Standards, Testing and Determined Futures

Cover art for Nubes a Mi Alrededor:
Oral Histories from Horizon Academy,
Rikers Island (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

In the finest classrooms I have observed/researched across the last twenty years, uncertainty was more the norm than not. That's right: uncertainty. This may seem unusual given the normalcy of educational standards and their accompanying high stakes assessments that have constrained learning these last thirty years. We have been told that named lists of things to know advantages learning. But does it? 

I can’t help but wonder if the standards movement so intimately tied to tests aren’t complicit in limiting learning by replacing wonder with codification. The tacit is hardly ever acknowledged in the rooms where standards are unfolded like predetermined paths that must be followed. The world beyond that path does not exist. Rather than following learners’ interests, we slavishly attend to narrow sets of standards and the lists of codified bits of knowledge as if these bits existed outside time, intention, ethics, and morals. In doing this we create classrooms where determined futures are the end point. And this is tragic.

Marching scores and scores of learners to already determined futures is less about living and more about following. In such schema ethics and creativity as Gary Saul Moroson (1994) has theorized is always lessened. The repeated practice dulls the mind. It is as if learning was more foreshadow and less lived practice.

In "Restoring Points of Potentiality: Sideshadowing in Elementary Classrooms," I wrote that a determined future is a knowable point in time that excludes other possibilities. Michael André Bernstein (1994) explained that foreshadowing relies on logic that “must always value the present, not for itself, but as the harbinger of an already determined future” (p. 2).  Getting kids to know point A is all that matters; the present moment where they stand has already been scripted, contained and limited. Standards and high stakes testing rest on the logic of an already determined future. One we have been told to believe must be privileged. The actual lived experience is reduced and in some cases deadened. Codification on such grand scales limits learning as it fails to allow for the present moment to emerge in favor of determined end points. Such logic reduces possibility and replaces it with certainty.

In the classrooms and schools where uncertainty was privileged, learners (students and teachers) demonstrated curiosity, wonder, error, persistence, accuracy, and an intellectualism that was generous and gregarious. There, paths were made, not followed. Middles emerged as natural. The present moment was very much alive.




Cited

Bernstein, M.A. (1994). Foregone conclusions: Against apocalyptic history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Morson, G.S. (1994). Narrative and freedom: The shadows of time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Our Use of Education Standards Limits Learning: We Negate the Anomalous by Being Ready

A child following a hunch... (Reilly 2010)

I.

"We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery." - Marcelo Gleiser, 2014

Building a public education system on the belief in knowledge-certainty represents a seismic error--one we continue to make and remake. Even as we know more than we can say, our knowledge is largely (in)formed by our guesses, our hunches, our theory-making and unmaking. We ought to celebrate these stances, not shun them. Tentative theory making represents a main purpose of education and yet, against the narrow world of educational standards the room necessary to think, err, reconsider, fail better is largely absent for the individual learner. We are driven by a logic that says school learning is knowable and testable. We fail to see such logic as damning. In favor of logic, we have forgotten mystery.

Douglas Hofstadter in his foreword to Gödel's Proof recognized this when he wrote, "We now understand that the human mind is fundamentally not a logic engine but an analogy engine, a guessing engine, an esthetics-driven engine, a self-correcting engine." Where in schools do we embrace this understanding of knowing or of our beautiful limitations? How are teachers and children penalized in this high-stakes narrow world of testing and evaluation for embracing such notions?

I would argue that much of what is privileged today in public school education has been built upon a construct of a stable universe, where the borders between teachers and students are permanent, and whereby the signs, signifiers, and signified are linear and stable—resulting in the belief that there are raw materials like stones and timber that can be collected and distributed in order to enact specific commodities called knowledge. Knowledge in this schema is not to be constructed, but rather discovered from a set of knowable and predetermined things.  Further, the stability between effect and cause is seen as constant. 

