The Necessity of Things Falling Apart: Bearing Witness

Twilight, In Beween (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

"Discourse, lives as it were, on the boundary between its own control and  another alien context" (Bakhtin, 1981, 284)

I.

I was working with some teachers recently and one asked about a plan we had revised. Her exasperation was both statement and question. I sensed she was wondering whether this version of the plan would last the length of the school year.  Was it sturdy enough? Correct? 

Surely it was indelicate on my part, but I told her most likely this revision would fall apart too--perhaps as soon as 6 or 8 weeks.  She paused and then laughed and I was thankful for her sense of humor. And I thought--not for the first time--that I might have tried for better words. 

Most everything falls apart, especially plans made for others. Plans are less the road we actually make and more the breath we exhale as we pause, slightly, before breathing again and walking on. Nothing stands still and plans, written, are the epitome of such truth.

I wanted to tell her that our teaching plans will change because we will have some new thinking. They will change because we were wrong.  I wanted to say that the kids will show us that what we thought was essential has become less so.  I wanted to suggest that our work is not to follow made plans verbatim, but to read the landscape as learning emerges. Becoming, not being, is cool comfort in the face of doubt. I wanted to lay down words like breadcrumbs, beg the birds to stay away, but I offered her only silence and a nod. And perhaps each was the better utterance than words I might have sounded. 

The space to doubt is a gift. 

II.

I was thinking about all of this as I waited in the doctor's examination room reading Bud Hunt's recent post, On Hope. Bud posits that it's hope he'll sidle up to in the wake of doubt--doubt that rises alongside made plans underway, plans that surely will begin to show their wear as plans do. 

I was thinking about the folks in Bud's story. He's involved in a 1:1 initiative where he works.  He writes:

And certainly some folks have begun to wonder about the bad and possibly risky pieces of our plan to allow for more access to technology and the Internet to students as everyday habits in teaching and learning.  I do hear some people who are certain that things and networks will be used for evil rather than good.  “Let’s lock stuff down,” they say, “because students with too much ability and opportunity are bound to go astray.”

Back in 2009, I rewrote board policy at a large NJ public high school to allow unrestricted Internet access for students. At that time, students were not allowed to use any Internet ready devices without facing disciplinary action. It was not unusual to see high school admins busy confiscating phones. "If I see your phone, it's mine" was well in play eating up copious amounts of time. Further, students at the high school and middle school were not allowed to bring their own devices to school without written permission.  And then they could not access the Internet.  We were locked down and safe.

It took some months to rally interest and support, but eventually support was garnered and the policy changes were enacted by the Board. Alongside these changes, we also were ensuring wireless environments at all district schools and updating hardware so that in the period of 15 months a 1:2 environment was present at the high school and eventually a 1:1 environment at the middle school.

As I think about what Bud wrote I am reminded that it is the in between spaces of what was and what might be that doubt most surely raises its head. I can recall the urgent voices that prophesized doom at both schools. "Only a fool would let 1500 kids access the Internet on whim," one high school teacher shouted at me. "Do you have any idea the problems this will cause?"

Sometimes, plans displace what we did not know we valued. Other times they nudge at beliefs about order and control that we aren't quite ready to part company with even when we profess the opposite. To be human is to know wear. I suspect it's one reason we love the new plan. So shiny, so full of possibility. Change often represents necessary losses and any loss is rarely comfortable. As I think about Bud and his dilemma I realize that it is what we reach to fill these losses, small and grand--personal and societal, that seem most to matter.  

Bud reaches for hope--the thing with feathers.

III.

And so this was on my mind when my doctor, a family friend, stepped into the examination room. Rob had taught all three of his children and across the last 15 years our family and his have developed a friendship. His children are the type of young people who fill both Rob and me with hope--with the belief in a better world than the one we have now.  Dr. R. is Egyptian and deeply involved in the politics that are (re)framing his country. And so it was with much interest that I listened to him talk about continued turmoil there and how people are invested in magical-religious thinking as the basis for answers to small and large problems. He tells me with a certain sadness, "the book has been lost." 

The book has been lost.

Later, I'll think that the book may surely have been lost, perhaps even that the book needed to be lost, but stories less so. I'm reminded of John Connolly's (2006) wonder-filled book, The Book of Lost Things. The subject of the story, 12-year-old David, loses his mother. She dies. The narrator tells us:

Before she became ill, David’s mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren’t alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats...Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud...they had no real existence in our world....Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life (p. 3).

Hope is a story we tell. It's the witness we bear when hearing another's tale. Hope is without past or future. It is emergence--a narrative sans beginning, middle or end. Hope may well be what we reach for during in between times.

IV.

