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?

Part III: Bold Schools - Community as Knowledge

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. 

Curriculum as Local Landscape

I like to think of curriculum as local landscape: one that moves, refuses to be fixed by the easy map, one you know because you walk it.  Curriculum cannot actually be mapped as it is a path unwinding before your feet--one that is altered by experience and changed by light and dark, fog and mist, intention and action, student and teacher, now and then, memory and shadow, you and me.

Looking East (Yuma, California, M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Curriculum maps that are made for others by others are problematic. They are distant. Erroneous before they are even read. Always epic. Consider Barry Lopez (1976) who has this to tell us about maps:

I would like to tell you how to get there so that you may see all this for yourself. But first a warning: you may already have come across a set of detailed instructions, a map with every bush and stone clearly marked, the meandering courses of dry rivers and other geographical features noted, with dotted lines put down to represent the very faintest of trails. Perhaps there were also warnings printed in tiny red letters along the margin, about the lack of water, the strength of the wind and the swiftness of the rattlesnakes. Your confidence in these finely etched maps is understandable, for at first glance they seem excellent, the best a man is capable of; but your confidence is misplaced. Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion. (from Desert Notes)

Curriculum, that complicated conversation we have even when we do not speak, is a subtle place with a long history: part truth, part lie, part mystery.  Forget the made map, as one can never be sure of the intentions that have fueled its making. For if the curriculum map is made apart from the learners, what damage might 'enactment' render?  What happens to one's spirit in such a lifeless place?  Consider Wendell Berry (1977) who writing about soil explains:

It is the nature of the soil to be highly complex and variable, to conform very inexactly to human conclusions and rules.  It is itself easily damaged by the imposition of alien patterns.  Out of the random grammar and lexicon of possibilities--geological, topographical, climatological, biological--the soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense.

It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit. (from The Unsettling of America)

Prairie (South Dakota, M.A. Reilly, 2010)

II. The Common Map Unmade

When I read documents like the Common Core State Standards with its long lists of expectations for all students, neatly ordered in sets of ten statements and dispersed like obedient soldiers across 13 years,  I know we have lost our way and have settled for the made map-- a map that strips the world of all that is local and in doing so nullifies magic and mystery, agency and voice--as if these no longer were real.  The arrogance is so loud.  Perhaps it is difficult to hear beneath such bravado the absurd belief that 'essentials' can be named by a handful of people. Imagine the misconceptions that fuel the belief that a small coterie can determine what each and every child across these United States should learn and when such learning should occur.

The Common Core is no framework.  This is curricular imprisonment--unrestrained power. When enacted and then tested every few weeks via a PARCC or SMARTER test, there will be no room for the idiosyncratic, the imagination, the questions, the dreams, the dreamtime, the unknown, the known that is no longer privileged, the recalled, the local, the random, the spiritual, the partial memory, the error, the student, the teacher, the you, the me. We are so foolish to believe that the only things worth knowing are explicit information one might easily test the same way for all the children across the country.  There are more ways to know then a test might gauge.  Listen to William Least Heath-Moon (1991) who is writing about how he has come to Kansas, to Roniger Hill--a sacred place--to test a belief he has about the connections one might find by laying a paper map atop a physical place and seeing if the grid, "arbitrary quadrangles that have nothing inherently to do with the land, little to do with history, and not much to do with [his] details" leads to some connections.  He tells us he has arrived here "by some old compass in the blood" (p. 14).  Listen to how he comes to know:

Now: I am standing on Roniger Hill to test the grid. I'm not waiting for revelation, only watching to see whether my notions will crumble like these old, eroding slopes. Standing here, thinking of grids and what's under them, their depths and their light and darkness. I'm watching, and in an hour or so I'll lie down and sleep on this hill and let it and its old shadows work on me, let the dark have at my own shadows and assail my sleep. If my configuration is still alive by morning, then I'll go down off this ridge, and, one more time, begin walking over Chase County, Kansas, grid by topographic grid, digging, sifting, sorting, assembling shards, and my arbitrary course will be that of a Japanese reading a book: up to down, right to left (pp. 15-16. from PrairyErth).