Consider that "Newton’s first law of motion states, objects at rest stay that way—as do objects in motion—until an outside force inflicts itself.  The cause-effect relationship implied here is an apt metaphor for the modernist concept of teaching and learning: One precedes and causes the other. Teaching becomes didactic, directing; not aiding, helping, stimulating, or challenging natural, self-organizing processes. Machines do not self organize, compensate, grow” (Doll, 63-64). The logic supporting a belief in standards with specified outcomes as measured by high stakes testing can be tied to a Newtonian understanding of knowledge as discovery. In such schema, the builder, as corporate knowledge-holder and the inhabitants, as teachers and students are bodiless entities who can be improved and acted upon by the introduction of different stones and timber. 

We are endlessly substitutable. 

A child following a hunch ... (Reilly, 2013)

II.

“Gaps, breaks, punctures are not only absent from the curriculum, they are seen only in negative terms.  Time itself is seen exclusively in cumulative terms, as a co-relation with what is learned: the longer the time, the more learning accumulated.  Time is not seen as an active ingredient, necessary for developing the creative possibilities inherent in any situation” (Doll, 37).

It is these disruptures that we ought to be courting, rather then the smooth face of certainty. Kurt Gödel's theorems about incompleteness might well inform our reform efforts. Through Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems we can recognize the fallacy of the standards-testing movement we are buried beneath and the freedoms we sacrifice to remain buried. Gödel theorized (1931/1992) that no set of finite axioms could represent absolute truth because an undecidability exists in closed systems. Within such systems, the logic necessary to negate a particular axiom is not present within the system. To know a contextual “truth” requires a metalanguage.  And yet, in public education we are forced to trust the 'truth' produced about our children's knowledge via a closed set.  The same corporations that name what must be 'learned' have design what will be tested and how.  Then the results of these tests that only the test makers and test takers are allowed to see are used to report how students and their teachers faired. Yes, against the judgment of nearly the entire psychometric and education researcher communities (Newton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel, & Thomas, 2010) we use these narrow results to measure the effectiveness of teachers.

from here 

PARCC has indicated that we can now use their closed system that they purport to be a truthful representation of children's learning to gauge how well our child did against other children from "PARCC states."

Do you see how closed this system is?  By purporting to be able to provide you with a comparative view of your child's performance vs. those in Arkansas or Colorado the assertion that these scores actually report some academic truth of importance is assumed.

But what do these tests measure? They measure only what is common, never what is singular or anomalous. And this is a problem.

Children following a hunch... (Reilly, 2012)

III.

Gilles Deleuze notes, "[beneath the general operation of laws, however, there always remains the play of singularities" (1994, p. 25). It is this play of singularities that we must attend to. This is where hunches, guesses, trial and error rises. Yet, there is little room for such musing is the input-output world of standards and testing. Our inability to occasion the anomalous, to celebrate its presence in the utterances of our children and of their teachers--speaks to our lack of vision and commitment to unfettered learning. Allegiance to one set of educational standards and the tests they produce leads us to directly ignore anomalies.

Instead of having open-ended outcomes in eduction where we do not worry about pre-naming what a child will learn, but rather use our energies and talents to co-name with the child what he or she is theorizing, we have a list of things all learners must know and do.

A list is cheap. A list can only be common.

Check 'em off is infinitely less complex than a map one makes. We ought not to sell out our children this way. The talents of students and teachers are being squandered, repressed and ignored in favor of having everyone produce like answers to closed tests. Now, what career or college readiness does that speak to?

A child following a hunch... (Reilly, 2014)

IV.

We know tentatively.

Where in the new models of educational reform is guessing represented? Where in these reforms is self-correction privileged? Where do we allow learners, or their teachers, to follow a hunch?  In what ways do we embrace aestheticism? Are the arts nothing more than fodder for reading materials so that we can teach directly the skills outlined in the Standards?

Multiple ways of (un)knowing are largely missing from the certainty that 'the new generation' of educational standards represents.

We are teaching you and testing you on what you most need to know are the largest of lies we tell our children and we do so daily. We have been fabricating truths about the completeness of knowing since at least Sputnik and in these new times of the Common Core we continue to lie. We know this completeness myth as educational standards--the narrow interpretation of what some now say learners need to know in order to be college and career ready. I find it improbable that a nation could even believe such fantasies, let alone act on them.

