There's Little School (Re)Form without Language Invention: A #Rhizo15 Post

Learner as Knowmad (Reilly, 2012)

I. Learner as Knowmad

We're driving in the car when Rob tells me our son is composing a first-person shooter (FPS) video game based on the science of parallel dimensions. I'm told that he intends to limit the weapons in order to level the playing field. Each player will have the same physical weapon, kitted out in the same fashion.

Why is he doing this? I ask.
He wants to study the sociology of FPS when the playing field has been leveled, Rob explains. 

And as we drive, I begin to wonder what emerges in such play? How does the practice of shifting into and out of parallel dimensions influence strategy? What happens to the nature and definition of team when dimensionality is in play? What happens to the understanding of individual when dimensionality is not just an interesting physics problem but a potential that can be realized? How is it that my 16-year-old who has never formally studied physics knows how to make such a thing? Where has he wandered so that he might compose such understandings of multiple universes? How does he understand such worlds?

I'm thinking about this in light of the #Rhizo15 discussion of late about the nature of content and the role of teacher, and the idea of community. I'm wondering about the play between content that gets produced and content that gets consumed and if such play doesn't help us to understand the co-specifiying nature of meaning making and becoming. I'm wondering how our understanding of teaching and learning is disrupted when we think about our children who are connected to a infinite world of influence, friendships, arrangements--where just asking is as natural as breathing and so they ask often and in doing so learn actively. To live in their world is to experience random juxtapositions where content and form are linked, where community is better understood as affinity groups that form and clear as needed.

Teacher as Time Traveler (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

II.  Teacher as Time Traveler

In our children's world, the instability of our titling becomes clearer--shows us more acutely the limitations of thinking roles, such as teacher or student, held steady. For is my son not the teacher in one instance and the learner too?  Is he not the player and the teammate too? Is he not the boy who abandons what he starts and finishes what he makes? Is it not true that a teacher he may need is one he's never met and one he's tutored and one he'll need for just a moment and himself? Is he not also the producer and consumer in so threaded a tangle that to know one is to be the other? Is he not contrary?

Is it not also possible that the role of teacher is too causal for this world and has limited reach? My son's world is one of connections and learners are teachers who time travel. They are knowmadic, for nothing holds steady, here. This is a world of becoming. There are no traces to follow, just maps that get made.

Thinking about this makes me wonder where inside the classrooms we are composing today does such fluid learning and becoming get privileged?  We must keep close to the heart the understanding that being is not equivalent to becoming. It never has.

Community as Rhizome (Reilly, 2012)

III. Community as Rhizome

Motion slows the passage of time and the titles we used to fix time--hold it steady are less orientable and far less accurate in the worlds our children are composing. There causality has limited play at best. Community is not defined by who joins, but rather by who plays. And play is not limited to participation based on what we can see or what we think we know.

Rather than classrooms inside buildings separated from the towns and cities where they reside--think assemblages formed by plateaus that are interconnected and breakable at every point of contact. We might think such communities are fragile.  They are not.  Rather they are non-orientable and to many of us, feel foreign.  Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain, ‘Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau’ (p. 22).  Learners in such affinity groups move horizontally and by lines of flight that cut stratification, clear over-coded space.

Think middle, not edges.


IV. Less (Re)Form, More Invention

School (re)form requires language invention.  How we name is how the world appears. That which we have no language for does not exist. Language invention will allow us to stop replicating models of learning that are causal. "I teach. You learn," does not serve us, or our children, very well.

And so, when we continue to understand teacher and student as separate roles located in distinct silos, our naming fails us. When we equate content with something set and proffered to all, our naming fails us. When we orient learning time to starts and stops signaled by the proverbial bell ringing, our naming fails us. When we understand physical classrooms and school buildings as community definers, our naming fails us. When we equate success with answering  predetermined and mass produced questions correctly and quickly our naming fails us.

In the learning spaces we most need, learning is already happening. No one is waiting for us to show up, unless we have forced them. There, learners are becoming not through some sequential development toward a stated standard--some state of being, but rather through a dynamic flow with self and others.

Here's the shift we most need to grasp: There's nothing to prove.  Becoming "produces nothing other than itself" (p.238). That's it. 

Being, Becoming: Ed Standards in 2015, Oh My!