Startled (Iowa, M.A. Reilly, 2010)

There are  more ways to come to know then we can imagine. These ways may well be unnameable and many are culturally/locally bound.  They do not translate well across time, space, and intention. And there value is easy to miss. William Least Heath-Moon knows that when he lies down on top of that hill the old shadows will work their way into his dreams, his very self (in)forming what he knows.

Folks, there are no 'old shadows' listed in the Common Core or I imagine in any State Standards. Such experiences would not be listed as they are likely not known or perhaps valued by those who write such things for others to enact.  (Okay, I recognized, dear reader, that I may be losing you on these last few lines.  But, stay awhile.  Linger. Perhaps dreams and shadows aren't very real to you, but surely something important you value is and I tell you now get ready to lose it--for you will need to lose what you love in order to adhere to 'the Standards.'  They have never actually been yours, now have they?)

My friend, Michael Doyle, a teacher of science, writes in a post today:

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.

We teach to what few love, the few with the money, the few with the power to dictate what matters. 

We have traded Main Street for strip malls, teachers for Standard bearers, students for test achievers and filled Main Street and its schools with a simulacrum we simply cannot bear.   My son a few years ago asked, 'Why are all the stores the same wherever you go?  Couldn't anyone think up something original? It's kinda sad.'

The Atlantic (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I dream of my son learning to clam: not for credit (AP or otherwise) or in preparation for some high stakes test, but because he would be in the presence of a teacher who deeply cared--was passionate and knowledgeable about the art and craft of crabbing and all that such work contained and pointed towards.  That's the learning I crave for him.  To be in the company of others who openly share their passions and expertise so he too might come to name his world in numerous and complicated ways.

That is what teaching use to be.  Before the standards. Before the high stakes tests. Before we foolishly thought we would leave no child behind by naming everything each child needed to learn and measuring it by a single paper and pencil test.


Our idiocy is astounding.  This has never been about learning, but rather remains a matter of power seeking and the greed that travels alongside such intention. Wendell Berry (1991) offers us insight into such people when he writes:

Our present 'leaders'--the people of wealth and power--do not know what it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for its own sake, of love and study and careful work. They cannot take any place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place. (from "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse")

In the same text, Berry similar to Doyle offers us this bit of wisdom--words we should be heeding:

If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity and forbearance, and by making the local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can--not by presumptuous abstractions of "global thought." (from "Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse")

Go ahead and search the Standards and see if imagination, charity or forbearance can be found.  Don't hold your breath.

And So I Dream A Bass Will Join Me: The Pleasure of We

I have been thinking about a line of thought that begins with Descartes' Cogito ergo sum, tours through American literature with its overt celebrations of the individual, and ends by wondering how we might shift schools from privileging thinking as a solo act to ensuring we design learning at schools that privileges neighbor interactions (Davis & Simmt 2003). Brent Davis and Elaine Simmt explain that ‘neighbors’ that interact ‘are not physical bodies or social groupings ... Rather ... these neighbors that must “bump” against one another are ideas’ (156). Neighbor interactions are group members’ ideas that are blended and juxtaposed through discussion, resulting at times in novel ideas that do not belong to any one individual.

It is in schools organized to leverage neighbor interactions that complexity of ideas bloom.  In many ways it is what happens in social media when ideas bump into ideas at such a rate that the origin of an idea becomes murky with the intentions of other.  Think about a twitter exchange such as the furious and fast exchanges via an Edchat  or English or social studies chat.  Ideas get retweeted, altered, morphed, triggering other ideas, slightly different and if you are like me, I often leave with some new understanding that would be impossible to trace as the idea(s) did not originate from one other person, but rather via the group in a nomadic fashion.

Yet in school we model assessment (think report cards, state testing) as if it is the lone individual who can best demonstrates knowledge. Why? Doesn't it seem foolish that in a world where we know knowledge is unstable that we keep issuing measures based on stability and say that these are our most profound indicators of learning? 

We need new narratives to guide us.