Who are these soothsayers who know what it means to be ready?

But, what if being ready is itself the largest of myths? What if being ready represents our attempts to stay complexity and to substitute a poor version of knowing? What if being ready lessens the scope and depth of learning? What if catering to being ready actually undermines learning?

We only need to read the introduction to the ELA Common Core State Standards to notice the belief in a finite world of knowing that privileges being ready:

The Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do (p. 6, 2010).

Really? 

Imagine the arrogance that such knowing was even possible, let alone desirable. Can Standards represent what needs to be known?  By whom? For what purpose? Is it even rational to suggest such a list that can be reproduced is worth our interest? Yet, our schools are limited by and driven to ensure that all students know emphatically a closed set of nameable reading, writing and mathematical skills that can be measured cheaply and profitably for corporations. Driven by the limitations of our allegiance to high stakes testing, we measure what is convenient--what can be cheaply known by the masses--negating the anomalous, missing the singularity. We then say that these results represent a truth about the value of what children know and can do and the quality of work their teachers have done.

It is this closed system of standards, student testing, and teacher evaluation that we must disassemble and do so quickly.

Cited

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). New York Columbia

University Press.

Doll, William E. Jr. (1993). A postmodernperspective on curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gleiser, Marcelo (2014). The island of knowledge: The limits of science and the search for meaning. New York: Basic Books.

Newton, Xiaoxia A., Darling-Hammond, Linda, Haertel, Edward,  & Thomas, Ewart. (2010). Value-Added Modeling of teacher effectiveness: An exploration of stability across models and contexts. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 18(23). 

Using Lines of Flight to Create Clear Spaces in Standards-Based Curriculum

At the Edge of a Dream (M.A. Reilly,  2009)

How might lines of flight de/colonize classrooms?

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that new ideas need “clear space”in which to establish a foothold. This is a space devoid of the old rules, regulations, norms, and practices associated with the existing ideas. The new assemblage needs to be differentiated from other competing or existing assemblages. This process of opening up clear space is termed “deterritorialization” and is followed by a process of “reterritorializing” where new rules are coded for the new concept. To dominate effectively, there is a need to cut off a return to old methods, processes, practices, etc., thereby preventing the old practices re-imposing themselves over the new. The escape from “striated space” 5  (deterritorialization) to “clear space” is known as a “line of flight” (p.163). 

Michael Reardon,  Louis Sanzogni, and Arthur Poropat, 2005/2006

I have been fascinated by the idea of lines of flight as a means to de/colonize classrooms for some time. I appreciate the explanation offered by Reardon, Sanzogni, and Poropat (2005/2006) about the relationship between clear space and lines of flight and wonder how clear space might be introduced into standards-based classrooms as an initial method to open curriculum and pedagogy to possibilities.  These methods are lines of flight. 

Deleuze and Guattari's notion of concept creation is one way that space can be cleared in a more deterministic curriculum, such as those that are standards-based. Diana Masny (2012) explains that

Concept creation is precisely creating concepts to push thinking beyond what is assumed or given, to what could be. One way in which Deleuze and Guattari go about doing concept creation involves a process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. (p.9)

So concept creation asks us to take a concept and to look beyond the prescribed meaning. As Claire Colebrook (2001) explains:

Concepts are not amenable to dictionary style definition, for their power lies in being open and expansive. For this reason, we have to understand them through the new connections they make (p.17).

It is the new connections to be made that allow for space to be opened. Further, creating concepts is most often linked with problem finding. Again Masny explains:

Concept creation is the result of looking at a problem/paradox to see how it functions and what it can produce (not solve). What problems produce is the creation of concepts. And the creation of concepts allows us to think differently about a problem (p.180).

Thinking differently is an outcome of creating concepts. Gilles Deleuze in Difference & Repetition notes:

For learning evolves entirely in the comprehension of problems … learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? (p. 192, as quoted in Masny & Cole, p. 180). 

