Composing Essay & Story in 2014: Are Kids Learning this At Your School?

Facing East (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

This is composing. Today.
This is what convincing essays look and sound like.
This is how they move.





Are you teaching multimodal composing at your school? 

Are your kids learning how to compose?  

Are they doing it despite school?

Below is a first grade horror film. It was created using Garageband, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro. The story is based on Alvin Schwartz's "In a Dark, Dark Room." 

Tales from the Yard from Needleworks Pictures on Vimeo.

As I Lean Back in Josephine's Lawnchair: Design Work, Complexity and School

Please Come Back (M.A. Reilly, 2014, Newark NJ)

Today there's distance in my head. I have been recalling the conclusion to Thomas Friedman's column,  How To Get a Job at Google and thinking about learning and schooling as they are played out at places where I work. Friedman writes:

in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

Each day as I work in inner city school classrooms, the space between Google's template for job hiring success and what gets dished up at school feels continents apart. Perhaps galaxies.

This past year two former teachers left classrooms to work with me in my company.  Each worked at a different public school. Each was considered highly successful, the type of teacher you'd most want for your own kid.  In the last week both have remarked that the work they have composed with teachers and principals since September marks the most significant intellectual work they have done in many years. One tells me:

With the daily mandates to do this or that, the endless scripts, and the control taken from me as a thinker,  I stopped wondering, thinking during the last 5 years I was a teacher. The work had changed so much from the beginning of my career.  My ideas were not valued, nor sought.

As we continue speaking, I realize that many of those Google 'soft skills', including permission to err are part of the work we now do, but interestingly was most often not part of the work required when teaching.  For each, there is considerable loss, not dissimilar to the pain Steve Kowit's captures in "Some Clouds."  Kowit's speaker laments:

I am busy watching things happen againthat happened a long time ago.as I lean back in Josephine's lawnchairunder a sky of incredible blue,broken - if that is the word for it - by a few billowing clouds,all white & unspeakably lovely,drifting out of one nothingness into another.

Like my colleagues, I too have felt a loss when I left college teaching to return to NJ to be a district administrator. The intellectual work, especially the design work that I had done as a professor and previously as an admin was significantly reduced and rarely valued.  Rather, my work more resembled that sad factory worker in Chaplin's Modern Times. I was caught in an input-output model.




So when teachers and admins pause do they not hear from the standards makers, the test makers: "Quit stalling. Get back to work."??

And perhaps that is the shame of all of this.  We have passed on complexity and seized an education that at best tangles every now and then with something slightly complicated--something far less human. We are missing the larger gestalt of learning in order to focus on narrow output of faux-academic success as measured by an endless repetition of similar school reading-writing and mathematics tests.

A möbius strip of sorts.

Throw Off the Bowlines: Walking About & School

Bruised (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I. Opening

In writing about dream states, Rebecca Solnitt says that, "Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open onto the impossible" (p. 182).

I spent the morning walking with a camera in hand.  And after weeks of very steady work, I was delighted to see the fog and light this morning-- a dream place of sorts where the ordinary is recast in unfamiliar cloth.  It was a morning for getting lost and coming to know and unknow.

Light (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

II. Making

In looking at the images I made this morning, I thought about how much I learn by simply being, walking outdoors and seeing--as well as how these experiences will (in)form others I have yet to name.  It gives me pause when I think about the millions of children who at the same time I was out walking were seated at desks.

Is it not out of balance that we keep children inside in order to learn?  It feels counter intuitive and a bit arrogant to house students inside permanent structures as a means to ensure learning.  The physical world beyond the school represents potential places of learning.  I'd like to see school be less a matter of indoor sitting.

III. Recording

There's a quote I have memorized that is attributed to Mark Twain although it hardly seems like something he would utter. Nonetheless, it is wise and was with me this morning as I set out.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Lush (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Some days, I too throw off bowlines, not in a flashy manner you would most notice, but rather through small, almost imperceptible acts.  Like walking about.  Some mornings are meant for getting lost, for ditching work and school and the hundred things you meant to do and instead catching the trade winds in your sails. I wish school was more like this in spirit and less pressed and constant.

Reservoir (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

The Start of Autumn (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Wires (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Sunlight Falling (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Two Birds, One Tree (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

Islands of Expertise: Implications for Early Childhood Learning

The Swimmer

It's not exactly that I didn't understand anything, but I did not understand a lot of the dinner conversation the other night.  At that time my husband, son and I were in a restaurant and perhaps the noise level contributed to my lack of understanding.  The truth though is much closer to the fact that I did not have adequate background knowledge to fully enter into the conversation.  I can't even recall the terms that were bantered about as all of the terms left my mind as quickly as they entered.  My son was schooling my husband and me on programming and the requisite hardware he has and wants to further acquire in his quest to do something with a computer. 