We continue to maintain the myth of the individual. American literature, like recounted U.S. history, is filled with stories about the plight and triumph of the individual, even when the official story does not adhere to such renderings.  Consider the distance between Longfellow's Hiawatha based on the trickster-transformer of the Ojibwe and the realities that framed Native Americans at the time from native perspective. In retrospective it is less than imaginable to think that a Native American would tell tribe members to trust the white man as if the missionaries arriving on the shore as Hiawatha is leaving were bringing justice, empathy, and cultural understanding alongside their desire to "get religion into the Indian".  The distance between the two is immeasurable and yet, Longfellow's Hiawatha emerges as a purveyor of cultural truths.

We have been told to love the individual and believe in his triumph.  Consider young Huck who reckons he has to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, or Nick who watches Jay Gatsby reach out his arms towards the water--towards the elusive green light at the end of Daisy' dock, or Holden who desires to be the catcher in the rye in order to save kids from falling off a cliff.  The individual be it boy, youth, or man is part of our make-up--our mythical sense of self and it has informed the way we produce schools and our emphasis on "the student."

From the very beginning, our education story has been a story about the individual rising up, acquiring the "smarts" on his (and later her) own to light out for the new territory.  We so believe this mythology that we have invented single user measures to ensure that students learn stuff as if the stuff was stable.  We hear the myth echoed in the SWBAT (student will be able to) statements based on Standards (fixed and measurable ideologies of power) and expressed through individual assessments that are routinely used in curriculum documents and teachers' plans.  We see it privileged in how we communicate learning: we issue report cards to individuals based on how they did or did not do or testing statements that recount how individuals have performed on a specific measure.  Our most privileged measurements that are tied to funding are supposed to tell us and the public how "much" each student knows based on a finite sense of content knowledge.  We neither invest in, nor represent the individual or the group in actual participatory practices.

And so I am wondering, are we myopic in our narrow expression of self as solitary hero; student as solo thinker?  The journey from "I think therefore I am" to "We participate therefore we are" is a difficult, albeit necessary, transition for U.S. schools. Instead of racing to be at the top, we need to be embracing participatory learning.

When I think of disrupting the myth of the individual, I considered all we can learn from a small song Harry Chapin recorded years ago, Six-String Orchestra. I think I am hearing strings way off in the distance.  How about you?




Work Cited
Davis, B., and E. Simmt. 2003. Understanding learning systems: Mathematics teaching and complexity science. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 34, no. 2: 137–67.

The Rhapsody of Things as They Are

A problem with common core and quite frankly State standards as well is the belief that the direct disciplinary route is not only the "best" way to learn, but the only way to learn. I've been wondering about this for a long time as I know that I weave in and out of disciplinary knowledge, but more times than not,  coming to know (or unknow) is more nomadic than directional. I truly can't trace the way I come to know completely.

For example, I have been thinking about the blue light at the far edges of the horizon for a long time and was especially interested when I read A Field Guide for Getting Lost.  The language Rebecca Solnit used invited me to think, wonder.

Looking East. (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Solnit opens the second chapter in A Field Guide for Getting Lost by writing:

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

Talking About Malcolm X (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I wondered about the science of this passage, the intention of light getting lost and such.  I asked Rob as we are sitting outside having breakfast on our deck.  He is my first source for all things science and I read the passage aloud and asked, is this accurate? He insisted, rather emphatically, that light doesn't disperse. Waves don't disperse.  He then explained the loopy look of blue wave lights and the more staccato look of red wave lights using science terms and all I could think about is jazz.

Yesterday we visited friends, Ethel and Mark. Mark is a jazz musician. At one point we discussed the way improvisation happens like a good conversation and I found myself wondering if nature improvises.  Is everything determined? Is nothing determined?

This led me to read a bit more this morning.  Ward Cameron (2005) writes in Colours of the Sky:

When light travels through the atmosphere, it comes into contact with materials that scatter and filter out certain parts of the spectrum. These include atoms of oxygen and nitrogen. As light moves through the atmosphere, the blue end of the spectrum is gradually filtered out leaving a predominance of yellow light. This causes the sun to appear yellow from the earth's surface. As the sun travels greater distances through the atmosphere, more and more of the blue light will be removed...This scattering of blue light also results in another atmospheric phenomenon – a blue sky. When we look upwards, we are actually seeing the scattered blue light – the light that didn't reach the earth's surface.