What is the problem in learning to do X? Encountering another leads to disruption or as Deleuze and Guatttari would name, deterritorialization. Deterritorialization opens a line of flight to a world of uncertainty and in doing so provides an opportunity "to disrupt overcoded learning and teaching practices" (Masny & Cole, p.181) such as the curriculum that yielded from state and national standards.

The rhizome is in motion.





Works Cited

Colebrook, Claire. (2001). Gilles Deleuze. New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles.  (1995). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Masny, Diana &Cole, David R. (2012). Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies.  New York" Continuum.

Reardon, Michael, Sanzogni, Louis and Arthur Poropat. (2005/2006). Towards a rhizomatic method for knowledge management. International Journal of the Management, 5 (5), 159-168.

Rhizomes - This Is Pushing My Thinking

Screenshot from Rhizomes by Marc. 

I stumbled across this slideshare by Marc while (re)turning/delving/wading in the stream/avoiding while finding middles of things/leaping into topics/discussions/questions about 
a vanishing point in a line of flight.

I  had queried rhizomes.  

House by the Tracks (Reilly, 2008)

I am keen to conceptualize what a vanishing point in a line of flight might mean and to whom and in what named context. 

I'm not satisfied to understand this as an abstraction--a(re)reading of Deleuze & Company. 

I want to be able to layer an understanding of this on to something I make as I think it is important for reasons I cannot name, today.  

In the Middle (Reilly, 2014)

(And here in that small space of tacit knowing, I want to eventually say something about standards and how they define us as they doom us. No hyperbole intended.)

I don't know why this is pulling at me, but I trust that there is something here/there/undisclosed I need to learn/unlearn/relearn/abandon/soak up/ignore.


Well you know how that goes, and not.



This slideshow caught my eye.  

Perhaps it will interest you too.

Rhizomes from Marc

Making, not Replicating: The Joy Standards Cannot Bear

20 collages created each day based on my reading of The New York Times.

I. Composing

For the last few weeks I have been composing a collage a day in response to what I read each day in The New York Times. Tomorrow will be collage #21. Creating something new each day allows me to shape possibility from the raw messiness of the day, to confront not knowing, and to situate it as a source of energy. And although this work leads me to see differently (the world is more vivid as if I was walking about with polarized lens covering my eyes) and to think differently, too--what motivates me to continue making is joy.  Rollo May in The Courage to Create noted:

But what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear;  it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction...Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities (p.45). 

Making a collage each day has increased my capacity to make connections between and among ideas as I don't turn off the layering process I use during collage making. I see the world as juxtaposition. At some point when I enter more deeply the work I am making, I disconnect from the world and time shifts and I find that I resurface hours later with a new work in hand. There's such joy in the making. Rollo May is correct--it is experiencing my own potential that fuels me--that fills me with joy.

Making matters beyond the object made.

So much of making collage is active problem solving--the trial and error, the endless re-shifting and reshaping of image and idea, and the unexpected rush and at times the slowness of understanding that occurs in ways difficult to predict.  It's complex work and beneath this process is the freedom to create, to err, to abandon a work, to not understand, to get it (sometimes) and to try again.

Making is indulgent.

II. Replicating

Indulgence and freedom are not the stuff made at school. The very dispositions necessary to creating are often threatened by the status quo that is present in the day to day conceptualization of what school is and how it 'ought' to be organized and what counts as important learning--especially with the rise of national standards. Educational standards, as we conceive of them presently, are a means for someone else to name the most important content for someone else to learn. It's a curriculum of servitude. At its base, standards are a form of colonialism.  (Ok, even if you aren't buying my Edward Said interpretation of educational standards, consider this):

The world’s information is doubling every two years. In 2011 the world will create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes. By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of information and 75 times the number of "information containers"... from here.

Does it not seem foolish in 2014 to use time and resources to name what must be learned in a world where information doubles every two years?  Educational standards making is an exercise in asserting power.  Situating educational standards as even being necessary, tells us much about what is valued at school and in the larger society: standardization and replication. 

Ugh, it's the machine age all over again. 