After David's mother dies, he thinks about how still his life has become without the rushing to and from that had been such a part of his life while his mother was ill. 

Instead, there was only the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a clock to be repaired and after a time you become aware of its absence because its gentle, reassuring tick is gone and you miss it so (p.13).

When things fall apart, the reassuring tick of what has been is gone. This is when we most need courage to face another person's uncertainty, as well as our own. Such acts are ones of hope.


Cited:
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981).  The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas.
Connolly, John (2006). The Book of Lost Things: A Novel. Atria Books. Kindle Edition.  

A Passion for Possibility

Want (M.A Reilly, 2009)

“A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it does not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us new aspects and new semantic depths” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7).

Tonight I was listening to Beethoven's 9th. It is such an expansive and emotional work.  One that never fails to move me--largely because it opens me to possibility.  There's something untamed about listening to the 9th.  

When I think about listening I wonder about about learning--how learning ought to open us--ought to be largely a matter of possibility, not certainty.  And yet, the desire to be certain when confronting an unknown and have it named often determines us and what we value--be it in our homes, our hearts, or our schools.  Consider Maxine Greene who tells us:

We are not the first to feel a slippage under our feet, to grope for a “point d’appui,” something to stand on, a platform, a ground. Like so many of our predecessors, many of us grope wildly for security. We seek a certainty of protection, of salvation.  (from here)

But what is the price we pay for security?  I can't help but think of the cool comfort standards and high stakes testing have offered--twin methods we have been embracing since we were told we were a nation at risk.  Frightened of our limitations, we wondered who might we trust? And in the ensuing years we have learned most not to trust ourselves, our very eyes and ears. We substitute certainty and completeness that wrap itself around national standards and national tests for the slippages we feel when we stand on our own feet atop a world that is always in motion. 

When I think about the CCSS and other educational certainties it is the sameness--the way the language parses itself so neatly, so predictably that most confounds me as it concerns me. Consider how likely it is that David Coleman and company, could name for millions of children (at least those enrolled in public US schools) what they most need to learn and when. Standards are a closed system. And yet, if meaning is most revealed as Bakhtin says when it comes in contact with other, then what might we make of this rather closed movement of educational standards--self-referential, monologic?  Hegemonic?

Again, Greene offers us a way of framing this conundrum when she writes:

As John Dewey reminded us, facts are mean and repellent things until we use imagination to open intellectual possibilities. Imagination may be viewed as a passion for possibility...this is where the effort to achieve freedom begins—freedom as the opening of spaces in which choices can be made and action undertaken. Thoughtfulness, imagination, encounters with the arts and sciences from the grounds of lived life: this is the beginning and the opening to what might be.

It is from the grounds of lived life, where we most need to dwell--the spaces that open and close causing gaps to appear. Nothing living is ever finished.  It is in the lived life where we can best "anticipate and accept incompleteness" (Greene again).   And perhaps that--incompleteness--is what we might value most at school. 

Composing are Acts of Not Knowing & Wanting

Stop Stealing Dreams (2012, M.A. Reilly)

I. Acts of Faith

Fred Leebron closes the essay "Not Knowing," saying this:

Readers suspend disbelief and writers suspend disbelief because writing and reading are acts of faith along the path to knowledge, not just one particular knowledge but any knowledge that is part of the essential truths lurking to be shared by the reader and the writer and all those people in that story, that are coming to not just one conclusion but many conclusions, that follow not one path but many paths, because the writing and the story are not just about one thing but many things, and in this essential multifarious way writing is an embrace of all the complexity of not knowing and wanting to know and all the contradictions that reside therein, and that has been our task, on these paths, all of us--writer, reader, character--to embrace those contradictions (p.56).

His depiction of the tangle we know as reader, writer, and character--provides a stark contrast to how writing and reading are situated at many schools.  One of the terrible by-products of high stakes testing has been the way that certainty is privileged in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment decisions and enactments.

One might even argue that certainty is the content, regardless of the discipline.

And we are not the better as a result of this.

II. Test Based Writing

If writing is largely a matter of discovery, what do the children who are fed a steady diet of test prompts as a substitute for good writing engagements come to know? What does it mean to be a writer in such rooms? There, knowing is THE given. Writing happens from a stance of already having your three ideas at hand, or plugging into an already scripted response the particulars from the prompt.  Such tasks have little to do with writing and a whole lot more to do with compliance.

Is it any wonder that many of the children in such classrooms fail to write with any agency, power, or faith?


III. A Better Way

Throw out the test prepping that substitutes for engagements.  Build the writing alongside the children, looking for natural places where wondering might be made more concrete through written/visual/auditory text making.  Teach the 'essentials' within such contexts and watch learners bloom.