As I read this I wondered about light as waves, remembering that as Rob spoke I was recalling earlier discussions and reading about waves, light, particles. Louis Bloomfield from Physics Central explains:

To understand why the air redirects primarily blue light, we have to look at the physics of light interacting with matter. Sunlight consists of countless tiny electromagnetic waves, each with an approximate frequency and wavelength, and each with a small amount—a quantum—of energy. Because of the discreteness of their energies, these basic electromagnetic waves have many particle-like properties and are known as photons of light.
The energy of a photon of sunlight determines its color, with higher-energy photons appearing at the blue end of the light spectrum and lower-energy photons appearing at the red end. The bluish photons also have higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths than the reddish photons. These differences in wavelength are responsible for the blueness of the sky.
Electromagnetic waves consist only of electric and magnetic fields, and they interact with matter by exerting forces on the charged particles in that matter. Through these interactions, matter can absorb a light wave and may then reemit it in a new direction, a process known as Rayleigh Scattering. That is just what the air particles do. In effect, the air particles act as antennas for light, absorbing light heading in one direction and reemitting it in another.

Josef Albers. Image for Command Records. Found Here.

Then I found a wonderful website, Causes of Color, which attempts to marry the aesthetics of color with the science of color. They organize the discussion of color into three causes: Light is made, light is lost, and light is moved. As I read through these pages I was thinking about Josef Albers--returning to subject matter I knew better, felt more comfortable with--something that might anchor the new. Albers's told us that color is understood through experience. He explained, "In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."

Things are not what they are. Tentative perhaps, like this post?

Wallace Stevens's musing about the blue guitar and how things are changed as they are played on that guitar had me quickly leaving Albers and thinking instead about poets,  Picasso, and a lovely book of etchings I have by British painter,  David Hockney --his homage to Stevens an Picasso.  I took a bit of time to reread "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and was stopped by these lines towards the end of the poem:

...Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are...

Counting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

The rhapsody of things as they are is an odd truth we fight bitterly, evidenced by the way our government--both federal and state--organize "content" as deliverable products.  We lack such imagination to imagine things are only as they are and what injustice do we serve to learners when we "train" them to believe solely in such nonsense.

Way always leads on to way.  Frost knew it and so should we.  The direct route may be economical at first blush, but nomadic tendencies are more representative of thinking, of wondering, of coming to know and unknow.  

Being in the Middle: Learning Walks

Introduction

Image made on Learning Walk 7.1.11

So imagine a commitment to learning that involved making regular learning walks with high school students as a normal part of the "school" day.  Now, these learning walks should not be confused with walking tours, which are designed based on planned outcomes.  One walks to point X in order to see object or artifact Y.  The points are predetermined, hierarchical in design.

Instead, learning walks are rhizomatic.  They are inherently about being in the middle of things and coming to learn what could not been predetermined. Learning walks are part of the "curriculum" for instructional seminar (which I described here).  Instructional seminar--a service, not a course--will replace Lab Classes at a NJ high school this September (2011). Lab classes are a hold over of a factory model where students were deposited into generic English and/or math courses and "remediated."  Knowledge transfer was the belief that fueled the efficacy of lab classes.   Instructional seminar affords a more consistent opportunity for students to access fluid academic services and to do so with agency. A vision statement for Instructional seminar might well be: Experimentation Matters. 

Learning walks represent one aspect of instructional seminar (they are scheduled for every possible block across a rotating schedule so there are lots of IS sections) that at least a few of us (Celeste Hammell, John Madden,  @doumakara, @shklepesch and I) intend to experiment with during the upcoming school year.  It's our intention that ownership of leaning walks will shift from teacher-initiated to shared between teacher and learner as the school year progresses. Although physically our learning walks will have start and stop points and be constrained by time, the potential learning that is engendered will not be confined to the walk itself, nor will the walk have a route that is determined.  There are any possible walks on any day with the same and different people, as well as learning that is both predictable and unpredictable. The process is nomadic intentionally.