III. Being a Simulacrum

Standards situate your child and mine as simulacrum--the copy for which there is no original. Is this really the measure of achievement we desire for children? Standards limit creativity as they are by design an orderly and singular way of seeing life. Think of replication, the outcome of standards, as an endless series of boxes, each with a very tight lid. There's no thinking outside of that box. There's nothing original. It's all about embracing the rational.

I think again about Rollo May who acknowledges that the creative spirit is a threat to the rational. He writes:

The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life. Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable. 

I am proposing that the creativity coming from the preconscious and unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later becomes the river of creativity in our science (pp.71-72).

IV. Uncovering the 3 U's

Four things I think about when I think about educational standards:

1. Educational standards and our response to them render our world 'banal and progressively more empty'. 
2. Educational standards and our response to them keep the anxiety that arises alongside not knowing and the unknown--at bay. 
3. Educational standards consistently reassure us that the way we have come is the only way we could have done so. 
4. Educational standards and our response to them reduce joy--as such flights of fancy cannot be adequately endured.

And so it is not surprising when Ruth Richards in "Everyday Creativity: Our Hidden Potential" notes that creativity

may often be overlooked—either consciously or unconsciously, for a purpose. One may talk about the three "U's": Our creativity is often underrecognized, underdeveloped, and underrewarded, in schools, at work, and at home. Why is it, after all, that in so many schools students are trying to get 100% on someone else's test and not making up more questions of their own? (p. 26)

V. Dominating

Why indeed?  Who benefits from the development of an underclass who is systematically taught, not only how to take someone else's tests, but to do so as if such work was the mark of high merit?   Yes, yes, I know I will hear the rhetoric that standards lead to high achievement.  But is that really so? In last week's Washington Post article about Bill Gates's dominance in education policy, Lyndsey Layton writes:

Tom Loveless, a former Harvard professor who is an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said the Common Core was “built on a shaky theory.” He said he has found no correlation between quality standards and higher student achievement.

“Everyone who developed standards in the past has had a theory that standards will raise achievement, and that’s not happened,” Loveless said.

Okay, so if there's no correlation between educational standards and increased student achievement, then what exactly did Gene Wilhoit, David Coleman, and Bill Gates want to create? Layton writes:

In February, Microsoft announced that it was joining Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, to load Pearson’s Common Core classroom materials on Microsoft’s tablet, the Surface. That product allows Microsoft to compete for school district spending with Apple, whose iPad is the dominant tablet in classrooms. 

Gates dismissed any suggestion that he is motivated by self-interest.

“I believe in the Common Core because of its substance and what it will do to improve education,” he said. “And that’s the only reason I believe in the Common Core.” 

Hmm. Okay, no self interest--even though he will benefit in ways you and I could only dream. 

What about Wilhoit and Coleman? Have they benefitted from this venture? Coleman is now the president of College Board with a $750,000 annual salary and benefits. Not bad.  Wilhoit joined Student Achievement Partners (SAP) as a Partner in 2013. The same group that is a top recipient of grants from Gates. (SAP received $4,042,920.00 from here.)

In reading Layton's article, it almost feels like the start to a very bad joke: Three wealthy guys meet up at a bar one night and... But it's not a joke and joy and more are at stake.

CCSS, Educational Aims & The Agency to Act or Why Being a Mere Onlooker Is Always Problematic

Towards the Light (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the obstructions in the way,—or, if it is really a mind to do the thing and not a vague aspiration—it is to have a plan which takes account of resources and difficulties. 

Dewey, John (2009-10-04). Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (Kindle Locations 1775-1778). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition. 

I. Wading In

Years ago when I first read Jerome Bruner's Actual Minds, Possible Worlds--I was a fairly young high school English teacher, alone for a week at Bard College.  I had gone there to learn about teaching writing as a process and one of the key texts we studied was Bruner's. I can recall the challenge of that text as I sat in the local motel room each night and read/reread. It was heady, wise and still remains a central text I return to.

Towards the end of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds Bruner concludes by stating that a new developmental theory informed by the question of how to "prevent the world from dissolving into chaos and destroying itself" will arise. Central to that theory will                    

be how to create in the young an appreciation for the fact that many worlds are possible, that meaning and reality are created and not discovered, that negotiation is the art of constructing new meanings by which individuals can regulate their relations with each other. . . - Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, 1986, p. 149.

