01-26T14:34:00.003-05:00

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog. If you make a post could you link it to this post? At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

The Love Letter (January 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

Madeleine Peyroux -"I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter"

The love letter.

The one you have been meaning to write.
You know, the one where you take the time to tell your partner how you're feeling, what s/he means to you.
Perhaps you mention some small, seemingly inconsequential noticing that conveys how closley you really do see your partner.
Perhaps you recall a time past and why it is a memory you treasure, want to retell.

Only you can write this letter and that is what makes it so compelling, so necessary.

Brief, or not--the love letter is a keepsake.

What Makes a Task Meaningful?

2012-01-24T12:35:00.001-05:00

(Note: this is work I will be doing with administrators, lead teaches/coaches in Morristown, NJ this week).

What Makes a Task Meaningful?

We know what meaningful tasks are in our everyday lives. We aren't apt to confuse meaningful from meaningless. For example, Rick and Dick Hoyt participate together in marathons. Their work is meaningful. Take a look at this video and as you watch think about what are some of the conditions that give rise to meaningful tasks. (BTW, you may need a tissue or two as you watch.)

In classrooms though, identifying meaningful learning tasks may be less obvious, less heart felt. So what makes a learning task meaningful? What might we borrow from Rick and Dick Hoyt that can inform our own practice?

The North Central Regional Educational Library (NCREL) offers this criteria:

In order to have engaged learning, tasks need to be challenging, authentic, and multidisciplinary. Such tasks are typically complex and involve sustained amounts of time. They are authentic in that they correspond to the tasks in the home and workplaces of today and tomorrow. Collaboration around authentic tasks often takes place with peers and mentors within school as well as with family members and others in the real world outside of school. These tasks often require integrated instruction that incorporates problem-based learning and curriculum by project. from NCREL

PCF4 (Fourth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning) offers this:

Learners are active partners in the process, rather than passive recipients of information and data;
Learners are engaged in learning by doing;
Learners are engaged in problem-solving tasks and activities;
Learners are engaged in critical reflection during and after their activities;
Learning is situated within the context of real-world or authentic problems;
Learning scaffolds support and promote cognitive apprenticeships;
Assessment of learning outcomes is closely aligned with the learning context and the learning activities.

Using the NCREL description and PCF4's 7 points as a framework for viewing, take a look at these videos of Dr. Jay Vavra, science teacher at High Tech High and his students as they explain the learning tasks they are composing. What do you notice?

African Bushmeat site
Trailer

Vavra Video II

Improving Student Products through Critique

An example of a meaningful task can be critique. Interestingly, Lissa Soep notes four conditions necessary for critique:

intense stakes attached to the work
standards used to critique the work need to be collaboratively negotiated
accountability for the quality of the work needs to be distributed across the group
the work being critiques is interdisciplinary

Take a look at these two brief videos of Ron Berger as he explains that one important condition of critique is offering specifics that if enacted will help to make the work better.

Part I: Ron Berger

Part II. Ron Berger

Part III. Read interview using 4As Text Protocol to guide the group's reading and discussion.

An interview with Elizabeth 'Lissa" Soep. Learning as Production, Critique as Assessment

Please note this is a fuller work on the topic by Soep, Critique: Assessment and the Production of Learning which was published in TC Record.

iPhone Art

2012-01-23T15:43:00.001-05:00

Red Hydrant (iPhone, M.A. Reilly, January 2012)

Today was a wonderful weather day in northern New Jersey and I went out to make a few images. I normally shoot with a Nikon D300 and then process images using Lightroom and then Photoshop. I haven't even looked at those images because along the way I also made images using my iPhone.

Specifically I made about two dozen images using different apps and my iPhone. The apps I used included TtV Camera, Hipstamatic app, and the regular camera that comes with the iPhone. I imported the images into iPhoto and made the following 1-minute slideshow that I posted to my YouTube channel. The music is from iPhoto (Skating by Vince Guaraldi).