A Trial Learning Walk

Contact Sheet of Images Made While Walking

Yesterday I set out on a "trial" walk.  I gave myself one hour to walk about Morristown, NJ and document what I saw using my iPhone.  I knew learning would happen, but not based on a prescribed lesson.  Instead my trial learning walk would epitomize the premise, "We know more than we can tell" (Michael Polanyi as quoted in Thomas & Brown, 2011).  Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) describe, in chapter six of The New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the tensions between explicit and tacit knowledge. They define tacit knowledge as: "the component of knowing that is assumed, unsaid, and understood as a product of experience and interaction" (np, e-book).  I had hoped that my walking about would provide a brief occasion to experience a city-town I work in, but really don't know or understand very well. 

So I walked for an hour and snapped pictures along the way, as well as filming a bit too. I have included a contact sheet of 20 images I made while walking and a very brief film.  It's still early to make much of the images or film, but I know that there's an emerging sense of differences within the city and how geography of place gives way to neighborhoods. These may well be ideas that I will explore more, contemplate--or not.  I imagine how different the walk might be alongside others or if instead of filming and image making, I only captured sound.  I think about what it might mean to interview those I meet along the way.  Or what might happen if I and others captured (video) stories of people on the street and learned them well enough to perform a walk as an ethnodrama.

Possibilities happen when you remain in the middle of things.

Tacit Knowledge & Rhizomatic Learning

One of the outcomes sought via instructional seminar from an institutional point of view, is that students will deepen their capacities to read, write, and problem solve. Initially, invited students to seminar have been "identified" by teachers and based on former course and state test performances.  I think of this year as a bridge year: a way to span the great difference between the factory model of lab classes and a more rhizomatic understanding of learning.  As the practice embodied in seminar becomes better established, any student could opt in and out of seminar.  Seminar is not an assigned course as no credit is earned, but rather an academic service. One might think of academic seminar as a learning center.

What is different though about instructional seminar is that tacit knowledge is critical, not ancillary. And so one might ask, how would walking about help a student to read, write, or problem solve better?  These cognitive processes are deeply influenced by our tacit knowledge.  For example, I can engage in complex reading, writing, and problem solving based on the narrative my reading of the images I made on the learning walk suggests. The walk may well anchor future expressions and inquiries.  Instead of beginning with explicit knowledge, learning walks allow for embodied learning. This difference is critical and may well be difficult for many to understand. Learning is not determined but encountered within the experiences and as such is rhizomatic.

Thomas and Brown (2011) explain that:

In the old culture of learning, educational institutions and practices focused almost exclusively on explicit knowledge, leaving tacit dimensions to build gradually on its own, over time...Knowledge was valued in the old culture because it was seen as stable. It was thought to transcend time and place...The twenty-first century, however, belongs to the tacit. In the digital world we learn by doing, watching, and experiencing (np, e-book).

After the Children Went Home

Much of what we know about knowledge has been (in)formed by education and those of us who have not only attended school but have made our living working at school may find it difficult to even imagine learning that is not causal.   We have organized schools based on the belief that knowledge can be transferred from one individual to another, predicated on the belief that "knowledge" was considered to be a stable matter.  In truth, knowledge has never actually been a stable regardless of century, but dominant cultural beliefs have for the most part been the single player on the "what counts as important learning" stage and so a prescribed body of "explicit knowledge" was privileged.  Just considered the teaching of American history and the differences about what counts as knowledge as expressed in a traditional textbook, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, or Marco Torres's students' films (SFETT).  With the presence of cultural revolutions and information technologies what counts as important learning appears to be a less certain affair. Perhaps now, especially with information access via the Internet, it is easier to recognize that knowledge is never stable, but constantly changing, and so too must our ideas about learning evolve.

Learning walks, like the one I took, are not about naming already determined facts, although these may well play a role in the learning and the expression of learning. Rather learning walks are about blending what we may have learned explicitly and tacitly with what we are coming to know.

Works Cited:
Thomas, D.s & J.S. Brown. (2011). The New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.