Bruner posits a world that is being composed, not given, and as such the aim (create that appreciation) aligns with an ideology that privileges agency. For Bruner it is critical that education helps the learner to "render a world less fixed, less banal, more susceptible to recreation" (Kindle Locations 2024-2025).

Educational aims represent what we want to achieve--outcomes that are designed. For example, In the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, the writers state:

The aim of social studies is the promotion of civic competence—the knowledge, intellectual processes, and democratic dispositions required of students to be active and engaged participants in public life. 

The social studies standards "provide a framework for professional deliberation and planning about what should occur in a social studies program in grades pre-K through 12." The relationship between educational aims and standards are pretty clear when it comes to social studies. There is an implicit linkage between the outcome of civic competence and the belief that a framework for 'deliberation and planning' represent a means to that bigger end. 

In contrast, there's no explicit talk of educational aims within the CCSS.  The word, aims, does not appear, nor is there an explicit linkage between pubic educational aims and standards that have been developed by the public. I wonder if the challenges with the adoption of the CCSS that David Brooks in today's NYT and others outline isn't a felt response to the absence of agreed upon educational aims. 

What is it we want for our children? What is it that public education ought to provide and occasion?

II.  Having a Mind to Think About Aims

Today much of the discourse about pubic education focuses on standards and testing and these discussions seem to be neither heady nor wise. Missing from this public discourse is the articulation of the educational aims we desire, need.  The conversations necessary to determine what we as a country need and want to produce are largely absent.  We have substituted method for philosophy. Yes, there is discussion about being college and career ready, but this is a phrase that has been given alongside the CCSS--not one that has been developed from and by the people.

Why do we have public education?  What is its function in a republic that protects certain inalienable rights that government cannot take away?  What might we want public education to produce? To occasion?

In chapter 8 of Democracy and Education, John Dewey defined aims as endings that have been "designed or consciously intended" imbued with work that has "intrinsic continuity." Educational aims are not merely effects or a "serial aggregate of acts."  Imbued in Dewey's discussion of educational aims is the primacy of agency at the pupil level.  He says it is nonsense to even discuss aims "when approximately each act of a pupil is dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons and the giving of directions by another" (Kindle Location 1741). One must have the will and permission to act.

In thinking about aims, Dewey is clear to connect temporal with action. He writes

Thus we fail to note what the essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the significance of the temporal place and order of each element; the way each prior event leads into its successor while the successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some other stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it were, summarizes and finishes off the process.  (Kindle Locations 1745-1748).  

Dewey cited three interrelated functions of foresight--a factor of aims. He writes that the third function is that foresight "makes choice of alternatives possible"(Kindle Location 1760). The presence of alternatives is deeply connected to agents at work in the ever emerging present--it is what Bruner in 1986 is writing about at the conclusion of Actual Minds, Possible Worlds--the "negotiation is the art of constructing new meanings."   Dewey concludes:

Since we do not anticipate results as mere intellectual onlookers, but as persons concerned in the outcome, we are partakers in the process which produces the result. We intervene to bring about this result or that.

For Dewey and Bruner, mere onlooker status is not to be confused with actors.  We have much to learn from each for it is this commitment to individual agency that is most missing today as standards and their requisite high stakes tests get enacted.  It is this absence of voice and presence that leads to the collapse of educational reforms.  In the absence of ongoing national discourse about what a Republic's public educational system must be mostly about may begin to feel that "Someone, somewhere else has determined what our children should know and be able to do without bothering to build consensus about what we want that public education to occasion."

Standards are always epic constructs, regardless of how well we believe them to have been crafted. Beneath whatever polish they might have, they cannot be responsive to emerging conditions as they are someone else's acts.  They are an already made. They are not aims and we are foolish to confuse them as such.

Dewey contends:

to have an aim is to act with meaning, not like an automatic machine; it is to mean to do something and to perceive the meaning of things in the light of that intent. (Kindle Locations 1788-1789). 