Simple and so much fun.

It will take less than 90 seconds to view the slideshow.
Hope you'll take a look.

The Snow Man

2012-01-22T19:48:00.000-05:00

A Certain Wonder (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Mis(sed)Reading Yeats: A Problem with Gr 7 Common Core Curriculum Maps

2012-01-21T20:07:00.000-05:00

Yeats

More than 4 million people viewed The Common Core Curriculum Maps and now they are offered (at a fee) in their second iteration. At the middle school level, 6 units of study per grade level have been developed and offered as models--exemplars if you will. I recently composed a blog post that highlighted examples of instruction I proposed in response to "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats which is listed as a middle school exemplar text via the CCSS. After I finished the post, I was curious as to what Lynne Munson and her Core Curriculum mapping team had developed in response to the Yeats. What I found was disappointing. I rarely would say something was misread, but in this case I do think that the authors of the grade 7, unit 4 map that highlights "The Song of Wandering Aengus" failed to actually comprehend the poem.

It helps if you take a quick look at my blog post before moving on as I am contrasting what I designed with this Common Core exemplar map. You will find a copy of the poem there as well.

For me the Yeats's poem is steeped in Irish mythology and one of the challenges young readers might face is understanding the mythology upon which the poem is based, what a quest is, and how magic and the imagination (in)form a quest. In contrast, the authors of the Grade 7, Unit 4 Common Core Curriculum Map understand this poem as a survival story akin to Call of the Wild and Hatchet. The Grade 7, Unit 4 is titled, "Survival in the Wild." The overview reads:

Students read “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats and use it as a springboard for discussions of characters’ pursuits of the unknown. Students analyze the development of the theme of survival across various texts, evaluate nonfiction text structures, and present their analyses to their classmates. Students compare and contrast character experiences across novels, as well as the points of view in narration, and are encouraged to research the authors behind the stories, many of whom are wilderness survivors themselves. This unit ends with a review of Yeats’s poem in order to see how this unit led to deeper understanding of the work. In addition, students are asked to write an informative/explanatory essay in response to the essential question.

The essential question for the unit is: What similarities and differences exist among characters who survive in the wilderness?

I am baffled as to how the poem actually fits into the unit about surviving in the wilderness. Here are some of the recommended sample activities:

Reading Poetry, Speaking and Listening, Language Usage
Introductory Activity: Read "The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats. Talk with a classmate about what you think the poem means, both literally and figuratively. Write your ideas down in your journal or on an online document. You will revisit this poem at the end of the unit to see if your thoughts and ideas have changed. (RL.7.2, RL.7.4, SL.7.5)

Informative Writing, Language Usage, Language Mechanics
Based on the novels read and discussed in class, write an informative/explanatory essay in response to the essential question: What similarities and differences exist among characters who survive in the wild? Cite at least three specific details from texts read. After your teacher reviews your first draft, work with a partner to strengthen your writing and edit it for the grammar conventions studied so far this year before final publication. Upload your essay to the classroom blog and consider posting your thoughts on a class wiki about survival in the wilderness. (W.7.9a,b, RI.7.8, RL.7.1, L.7.1,L.7.2a,b)

Reading Poetry, Speaking and Listening, Reading Fluency, Performance
Re-read the first poem read in this unit, "The Song of Wandering Aengus.” After this unit of study, describe how your understanding of this poem has changed. What new insights have you gained? Add these insights on the shared spreadsheet created in Activity 1 (in a new column next to your initial thoughts). Memorize and/or recite the poem aloud while emphasizing different words. Record them using a video camera so you can see and hear the different phrasing. How does changing emphasis change the meaning of the sentences? Follow the performances with a class discussion about how this poem relates to the theme of this unit (survival in the wild). (RL.7.5, SL.7.6)