Coming through the Rye (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I. Being Well Educated

When we ask, "What does it mean to be well educated in 2015?" there is an underlying belief that being is inherently valuable.  But is it?  Is your understanding of being well educated synonymous with being well informed about present events that are always emerging?  Is becoming knowledgeable a laudable disposition to engender at school?  Given the current push for all things Common Core, is there even time available for such knowing?  Is being well educated a matter of passing the state reading, writing and mathematics high stakes assessment your state and/or country procures and provides to schools to administer to children and teens?  After all the folks who gave us the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and its accompanying tests make a rather bold and one might be tempted to say, laughable, claim. They write:

The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.  (from official site, found here)

Really? Can success at college, career, and life be based on the acquisition of a determined set of skills and 'knowledge'?  Can the complexity of becoming be rendered simple and if so, can one actually still be becoming?  Is success ever predictable based on a single set of test results?

II. Becoming

Okay, such claims are easy to debunk.  So, let's shift our focus for a moment. What happens to your thinking if the word, being is deleted and instead becoming is substituted? Instead of being well educated, we wonder how we are becoming and what that means now and now and now...

Every moment unfolding is the learning. 

Does such a shift in time alter your focus or occasion your revaluation of what is privileged when we think about learning?  Becoming does not deny content, intent, or happenstance.  I think of this shift as an invitation to reevaluate the logic of naming what is to be known, of relying on predetermined bits of knowledge that come from a static list of educational standards proffered by a group of people.

Folks, it's the Committee of Ten all over again.

Is this what we want for our children?  Is this the stuff that leads to informed citizenry, that is representative of learning?  Is such a process really going to ensure our kids' life-long success as the CCSS writers insist?

Does the shift from being to becoming open intellectual, social, or spiritual spaces?  Does such a shift help you linger in possibilities, as opposed to being rooted in named and known certainties?

These are not small questions and they are ones we do not entertain when we offer commentary about what it means to know at school.  For all our bravado, we rarely talk about what must be talked about when we talk about learning at school.

The logic of education standards has no place in this century.  They belong to a time when information was scarce and procurement was the only expression of power.


III. Who's Edward Snowden?

What prompted this bit of inquiry was a retweet I viewed this morning by Will Richardson of  link to a video of John Oliver's 'insanely brilliant' interview with Edward Snowden that Gary Stager initially posted.  I was able to watch the video this afternoon and I hope you do too.  I then sent the link to my 16 year-old-son who I'm pleased to say knows a whole lot more about Edward Snowden and US surveillance via the Patriot Act than those depicted in Oliver's show.

What caught my eye initially after the mention of Snowden,  was the bracketed comment, "Not on the #ccss however." This language gave me pause as I heard the sassiness of it.

But it goes well beyond sassy.

Is it school-worthy for students to be able to contemplate what the US government has allowed itself to do with regard to domestic and foreign surveillance via the Patriot Act?  Is becoming an informed citizenry an apt educational outcome? Why would we ever want to limit such definitions of knowing ahead of time? Whose interest are being served by constructing school as places where children demonstrate that they too can name what has been named for them, most often by a slim elite group of others?

Here in the US, we are spending billions to implement and assess student learning based on a set of reading, writing and mathematics standards that still insist in 2015 on limiting naming what must be learned at each grade level across 13-years (K-12) by every child to what a few people who met in 2009 thought to be important.  Is such naming logical or does the very method of a group of privileged people naming--limit learning to what was perhaps profitable when information was scarce?

The logic of education standards as de facto expressions of what MUST be learned by all students across 13 years as measured by a single set of assessments is faulty and we should reject it and reject those elected officials who support such a paltry stance of learning.

Moonlight Not Written (#SOL15 Day 1)

An Offering (M.A Reilly, 2011)

I.

I had Wallace Stevens on my mind when it happened.  It was an insistent voice in my head chanting two of his lines over and over as I watched the streets slide past out the window of the car.

The book of moonlight is not written yet
Nor half begun...

It wasn't night, nor was there a promise for a full moon later. That was a week away. I don't know what triggered my memory of these lines, but I was intrigued, half listening to what my husband was saying, half thinking about what is not written.

It was Friday afternoon and we had left Newark and were making our way through Bloomfield to get on the Garden State Parkway. We were heading towards home when my husband slowed the car to a stop in order to yield to oncoming traffic.

The young man in the green car behind us did not yield.  He did not stop until after his car clipped the rear driver's side bumper of my year-old car.

Bang.


II.


"He's a communication major at William Paterson.  He wants to be a sports broadcaster," Rob is telling me an hour later as we sit in a restaurant. Off to our right three older men sit at a table, a small cup of custard is brought to them with a single lit candle and the waitresses gather and sing a quick Happy Birthday.

The he, Rob is talking about is Giuseppe, the young man who was diving the green car.

"He was nervous as hell," Rob says.  "I told him, 'Nothing bad happened.  Relax. We're all okay.  Just a few dents and all of it can be fixed.'"


III.