III. Acting

We would be better served discussing aims and the means to achieve those aims at our local, state and national levels than fighting about standards and tests. These discussions about aims are apt to be thorny ones given our differences and inexperience with ongoing discourse. And so this practice is all the more essential.

We live in dark times, still. And I suspect will remain so until we learn how to see other and respect other.  Oddly, there is some hope that Bruner tosses us as he concludes:

"...if we have learned anything from the dark passage in history through which we are now moving it is that man, surely, is not 'an island, entire of itself' but a part of the culture that he inherits and then recreates" (Kindle Locations 1908-1909). 

It is this active stance of (re)creation that shifts us from being mere onlookers to agents acting.  It is a shift we must make and ensure it is one that our children and all whom we consider to be other are able to make and remake.

Empowering

From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only. Elizabeth Daley as quoted by L. Lessig, Free Culture, p. 37

I tweeted this earlier.

I think it connects with what Elizabeth Dailey is quoted as saying in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. Consistent empowerment is more important than any literacy lesson we might offer, for alongside empowerment are the beliefs we have about learners, as well as the beliefs about self that learners compose, in part, based on our actions.

It is alongside these beliefs that children's intellectual lives are fueled and sparked or diminished and underfed. This is what rests in adult hands. What we make of it is most telling. We need only be constrained by our own imaginations, dispositions, faith. Not even the CCSS need constrain us (or them).

In Franki Sibberson's (2012) The Joy of Planning, she writes, "The Common Core, or any standards for that matter, give us a goal--what we want our students to be able to do at a certain point in time. What they do not give us are the ways to help our students meet those goals" (p. 13). I see hope in that statement.

If you think of the CCSS as goal statements (impoverished goals in some ways especially as we think about new literacies, but that is another post), then maintaining local jurisdiction with regard to the methods one uses to learn should remain a priority--one that is shared between learner and teacher. In accepting that, we must remain wide open to the fact that we know so little about each learner. In an unstable and ever changing world, our understandings must be seen as yesterday's news (at best) and within that slim and present space, possibilities abound.

That's where we need to reside.

I don't doubt that I will fail to see the bright shine of a learner.  I am often dull and fallible. This is why I keep myself wondering when I work alongside children.  I know I will underestimate them and so I resist knowing best.  It is from a stance of not knowing and wondering that I remain most open to what I failed to see at first (or second...) glance.

The children never fail to teach me, so long as I remain teachable.

Crows Talking, Tacit Knowing

Crows Talking (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I.

I made the image above last summer while out walking.  A cawing, polyphonic nasal sound, caught my ear and had me turning toward it, camera lifting simultaneously, shutter whirling.  Between trees, green with summer, two crows sat on a large branch in the thick of the woods talking.  Between us: an exchange of energy. At that moment, I knew more than I could say.

II.

Later, as I walked on I wondered if perhaps they were mates or neighbors--what they might have been talking about.  Crows, like us, are social beings.

III.

I've always found crows fascinating: these birds whose vocal range is so significant. At 8 I entered a crow calling contest, surprising my family, as we were passing through a town and had stopped for lunch and in the town center there was a small autumn festival happening and on the posted schedule was a crow calling contest and I signed on.  My family cheered me.  I only knew the "caw-caw" of the bird and sounded it loudly--and was even more delighted to hear the other contestants make their varied sounds. They helped me to know that voice of the crow is varied, beautiful.  All the way home I looked for crows and made crow sounds.

IV.

Regardless of living in a city, suburb or rural space--crows have always been a backdrop to wherever I've lived--be it the hooded crow found in Ireland or the black crow I've come to better know here in the States.

V.

Like the humans I joined who imitated the crow, so too have crows been known to imitate human voice. In Gifts of the Crow, John Marzluff (2012) describes a situation in which a crow rounded up local dogs by calling to the dogs in a human sounding voice, "Here, boy. Good dog." The crow lead dogs to a nearby college campus, gathering them beneath a tree. When the students let out of classes, the crow flew low with the dogs following it and their movement disrupted the students as they made their way across a large green, dislodging lunches in the process. The crow returned to eat. A trickster, for sure.

VI.