Here are the texts for this unit:
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” (William Butler Yeats) (E)
Call it Courage (Armstrong Sperry)
Far North (Will Hobbs)
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)
Incident at Hawk’s Hill (Allan W. Eckert)
Other Will Hobbs survival tales, such as Beardance
The Call of the Wild (Puffin Graphics, Jack London) (graphic novel)
The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
The Higher Power of Lucky (Susan Patron)
Touching Spirit Bear (Ben Mikaelsen)
Woodsong (Gary Paulsen)
Black Hearts in Battersea (Joan Aiken)
Guts (Gary Paulsen)
Jack London: A Biography (Daniel Dyer)
Will Hobbs (My Favorite Writer Series) (Megan Lappi)
Into the Ice: The Story of Arctic Exploration (Lynn Curlee)
SAS Survival Handbook, Revised Edition: For Any Climate, in Any Situation (John "Lofty" Wiseman)
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1864)
Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes (1859)
Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819)
Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm - The Oxbow (1836)
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899)
Mark Griffiths, dir., A Cry in the Wild (based on Hatchet) (1990)
Peter Svatek, dir., The Call of the Wild: Dog of the Yukon (1997)
Richard Gabai, dir., Call of the Wild (2009)

Art as Ancillary Text

In addition to the misreading of Yeats, the authors also decide to have students view and analyze Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) with Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899). Specifically the students are assigned these tasks:

Art, Speaking and Listening, Narrative Writing
The works by Géricault and Homer are considered to be classic images of man’s survival at sea. Study the works separately, beginning with the Géricault. Note the many ways in which the artist emphasized the high drama of the situation (e.g., the dramatic surf and sky, billowing sail, imposing wave). Observe that half of the men are reaching toward a barely visible ship on the horizon, while the rest slip slowly into the surf. Then turn to the Homer and identify similarities with the Géricault (e.g., the coming boat). Which work do you think documents a real event? Listen to the story of the Medusa shipwreck. Write a short story describing the events that you would imagine either led to or came after the scene in Homer’s work. (SL.7.2, SL.7.4, SL.7.5, W.7.3)

As an artist, I find it difficult to even comment on this list of arbitrary tasks the authors attach to the art for students to do. Both images were controversial at the time of their painting as each disturbed the sensibilities of some of those who came to view. I have read about the Géricault painting and don't feel expert enough to comment on it. I have read more about and actually viewed the Homer work. There's a slim little book (Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream) based on a lecture historian Peter Wood delivered in 2002. Wood contends that matters of race and slavery offer an important insight into the painting. None of this seems represented in the tasks students must do. Here's the image:

Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream.

It seems odd that asking students to guess which painting was based on a 'real' event would trump exploring the human condition, exploring race and social position exploring that the works seem to attend to. My only hope is that when students navigate to the Met page to view The Gulf Stream they click on the link that says Black and then take some time to listen to the visual essay by Aimee Dixon.

What concerns me with many of the "art" related tasks that are featured in these maps is that the art is situated as an extension of the fabricated unit 'themes'. There's no mention in what I have read as to how students might enter in or engage with the visual, musical or film arts. Rather, these works seem to serve as mere extensions to the rather contrived themes.

As the CCSS are situated by so many as that which raises the 'academic' bar, this unit in particular ought to call such claims into question.

Bold Schools Part II: Teacher as Time Traveler

2012-01-21T13:06:00.000-05:00

Time Traveler (M.A. Reilly, January 2012)

Will Richardson's search for bold schools nudged my thinking too. In a former post, I wrote about the learner as knowmad, borrowing heavily from Pekka Ihanainen and John Moravec's concepts about knowmads. In this post I explore teacher as time traveler. In the the third post I will explore community as rhizome. All three are conditions present in my conception of bold schools.

1. Clocks

And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind. - William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury.

About two years ago I stopped wearing a watch. This wasn't done for any philosophical, literary, or even political reason, but rather wearing one seemed a bit archaic--unnecessary even. As time is relative, what exactly is being represented by the movement of hands on a watch? I sometimes think the early Egyptians had a finer sense of time via their sundials as they recognized that an 'hour' was not a constant. Variations in time clicked on until the medieval period, when the pendulum clock was invented and along with it, time and commerce co-mingled. Purchasing time moved from concept to guiding reality--one that remains with us (just consider interest on loans) and (in)forms our understanding of school.

Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) rightly observed, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age." The clock regulates.

It regulates you.

Me.

Schools.

In bold schools, there is the recognition that in addition to 3-dimesnions of width, height, and length--there is a fourth dimension, time-space. In traditional schools, acknowledgement of relative time is obscured by regulation and standardization of the day, the term, the school year.

Let's take a closer look.

2. School Time

The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the big Puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards. It was a dark, old spirit that didn't so much mark time as bequeath it. Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well: A Novel

There's always a clock, isn't there? Prominently displayed, the schoolroom clock is a staple, representing the regimentation that manages the coming and going of all. And yet, the classroom clock in many ways is a testament to the fact that time does not flow at a constant rate, regardless of the ways we choose to represent it. Just recall a time of tedium that informed a classroom stay and surely the concept of relativity becomes more embodied, less esoteric. The orderliness of the clock as a single representation of time misrepresents the complexity of how we experience time just as the standardization of schools misrepresents learning.

Within any school environment multiple representations of time are present, yet not privileged in the way learning is organized. In this manner, schools are work like factories with all adhering to set starting and ending times, lunch breaks, passing time, and allocated 'minutes' by subject. Like factory lines, children are given x number of minutes to complete task y or task z. Failure to adhere to the established scheduled is considered failure of the task. Time is an odd constant. The tasks are predetermined and issued. In many states, high school diplomas are granted based on seat time: literally the number of minutes one's seat has sat in a schoolroom chair. Yet, learning, like time, is conditioned and responsive to context. Both are relative.

At a bold school, the environment is not set and a learner's time is local. The teacher travels across learners' notions of time, as establishing and managing time is understood as critical learning. The teacher is a time traveler insomuch as s/he works in a fluid and changeable environment populated with learners whose time experiences are varied.

3. Local Time at the Bold School

The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behaviour at the boundary. - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Boundaries are interesting. Specifying behavior at the edge of a boundary is a most frequent task teachers enact with students in traditional schools for in a regimented world, boundaries are prolific and one might even argue, necessary, in order to maintain power.

This is the way you line up to leave the classroom.
This is the way you ask for a pass to use the bathroom.
This is the way you exit a burning building.
This is the way you sit during an assembly.
This is the way you write a heading and format our compositions.
This is the divider you place on your desks when taking a test.
These are the hallways in which you do not run.
These are the guards who come to the classroom door to bring you to be disciplined.
This is the way you signal when you want to speak.
This is the way you keep a notebook.
This is the specific notebook you must have in order to write notes.
These are the notes you must copy and do so exactly as indicated.
This is the time you may use a computer to complete a task.
This is the task you must complete in x minutes.
This is the reading quiz you take when you finish reading a book.
This is how you walk to a special.
This is how you enter the school.
If you are a minute late to school, this is the line you stand in for 15 to 20 minutes in order to indicate you were late.
This is how you line up to get lunch.
These are tools you need to learn with and this is how you ask permission to use them.
This is the way you huddle in the corner of the classroom in case an intruder with a gun shows up at our door.
This is how you sit to learn.
This is fear. This is the way to wear it daily.

Boundaries abound and stripped of institutional context, the absurdity seems more apparent, doesn't it?

In a bold school, time is overtly relative by design and learners are knowmads who "work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere" (Moravec, 2008). As such, regulating behavior is less needed and teachers' roles shift from maintaining order and adhering to institutional and self-imposed sets of behaviors to understanding learners' intentions. In such an environment, teachers are situated as time travelers--those who negotiate their students' multiple and varying time frames, and in doing so are reflexive in order to support, teach, and guide these knowmads on their journeys. In such a world, the term, teacher, is a placeholder for multiple types of people who guide, instruct, apprentice, and co-learn both within and beyond the physical classroom. Some of these teacher-guides travel alongside a group of learners for years, while others fade when no longer needed. Teachers visit, but do not live in the varied temporal realities of their students. Susan Sontag notes:

To be a traveler...is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.