My son's academic discourse related to computers, programming, gaming, and digital know-how eclipses my own.  He has immersed himself for the last two years playing, making, doing, talking about, and engaging daily with others who share and deepen his interest in these technologies.  He has always been like this: passions develop across large spans of time and the domain specific discourse becomes integrated into his daily speech. In this process, he is not at all unusual.

Most parents I imagine can recall fondly the first passions their child experienced. Perhaps like me, you too recall the Thomas the Tank Engine passion which for us led to learning about, riding on, and coming to understand trains. This period, like all passions, was highly experiential. The Thomas Period arrived while my son was still a young toddler. His enthusiasm for all things that were trains informed many of our outings and decisions, books and movies (yes we sat through the Thomas movies over and over again). Alongside this period, my son also developed a passion about the inner ear. He was fascinated with an illustration of the inner ear that was in a oversized book he would cart around and well before he knew all his ABCs, he was fluent in inner ear discourse and would proudly discuss the cochlea, canals, incus, and Eustachian tube. He studied the illustration and asked question after question about how sound was heard and what in the ear facilitated sound.  He wanted to work out how hearing happens. About this same time, my husband was being fitted for a hearing device and I wonder now if the two were related.  My son's questions pushed us to learn more, to find connections to the ear in other activities we were doing as a family, and to incorporate domain-specific discourse into our conversations about hearing and the ear. We didn't do this to enrich him academically.  We did this because we naturally wanted to support his interest and often his interests sparked our own. Out of our shared inquiry the language we used became increasingly specific and mature.  This is what happens when children develop these islands of expertise.  the language we use with them, changes and becomes far more domain-specific than other types of talk we use when speaking with children.

Kids are quirky experts. If you have a child, I'm confident you know what I mean.  Just take a look at four-year-old Stella in the video below as she explains what is inaccurate with the toy dinosaur she is holding.  Notice especially how her father supports her learning by providing domain-specific language.



The first comment posted to the Stella video was by a palaeontologist who wrote this:

It's awesome seeing this. I'm a palaeontologist and this makes my heart soar. I've seen kids in museums are the ones who educate their teachers and parents in nomenclature - I know my brother and myself were like that. My brother could name more than 20 dinosaurs at the age of four (genus and species) and would correct our parents if they couldn't pronounce them. This is a parenting WIN in my opinion!
akhshai 8 months ago 3

So what's going here? What do we need to learn from this as teachers? Principals?

The Island of Expertise Theory

Kevin Crowley and Melanie Jacobs (2002) labeled this at home cognitive development that young children develop prior to attending school, islands of expertise.  They defined it as such:

An island of expertise is a topic in which children happen to become interested in and in which they develop relatively deep and rich knowledge. A typical island emerges over weeks, months, or years and is woven throughout multiple family activities.  Because of this, developing islands of expertise is a fundamentally social process. They are con-constructed through the ongoing negotiation of children and parents' interests, children and parents' choices about family activities, and children and parents' cognitive processes, including memory, inferencing, problem solving, and explanation. As children develop deeper knowledge, islands of expertise support conversations and learning that can be more advanced than would be possible in domains in which the child's knowledge is of a more typically sketchy nature (333-334).  

What is significant about these islands of expertise is that they facilitate abstract and general knowledge development.  Again Crowley and Jacobs explain:

....islands of expertise become platforms for families to practice learning habits and to develop, often for the first time, conversations about abstract  and general ideas, concepts, or mechanisms.  Even when a child loses interest and an island of expertise begins to fade, the abstract and general themes that used the island's rich knowledge as a launching pad, will remain connected to children's other knowledge (pp. 333-334).

The palaeontologist and Stella not only share some aspects of a scientific discourse, but more importantly they share similar processes they have used to develop this domain-specific language.

The expertise of both the interested child and adult scientist reflect repeated exposure to domain-specific declarative knowledge, repeated practice in interpreting new content, making inferences to connect new knowledge to existing knowledge, repeated conversations with others who share or want to support the same interest and so on (Crowley & Jacobs, p. 337).

James Gee (2005) in discussing the importance and potential implications of islands of expertise writes: 

Even young children learn best when they pick up "islands of expertise" (Crowley and Jacobs 2003). Whether those "islands" are model trains, toy dinosaurs, or Pokémon, they constitute centers of expertise that introduce learners to complex languages and the ways in which such languages are married to specific experiences, like gravity to a tossed coin. These experiences are then used to solve problems and answer questions. With authentic professionalism, "knowing" is not merely the mastery of facts; rather knowing involves participation in the complex relationships between facts, skills, and values in the service of performing a specific identity. Here, word and deed are united and the knower is a knower of specific kind—a type of active professional, not just a generic recipient of knowledge. 