Rhizomatic Learning

Sylvano Bussotti, Rhizome (1959). Found here.

For several years now, I have been considering how the rhizome might function as a metaphor for learning and a model for education.  I tend to agree with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2002) who in writing about the tree as the long standing metaphor for knowledge and learning said, “We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much" (p. 15).

In their stead, Deleuze and Guattari offer the rhizome. Rhizome? Yes. You know rhizomes: think ginger. A rhizome is the horizontal stem of a plant, usually found underground. From the plant's nodes, it sends out roots and shoots.  The rhizome is all about middles. The tree is a symbol of hierarchy.

A month ago, my friend Jane, a professor at a Connecticut University posted this definition of rhizome:

The rhizome is a tangle of tubers with no apparent beginning or end. It constantly changes shape, and every point in it appears to be connected with every other point. (Driscoll, 2004. Psychology of Learning and Instruction, p. 389)

So today as Scott Klepesch, Deb Gottsleben and I were visiting English teachers, Cathy Stutzman and Meg Donhauser and librarians Heather Hersey and Marci Zane from Hunterdon Central Regional High School (HCRHS) in NJ, I began to see what the rhizomatic classroom might resemble.  Cathy and Heather partner, as do Meg and Marci,  in the design and teaching of a student-centered English class. I became intrigued a few weeks ago, when I had read a post Cathy had written describing the learning happening in Meg's British literature class. Cathy wrote:

Meg’s class is run like a choose-your-own British literature adventure! Students move through literary eras together, but they choose their own texts and areas of focus. Students track their learning by basically writing their own learning plans. They identify standards they work toward, they write their own questions, and they identify their own understandings. Meg conferences with them, monitors their progress, and teaches them to question and reflect. I love this whole concept. It makes learning collaboratively differentiated and amazing!

I contacted Cathy and she was kind enough to extend an invitation for us to visit her American literature class and Meg's British literature class today.  Each class met for 80 minutes and was populated with junior and senior students.  There was so much to comment about given all the progressive learning I observed, but for this post I am limiting my comments to describing how each class was inherently rhizomatic.

In defining the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari (2002) write that it:

has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is conjunction, 'and . . . and . . . and' (pp.24-25)

Today while observing, I noticed how the classroom dynamics in each room were rhizomatic. The learners (students, teachers, and librarians) resembled a sea of "middles" in that they formed and reformed alliances based on need, interest, direction, redirection, assessment, and commitment.  Unlike the design of many teacher-directed classrooms, the rhizomatic classroom is based on joining and rejoining as opposed to a hierarchical structure where the teacher determines the content and the method to "dispense" knowledge or perhaps even to occasion learning through experiential design. 

The rhizomatic classroom requires a shift in teacher talk from telling to inquiring alongside students; from talking a lot and often to listening and conversing.  Such shifts reveal the uncertainty present in dynamic learning. As Meg explained planning happens in conjunction with and response to what is happening in the classroom. There's no Sunday planning for the week in the traditional sense. What happens on Monday will inform Tuesday and so on. As Meg said, it's all about conversation.

Image found here.

Perhaps what was most significant is how the rhizomatic classroom reveals the fallacy of content-driven teaching as the method that better ensures there are no wholes in students' knowledge.  Often I hear educators explain that they like the idea of student-centered classrooms, but worry that students won't learn as much as they will not be determining all of the content and sharing their insights and knowledge with the class.  They worry that although they might teach students A and B concepts x and y,  neither will learn concept z as only student C will have occasion to learn that.

So it was interesting when I asked the teachers if they missed teaching whole class texts and Cathy said at times she did.  She referenced how much she loved teaching The Great Gatsby and yet she was quick to explain that in teacher directed lessons, just a few students might understand the points (concepts x, y, and z) she would be highlighting and stressing. I thought about how her description so matched my memory of my own teaching and realized that there are always wholes in what we know.  Cathy added that now her students are learning more as they are all learning all the time, instead of the occasional connection to what she was directly teaching. The students determine which concepts and skills connected to standards they will learn, how they will learn, which texts they will read/view/hear based in part on teacher-recommended author lists and informed by their interests and how they will represent their learning.