Annie Dillard said it well in The Writing Life.

Process is nothing. Erase your path. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all, and not look back. 

Let's be bold enough to toss the years of high stakes testing preparation that we have substituted for writing engagements.  It is only then, when there is enough room to not know and still want, that writers might take up the pen without us.

Thinking About Power, Schools, Teaching, Technologies, and God

 I. Channeling God

A few weeks ago, Pam Moran (@pammoran) sent me the transcripts of extended talks that Drs. Ackoff and Deming had back in the early 1990s.  It was most fascinating. This one extended comment by Ackoff really caught my ear.

"And when we started to talk about an enterprise, we looked at it exactly the way that Newton looked at the world. The enterprise was a machine created by its god, the owner, to do his work, and the worker was a replaceable machine part. Okay? The owner was a visible power that had virtually no constraints imposed on him by government or anybody else. He could hire who he wanted to, when he wanted to, pay them what he wanted to, and so on. That concept went through a transformation after World War I for a very important reason.

The American economy grew so rapidly that even if all the profit the corporations were making were reinvested in them, they would not be able to grow as rapidly as was possible. Therefore, the fundamental problem that confronted American management in the 1920's was: Do we constrain growth and retain control, or do we encourage growth and sacrifice control in order to get the financing necessary to get the growth. In other words, do we stay private or go public? And the 1920's was the major period in which corporations converted from private ownership to public ownership.

What happened? God disappeared --a very fundamental change. God was no longer present and powerful. He became an abstract spirit - two hundred and fifty thousand shareholders out there. Now, there's a difficulty in communication between the ordinary worker and that abstract spirit. Peter Drucker recognized that was a problem we had confronted almost 2,000 years ago when God disappeared in the Western World, and he said industry did exactly what the Western World did. It created an institution whose function it was to communicate between man and God, and he called that institution management. And management knew the will of god, the owners, the shareholders, exactly the way that the clergy knows the will of God, by revelation, because they sure don't know it any other way. 
 - Dr. Ackoff (Transcript: Conversations between Ackoff and Deming, 1992)

Wondering what you make of this...what, if any, parallels you see with the shift from private to public in the 1920s and the  increasing interest to make public schools private now. What should we make of that? Are the motivations connected?

II. Thinking About Learning

Today I watched this excellent screencast (Embracing Uncertainty) by Dave Cormier (@davecormier) who boldly states that we need to embrace uncertainty and that cannot measure learning.

Take a look:


Now take a look at this quote by Deming.



Is the push for making public schools private, a response in part to the indeterminacy one might feel when God has been replaced by an abstraction?  Take a look at Will Richardson's (@willrich45) recent column in District Administrator, "Coming to Terms with Five New Realities." Specifically, I connect Will's first assertion with the idea of an uncertain future. Will writes:

It’s becoming clearer by the minute that, as Web technologies open more and more doors for learners, they also pose more and more challenges to traditional thinking about schools. At the center is figuring how best to prepare students for the vast learning opportunities they have outside of the traditional education system.

How do we respond to such challenges? How do institutions respond?

I see these ideas as being connected.  How do we respond to uncertainty? How do we leverage uncertainty and how might it connect to economic methods?

Some things I am thinking about and wonder what you think:

1. Do private institutions create a public need for certainty by establishing its role as interpreter of God--thus reasserting God, not as an abstraction, but as the Deity? (Great Chain of Being, revisited?) Is this related to the increased pressure to move from public schooling to private forms of schooling?
2. What do we do when faced with uncertainty?  Is embracing uncertainty a learned behavior?
3. What does it mean that we need to learn to live in a world of mistakes? How do we do that and how do we avoid that?
4. What role(s) might web technologies play in leveraging/attending to/obfuscating/intensifying these tensions? Is the current backlash against and imposed restrictions of web technologies connected to how well we attend and/or fail to attend to uncertainty?

The Double Bind of Optimism and Pessimism: Predestined Schooling

I opened an email this morning from Margaret Wheatley that said:

Can we refrain from categorizing ourselves as either optimists or pessimists, but instead live with the great paradoxes of this time? Can we learn that uncertainty is a very healthy place to dwell, rich in potential rather than opinions? 

I do believe this and have written often about uncertainty being a powerful organizing force in our lives.  Most times I have situated this discussion in narratives of classroom space I have observed/participated in.  This morning I am thinking about learning and how it is decidedly different from schooling, especially as schools are constrained by national standards and reform measures.  I appreciate Wheatley's understanding of the world as being more complex and promising than the half-full/half-empty folks would have us believe.  It is uncertainty, rich in potential rather than opinion, that gives me hope when I think about living deliberately and learning. Being responsible for the decisions I make is humbling as those decisions often reveal what I simply did not and do not understand.  It is this stance of not knowing and unknowing that I want to lean on a bit for it has never been a matter of being optimistic or being pessimistic as both offer a similar distance from living.