School Implications

So when I think about Gee's comments and some of the inherent challenges related to the acquisition of school Discourse(s), I wonder about the efficacy of creating sustained occasions (like the first three years of school) where young children could follow/abandon passions across those years and become active professionals whose experiential learning would serve as a powerful scaffold that supported other newer learning.  If we tapped into these islands, we could unleash a learning power that would dazzle us and the failed practice of situating some children as 'being remedial' would feel odd, unnecessary. I have no doubt that the development of these discourses would lead to an easier acquisition of reading rather than the more forced manner that some children experience school-based learning to read lessons.



Works Cited

Crowley, K. and M. Jacobs. 2002. Islands of expertise and the development of family scientific literacy. In Learning conversations in museums, eds. G. Leinhardt, K. Crowley, and K. Knutson, 333-356. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gee, J. 2005. What would a state of the artinstructional video game look like?. Innovate 1 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=80 (accessed April 24, 2008). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Cue the Rhizome: A Post-Better World

Pershing Square (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

So I was reading Will Richardson's latest post, Redefine Better in which he quotes from Umair Haque's recent HBR column, Declare Your Radicalness:

But to do it, we can't merely call for a set of broken institutions to work slightly better, to restore the present to the state of the past. We've got to redefine better; to redesign the future.

I read the column next and both Will's post and Umair's column got me thinking about what some of the conditions of a redefined better might be.  A quick thought that emerged is that perhaps a central tenet of a post-better world is that institutions can no longer be positioned as being containable--as being able to be represented as a single set. The idea that there is a set called school needs to be rethought. If we are continuously trying to make that set better, we will never find ourselves very far from the boundaries that have limited our vision.  Operating within the narrow little box we have called school, will at best get us surface changes as the borders will remained fixed and with them the opportunities to rethink, re-imagine, and express our radicalness.

This is a chief difference between understanding power as epic hierarchy and conceptualizing power as possibility that is rhizomatic. The old order that Umair writes about can be nothing more than an epic construct.  Think Race to the Top.  Is it nothing more than a new NCLB?  The old order is by definition and function: untouchable, self contained, closed.  It derives and maintains power by adhering to these very attributes.  So when Will writes about the need to think of different, not better schools--I begin to see this challenge visually, as closed sets no longer work.  

Declaring our radicalness begins with understanding that the way we have progressed--the very place where you can still almost see your breath--does not offer a viable method of continuing and must be boldly abandoned.  The set we call school is broken.   Reassembling those pieces into fixed re-presentations is a losing method.  Looking beyond that set is a worthy task that many are doing.


Cue the rhizome.

Break
         the set.
Boldly step
                  into new definitions of learning

(that are not sanctioned by governments, municipalities, fortune 500 types).


It is not a big engine we need to make such movement.  Rather it is the anti-big engine powered by you, me, the guy over there, the child with an idea, the artist with a brush, the woman with a storefront, the connected group that meets, the happenstance we cannot predict.

It is about expression that pulls others to it,  not out of coercion like NCLB and RTtT, but out of desire.

Instead of a single place called school that is reiterated, imagine multi-expressions of learning that cannot be contained: we are a river that overflows, recedes, breaks, moves on and over.

Imagine a bit.

And then let's see how we might connect and break along the way.

Imagining A to Z: X is for X-ray Intentions

X is for X-Ray Intentions

Reproduction (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

  “Never believe that smooth space will suffer to save us." D & G ATP.

Well this has been a week for interrogating intentions--getting beneath the surface so to speak and seeing what lurks there.  At PELeCON 12, Simon Finch (@sinfin) presented a keynote and used the film below.  Take a look.

So it has me wondering about how much I am willing to sell out myself--sell out what I deeply believe, sell out you and your children, or my own child--in order to secure or keep a job, or to be promoted? What's the price for economic security? 

The world depicted in the video is one that maintains its power by ensuring that it has no free thinkers, just followers.  It's a world I think we are coming to know--at least those of us who can still think, can still recall.

There can be no imagination inside a machine, be it a war machine or a school machine. The machine requires reproduction of an already established norm.  It's at best, a track one follows--a track one must follow. To release the imagination requires agency, self will, desire.  Allow yourself to be placed inside a box by being untrue to what you believe, and what you create will only be a simulacrum: a copy for which there is no original.