In the rhizomatic classroom, thinking resembles the tangle of roots and shoots, both broken and whole.  Problem framing and decision-making rest with all learners: teachers and students.  Right before we were to leave, Heather told a story about a student who was studying modernism and postmodernism and struggling with how to represent his learning.  After some discussion with the boy in which Heather learned that he was passionate about motorbikes, she asked him if he thought he could represent what he had learned using motorbikes.  Do you think you could find some connections that would show what you learned? The student found the idea challenging and interesting and began thinking.

Throughout the visit as I observed and interacted with the teachers, my colleagues, and the students--it became obvious that Marcy Driscoll's description of learning as rhizomatic was recognizable. She wrote:

Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points…and no particular organization (p. 389). 

The learning we watched today had not been predetermined or orchestrated via a single point (teacher). Instead, as students worked solo, in pairs, small groups, with the teachers, or us--new alliances were formed and broken leading to the potential of new connections being learned/unlearned/relearned.




Work Cited:
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (2002). A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. 
Driscoll, Marcy P. 2004. Psychology of Learning and Instruction, 3rd Edition. Allyn & Bacon.

Getting Off the Math Acceleration Train

My husband and I have come to a decision: we're getting our son off the math acceleration train that speeds through middle school (in order to get ready for high school) and takes with it any and all interest in things mathematical.  This is the child who lined up condiments from the refrigerator at 18 months, taking time to balance the bottles so that they were somewhat symmetrical from taller bottles on each side to smaller, more squat bottles.   We are watching his imagination and curiosity lessen, his anxiety about grades increase, and his belief that he can't "do mathematics" take on new life.

When we discussed the matter with our son and asked him if he wanted to continue in the accelerated track, he answered, No! with great quickness.

In a perfect world, mathematics, especially during the middle school years, would be understood as an art, no more or less a symbolic language than music, photography, painting, and so on. But this is not a perfect world and mathematics is not understood as an art. I can't help but think if this were the case, my 12-year old might not say, I hate math, with such regularity. 

1st "Still Life", age 7: Sense of symmetry, line, and balance were intuitive.

In "A Mathematician's Lament," Paul Lockhart writes: "Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions."

The opposite of this idea was so easily observed a few nights ago when we helped our son solve two-step algebraic equations--corrections he had to make on a test. Although he could follow the steps when shown, he didn't have any understanding. Finally my husband asked him if he understood what the equal sign represented. He said no. That led to describing scenarios that involved balancing sides (seesaw, weight distribution on an airplane by aisle, playing with coins, and so on). We later found out that the "curriculum" was finished for the year and the teacher decided to get a jump on next year by assigning and then testing via a 20 item test, students' capacity to solve equations (1/5t - 57 = 18).

All this getting ready for...is just plain dumb.

We need less rushing through to answer math exercises and more dwelling in human problems where the elegance and uncertainty of mathematics are given center stage.

Lockhart describes meaningful problems this way:

But a problem, a genuine honest-to-goodness natural human question— that’s another thing. How long is the diagonal of a cube? Do prime numbers keep going on forever? Is infinity a number? How many ways can I symmetrically tile a surface? The history of mathematics is the history of mankind’s engagement with questions like these, not the mindless regurgitation of formulas and algorithms (together with contrived exercises designed to make use of them).

Maybe it's too much to hope for, but somewhere I hope there's a math teacher in my son's future who also wants to slow down and dwell in meaningful problems and perhaps is even courageous enough to do so often, if not regularly, in these dark days of pacing and testing.


There's a lot to be said for joy and curiosity, wonder and fun.  It's time to get off the fast train. I hope other parents might do so as well. 

Designing Alt. Learning Spaces: I Need Your Ideas!

I have been tasked with designing an alternative learning space to traditional high school within a NJ public school system and to have it operational by 9/12.  Two constraints of working within a public system:

1. Students will still need to take and pass state assessments and earn x #of credits to graduate.
2. Under option 2 in NJ there is great liberty w/ regard to how students earn graduation credit. Seat time can be divorced from coursework allowing project/passion-based learning, virtual learning, and community based learning so long as they are connected to state standards.