Being optimistic or pessimistic allows us to nullifying life's uncertainties and oddly live in a predestined manner.  One might well think now of John Calvin's religious doctrine of double predestination as it too has been an exacting "anecdote" to living, and if the article from The Economist is correct, the numbers of neo-Calvinists are increasing here in the United States.  In the text John Calvin: A Pilgrim's Life, Herman Selderhuis tells us that Calvin who "sought refuge in providence and predestination" wrote that "there is no more terrifying agony than to tremble from fear and uncertainty" (pp. 36 - 37). Calvin, not often thought of as an optimist, seems in many ways to embrace optimism through his view of God.

In explaining Calvin's belief in a double, not single, predestination, Selderhuis writes:

This brought him (Calvin) to the conviction that the Bible teaches double predestination, that is, that God has chosen one group of people to live eternally with him, and that the other group would remain in darkness. The issue was not whether there were two types of people, some who would go to heaven and others who would go to hell. The issue was instead whether anyone could make a saving decision for himself or herself, or whether everything depended on God's choice. For Calvin, there was no question. The Bible showed most clearly in both cases that everything depended on God, and that it was by his decision and choice that eternal destiny of all people was decided. Calvin had no use for a solution like single predestination, which held that there was only an election to salvation. If God had decided to preserve one group, his decision was automatically a choice not to save the other. There was simply a double predestination.  Calvin had no desire whatsoever to leave even a small part of their salvation to people that would lead to uncertainty, and at the time there was already so much uncertainty in the world (p.190).

Calvin's belief that only God, not humans, rendered the decision about eternal life, led to an equally strong Calvinistic belief that one was to learn from the hand of God by being humbled when "bad" things happened and responding by asking forgiveness for sinning.  To me this is the center of the optimistic call: better to look upon x situation as the glass half full  and if you don't you are cast to the half-empty group. This type of thinking removes decision-making and agency from one's life and replaces it with a map already made.

In contrast, Wheatley writes that  certainty "is a very effective way of defending ourselves from the irresolvable nature of life."  She tell us that "the challenge is to refuse to categorize ourselves."  I am neither optimistic, nor pessimistic as both situate life as predestined.  By now (if you have read this far:) you may be wondering what does all this talk about Calvin and optimism, etc. have to do with schooling and learning?

Learning is all about uncertainty. In fact, I doubt we can learn anything apart from a stance of uncertainty.  Uncertainty is curiosity.  It's "let's give it a try and see what happens." It's Frost's road that wanted wear.  Schools need to be more uncertain, rather than informed and limited by national or common "core" standards (call them what you will) and reform method after reform method. 

Here's a partial list of actions, all routed in certainty, that reduce the possibility of learning:

• using the written curriculum enacted as written or being in "trouble" for not doing so
• allowing the "teacher" to determine what will be learned exclusive of the students
• believing that there is a single teacher or that a principal is the only leader
• understanding the classroom as a physical space where learning must occur as prescribed
• separating learning into discrete "subjects"
• understanding learning as that which must be taught
• tracking  children into different "learning" groups based on the ubiquitous belief in "student ability"
• assigning teachers to different "learning" groups based on the ubiquitous belief in "teacher ability"
• assigning principals to different schools based on the ubiquitous belief in "principal ability"
• tying all aspects of lessons to standards and objectives 
• recording lesson objectives & standards on a blackboard for all to see and thinking this is related to learning
• using only books already approved by a BOE and nothing else
• using only materials the teacher selects
• writing the midterm and final exam in September and giving these as written in January and June
• confusing testing with learning
• limiting resources by blocking Internet sites
• using any basal program with learners
• using any and all worksheets as a method for teaching
• thinking the answers in the basal program are correct
• believing in correctness as an aim of education
• using or making others use a scripted program that tells the teacher what to say every day and what to expect students to say
• rewarding correctness 
• equating correctness with learning
• determining that the "workshop" must have a mini lesson and closure
• using already determined mini lessons
• teaching the writing process as that which has five stages
• using any and all pre-made rubrics
• believing that talk in a classroom must be responsible 
• categorizing student or teacher utterances as responsible (or not)
• categorizing a teaching practice as "best practice" 
• believing there are "core" subjects 

I think Wheatley is correct: the challenge is not to see ourselves as inherently optimistic or pessimistic, but rather to refuse to categorize ourselves.