Teachers, in bold learning spaces, hold such simultaneity in hand and that knowledge allows them and their students to craft important learning. This role requires new language, similar to the verb tense conundrum that Robert Heinlein discusses in his novel, The Door Into Summer:

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

Time-traveling teachers recognize that listening well in order to better understand their students' locations is a critical teaching skill one that compliments a shift in what counts as important knowledge. These teachers work in an environment where what constitutes important knowledge has shifted from learning prescribed and explicit content to composing knowledge collectively. Dave Cormier (2008) in Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum captures this idea well when he writes: “The community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum." Learning in these times is less about absorption and more about participation.

4. Embodied Location

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” - James Joyce, Dubliners.

In lieu of the solitary schoolroom, a bold school recognizes a field of potential spaces to learn, beginning with an embodied self. As such a learner's 'school' is the self in a community: his/her home, libraries, coffee shops, book shops, parks, state forests, museums, various storefronts, recreation centers, art and music spaces, dance studios, government buildings, beaches, the ocean, research centers, shelters, labs, a corner diner, bakery, architect's studio, dentist and doctor's offices, the hospital, the town hall, the police station, garden, farm, morgue, petrol station, amusement park, machine shop, theater, and so on. One only has to look at the learning spaces Monika Hardy via the Innovation Lab is creating in Loveland, CO community to see how this might work.

Oddly, a bold school is inherently local, especially for the time traveling teacher. Against the uncertainty of time, one revels in an anchor of sorts. I think here of Michael Doyle's blog post where he dreams of teaching his students clamming. Michael writes:

I dream of teaching my students how to clam. It's a local activity that will never be part of the national standards because it's a local activity. That may sound innocuous enough, but it gets to the heart of the sickness in education today, our love of the abstract.

Bold schools recognize that learners, including teachers, arrive in bodies, and do not ask them to check those bodies at the proverbial door. In bold places, teachers offer what they know and are learning, not the long list of things they have been told to mimic that most often comes from those who have rarely set foot in a school as an adult. Much is learned through the close study of the local. This may well mean walking about--perhaps along a beach with a teacher who knows the tides and clams and ways to read such landscapes. It is in these situations that teachers remember who they have been and perhaps even why they sought this work. (Shh. Look, you've known in your bones you have much to give. The failure of the traditional school has been in requiring you to stop being the impossibly human person you are and requiring you to become a talking head.)

In addition to the local geography a learner might map, there is also a virtual community s/he belongs to that is far more resistant to mapping. Participation in these virtual spaces may well lead to a redesign of the physical geography as learners come to know and name other places in the world. This naming though is informed by what learners come to know through local matters. Some of these places may become new centers that the learner visits and dwells in. The development of these physical and virtual learning spaces occurs horizontally: translocally. Helping students to determine, enter into, manage, complicate, compose, and grow such spaces of learning is complex and represents a critical teacher role.

Teachers and students co-learn with each other in self-, peer-, family- community-, and teacher-sponsored learning. These networks are inherently nomadic as learners make, merge, mash, remix, and break connections in multiple ways. Part of the work a teacher does is to guide learners in the development and articulation of learning plans that remain in many ways emergent. Learners participate in temponormative, pointillist, cyclical, continuous, and overlapping learning engagements. During temponormative learning, a teacher offers and/or arranges explicit instruction in which learning outcomes are less surprising, more predictable and explicit knowledge is made. In contrast, during the remaining types of learning (pointillist, cyclical, continuous, and overlapping), a teacher engages learners in dialogic discourse that occasions them to pierce beneath the skin of the ordinary, the obvious--to uncover and compose with greater depth. This type of 'teaching' is associative, not causal and requires a teacher to create conditions where learners have an opportunity to determine pathways to learning, to name explicit knowing, to codify tacit knowledge, and to fold/unfold/refold conceptual space.