Even though Rob is now officially retired from teaching, the profession remains with him, continues to define him. He was pissed in the car but when he stepped out, when he saw that the driver was just a boy a bit older than our own son--he quickly morphed into teacher mode.

I am a teacher. I am.

He became what best defines him: a teacher soothing a kid who was panicking. Getting him to talk about himself, his schooling, his dreams. Soothing the boy's mom who arrived at the scene after her son had called. No one was hurt. Laughing with the cop from Bloomfield who told him, "Now I have draw this scene."

"Hey, you shouldn't have cut out that art course."

I was reminded later that afternoon as I sat in the restaurant with a slight headache pressing and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in hand that love is mostly complicated, but some days it feels less so.  It's like that book of moonlight, unwritten, not even half begun.

Things Fall Apart: Schooling, Becoming, Not Being

Want (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I. Becoming

I read a lot that education is broken.  A worn and tired lot, that.

It's easy, perhaps even comfortable, to lay the brokenness we feel at the feet of public education as it saves us from looking more closely beyond the institution into a void we cannot quite name. Consistency which has held us so closely is less the friend we thought. We fear seeing beyond, for our public institutions are composed to reflect the current reality we believe is whole.

It is not whole.

Our vision of what reality is--a stable, coherent ground--has not worked with fidelity for some time. Claire Colebrook (2001) reminds us:

To see any thing as actual also requires the virtual synthesis of time: we see things only by retaining the memory of past perceptions and anticipating and connecting future perceptions (p.127).

Synthesis is a stream flowing. Becoming requires us to assemble/reassemble/deconstruct. There is no standing still.

Is this fracture, standing still in a stream that moves, not the impetus, in part, for our constant warring?  Our inarticulate speech?  Stability is myth--and it is costly. The internet connects as it disrupts the ways we are in the world and the ways we experience the world.  Its fastness allows us to experience the collisions. A tacit knowing. And experiencing what we have deemed as actual now as myth, perhaps fleeting at first--a glimpse we quickly move away from, has grown more consistent, shaking "foundations" we thought we knew to be true.

There is no one Truth. There is only flow.

We are always becoming regardless of Descarte's insistence on being.  This understanding has deepened across the last century disrupting the center we hold to that says stability is our core.  It is not. Think Yeats, who nearly 100 years ago told us "the centre cannot hold".

The poets know first.

II. Schooling

Public education is built on that faux rock that says we can code the world and transmit it and what we transmit is Truth, not someone's truth, but Truth with a capital T.  Schooling has been built on the belief that we can keep ourselves whole by teaching this truth to our children who can teach it to their children and so on.  Lost in this translation is the reality that we are coding, decoding and recoding often in ways that feel and are simultaneous.  Living connected lives across vast geographies helps us to know this even as we work to deny it.  And so we are a bit like Simon Laplace, hopeful that with some measurements at hand we can name the universe--that it will hold still for us as if we were somehow apart from it.

Nothing living holds still.

Power maintainers situate curricula and pedagogies as measurements of the known universe. Educational standards, high stakes tests, school-based grading and courses often work as the means to maintain the stability myth and alongside it the power of those who get to name. Social media offers us enough clear spaces to (re)name/(un)name the world.  We don't need to hold big power to do so. The power is not in us.  The power resides across the shifting and moving things we make/break/remake.  We are animals with language.  Again, Colebrook (2001) says:

We think of language as a ‘tool’ for speakers, rather than as a differential force that produces speaking positions (p. 76).

And as more and more people connect across these vast geographies, the universe that standards and test results portray reveal speaking positions, not Truth. We come to doubt and as that doubt is echoed we can see not only the cracks undermining the ground education sits upon, but we feel the stream rushing us along.

This movement is not lost on the young, who have less time invested in the maintenance of powerful and established mythologies.  Their knowing is not limited to their selves.  Technologies that connect the young also make more explicit that they are less the individual and more the collective--calling into doubt Wittgenstein's statement, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

They are not silent. They are roaring, moving, connecting. And it is this that creates long tails of difference with regard to how learning is organized, named, needed, desired.  We need not (re)create the system of education as this continues the myth of ground. Education reform is a sordid redundancy.  Rising without our permission are alternatives that young people already turn to as they invent.  Think of them as tribes, as PLNs, as collectives, as affinity groups.

We know more than we can say, Polyani would tell us. That's where we are, tentatively but even as I pen this, the ground beneath is moving and we are moving too.

Learning is more flow, less rocks in the stream.  And so, the space we call school is being cleared.


Cited
Colebrook, Claire (2001). Gilles Deleuze (Routledge Critical Thinkers) (p. 127). London: Taylor and Francis.