So I am wondering:

If you were to design a learning space as an alternative to traditional high school, what might it look like? 
What would you privilege? 
What would be absolutes that you would need to include in your design?  
What would learning look and sound like? 
Who would own the learning? How would you know?

I really value your ideas and I know that they will surely (in)form mine.  Please let me know what you think.  Thanks.

Remove the Records and Someone Will Learn to Sing

Trio (Central Park, 2010)

"A lady            from Texas               said:            I live in Texas            .

                                    We have no music    in Texas.              The reason they've no

music in Texas                                               is because            they have recordings

in Texas.                        Remove the records from Texas

                                    and someone               will learn to sing

                                    Everybody                        has a song

                                    which is                               no                                song at all  :

                                    it is a process             of singing                                     ,

                         and when you sing                            ,

                                    you are                                 where you are                               .

                                                                       

                                                                  John Cage

                                                            from  Silence, "Lecture on Nothing," p. 126.

Listening For Silenced Voices

During the opening weeks of the semester I met with Kathy, a single mother, who had recently started college after securing her G.E.D.  She told me, “I want to make something outta my life. Something for me and my kid.”  After class and over coffee Kathy told me that she had read her first book during the previous semester.  She told me this slowly, hesitantly as if she might be revealing too much, too quickly and I think perhaps she was.  She dropped her voice and said,  “It was a young adult book, but I really liked it. It was the first book I could read.”

She continued explaining that she “got mostly A’s” on her papers the previous semester in Developmental Writing I.  She also said that her teacher rarely commented about her writing.  That was when she asked me if I would read the same essays as she was considering then for her portfolio. I said yes and she then confided in a lower voice that she didn’t believe the grades her work received were warranted.

“I think she just gave me the grades because she liked me.”

I read and reread the essays Kathy gave me. The texts were brief, averaging slightly longer than a paragraph of two to three sentences.  They were rather lifeless texts, insomuch as the spirit that Kathy showed during our conversations outside of class was difficult for me to discern within the texts. As she had indicated to me, the compositions were each topped with a red A and the sparse cryptic markings of correction, such as c/s and awk.  The one essay that stood out had no teacher remarks or a grade.  It was the one essay that Kathy would later tell me she did not hand in.  In this essay she wrote about being a single mother receiving welfare, a topic she knew first-hand.  It was her most sustained effort of seven sentences and the one she kept silent.  In sharing this writing with me, I thought of her courage to tell her heart especially after she explained that she didn’t hand the essay in “cause it didn’t belong at school.”

Years later, I still wonder what belongs at school. Whose stories matter? It was 1994 when I wrote that opening to a ten-chapter inquiry about women and courage.  I was beginning course work toward a doctorate and teaching at a community college in NJ. I didn't know then that Kathy's understanding of what belonged and did not belong at school would be so prophetic. I would learn though that Kathy was right: Matters of the heart have no place in a standards-based world.

I've been thinking about the terrible constraint the Common Core Standards impose on learners.  I've read through the document a few times and I can't find the section that acknowledges that matters of the heart are central to learning.  Instead I find statements situated as writing objectives that say sixth graders need to "demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of three pages in a single sitting." Why three pages? Why in a single sitting? Is this behavior anticipated in preparation for the computer testing that is being developed for sixth graders by groups like PARCC?

Bass (Central Park, 2010)

Lost in all the racing about is what makes for great learning: caring relationships, courage, perseverance, diversity, autonomy, and love. As these cannot easily be tested we no longer find them in what is privileged curriculum via national standards. The more we privilege standards and measurements that narrowly test those standards, the more I think John Cage was right.  He was wise to discern the difference between a recording and music.  Instead of the real deal, the people in Texas have only the fake.  And I think that what is true about the relationship between records and music is also true between standards and learning.

The Common Core Standards wall out important learning by narrowly attending to lists of ten and by paying xenophobic attention to mostly "foundational" texts.  Additionally, now that national tests are being made based on these extremely narrow standards, the most students can hope for are records, not music.

It makes me wonder: if we were to remove the standards, might students not learn to learn?