There are many truths. One truth in bold schools is that learners will exit with holes in what they know and they will know deeply that which they have named as critical.

5. PLNs

Central to a teacher's role is the responsibility to cognitively apprentice learners so that they compose intellectual and social independence. Independence is learned through the development of and participation in personal learning networks (PLN) which are both local and virtual. Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli (2011) in Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education write about PLNs and explain:

With a PLN, we can learn anytime, anywhere, with potentially anyone around the world who shares our passion or interest. We can literally build global, online classrooms of our own making on the web that include networks and communities of learners with whom we interact on a regular basis. We can learn around a particular topic at a particular time, or simply tap into an ongoing stream of knowledge from which we can sip anytime we like. And we can build things together, things that can have a global impact in ways that were impossible only a few years ago (p.2).

They describe how learners within the next ten years will all have personal Internet-enabled devices. I agree with them that this time frame is conservative and imagine that such access will occur sooner. These devices allow learners to connect with others--to form PLNs, guilds, or collectives across geographic spaces. How they connect and what they do via these connections of course matters. Will and Rob say: "What really counts is the power to plug into networks for learning under the guidance of a teacher who knows how to do that" (p. 139). What I want to urge here though is that much of the important learning will have local roots. The many walks taken along that beach with a teacher will likely prepare learners to compose and navigate the unmapped space of a PLN. The teacher here, knows both times as well as the need for learners to get lost in these emerging landscapes.

Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change list three principles upon which this culture is based:

(1) The old ways of learning are unable to keep up with our rapidly changing world.
(2) New media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural.
(3) Peer-to-peer learning is amplified by emerging technologies that shape the collective nature of participation with those new media. (Kindle Locations 578-583).

Peer-to-peer learning matters at bold schools. It is privileged and central, not a thing one gets to after the 'real' work has been done.

6. Affinity-Based Spaces as Sites for Learning

Within networks are passionate affinity-based spaces that are learner-determined. Important literacies are learned through play in such spaces. For example in massively multiplayer online games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, learners have the ongoing opportunity to participate in complex systems, which in itself is a critical skill. I have previously written about my son, his play in Minecraft and the learning he is composing with his guild and have come to see how powerful and socially complex the learning among these players can be. (I discuss this here, here, here and here). James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) in Language and Learning in the Digital Age tell us:

...affinity spaces are about sharing a common endeavor were people learn things, produce things or knowledge, and can, if they wish, become experts...Even these experts believe there is always something new to learn, more to discover, and higher standards to achieve (p. 71).

What drives this powerful learning is commitment and passion. For example, in Rob Cohen's 8th grade class, students are composing literary worlds in Minecraft. It was interesting to note one day that a student who had been absent from school was nonetheless present for class via the class's Minecraft site. He was motivated to participate from home. In this class, students can be found using the chat feature in their Minecraft site to guide homework they have from other classes. The site is a home of sorts. Thomas and Brown (2011) explain that "[s]tudents learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment" (Location 1050). In Rob's class, student interest in Minecraft signals a passion and the means by which they compose through the software represents a bounded environment--one not always easy to negotiate.

In bold schools, learners' passions and knowledge guide curricular decisions, not state standards. I think here of Rob's latest tweet in which he asks:

Simply put: it is illogical to think a single list regardless of how clever one might be can encapsulate what is important to know. Thomas and Brown (2011) aptly remind us: "Making knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game" (Kindle Locations 522-523).

7. Unknowing

What is knowable? What is curriculum?

As knowledge is not stable, then how does one determine what represents important community knowledge? In the concluding post about bold schools I discuss learning content by situating content as knowledge a community of learners compose. As community is understood as rhizomatic, the representation of knowing is varied and complex. Hope you will take a look.