A Chance of Crows (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Crows, like many songbirds, sing to define their territories and to attract mates.  But crows also interact with regular neighbors, engaging in sustained social relationships. 

VII.

Like crows, we too seek to make meaning--to frame and figure out problems, to talk our way in and out of ideas, hunches, and relationships.

VIII.

Do birds dream?  Songbirds, like crows, do. They rehearse their songs in sleep.

On birds and dreaming: "During undisturbed sleep...The neurons spontaneously fired the same complex song production patterns in bursts. Interestingly, these activity patterns were at slight variance, as if the bird was rehearsing a variety of slightly different songs, sometimes with slower or faster tempos." (from here).


IX.

Here's an idea: Take one field. Add some children. Add some crows.

There's so much to know and (un)know through observation that I wonder why we don't make it a main activity of school.  Keenly watching and at times using tools to help us notice and understand what we notice is the stuff of conjecture, theory making, composing, experimenting, and insight.  It helps us code and fail to code.

X.

There's so much one can and does learn that expressing the 'totality' of it in neatly and logically written standards is rather foolish and dangerous especially when coupled with a manic desire to test public school children constantly and narrowly.  We need to consider Robert Frost and the advice from the speaker of his poem, "Mending Wall" who has this to say about boundaries:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

The very things that are 'walled in and out' through our understanding of standards, Common or otherwise, may be the necessary keys to learning for some.

XI.

Knowing is embodied in learners, their social networks, and in the processes and things that they create. Tacit knowing is the stuff we cannot list or code.  Much of that uncoded knowledge is systematically being diminished from school experiences, as what counts as content is what can be found on lists of things to know via standards. In our hyper attention to standards and the tests that measure students' acquisition of these coded bits of information, what will become of embodied learning?

XII.

Think about the crows who sat on the limb of the tree, calling.  I didn't know what their calls meant at the time or what that scene remembered might mean again and again or how such knowing might find expression.  I could not have anticipated you, dear reader.  It was a nothing moment, and one that was and is ripe with possibility.

Like learning, lifting the camera to make a moment was part reflex, part faith, part cooperation, and part coding. 

XIII.

Reflex.
Faith.
Cooperation.
Coding.

What might it mean for the generation coming of age if the majority of things we teach them to value are limited to that which can be coded?  What might our children learn about intuition, cooperation, community as knowledge?

Might we be teaching them to turn away from hunches, from self, from other? 

Omen (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

A Counting God and Being in the Now

Counting (M.A. Reilly, NYC, 2010)

"...To know certain numbers
would be like standing next to God,
a counting God, too busy
to stop for war or famine.
I'd go out under the night sky
to search for Him up there:
God counting, next to Orion
drawing his bow..."

- Douglas Goetsch, "Counting"

I. Tweeting

Last night I took part in a Twitter chat (#leadfromwithin, Tuesday evenings from 8:00 - 9:00 p.m. EST) and the general topic was about being in the NOW.  John Bernard's, Business at the Speed of Now: Fire Up Your People, Thrill Your Customers, and Crush Your Competitors was referenced. I read the opening chapter on line and marveled at the connections between the business world it describes and the educational world I recently left. Consider this:

A company's failure to solve  the customer's problem now can mean the beginning of the end of a relationship (p. 6).

Certainly, there are key differences between education as civic enterprise and business. Yet, there are similarities as well, especially as affordable education options, such as virtual and blended learning, arise and those with the means to access these alternatives to public schools may well do so.

Last night the chat was largely about the differences between NOW leaders and THEN leaders.  As is the norm for this chat, the questions were thoughtful as were the responses posted by others. There's a lot to borrow from this inquiry as educators.   Years ago a chapter in my dissertation examined epic and novel language in classrooms. I theorized that when first grade teachers spoke using the present tense, the learning opportunities for children increased as both the teacher and the children were operating in the present moment--the now.  The now allows us to be free from operating via our assumptions, misunderstandings, imposed standards.  Rather, the present emerges and alongside it our reading of it--a reading that is jointly constructed.  At such moments, we grapple to make meaning alongside the children.  This energy and purpose is significant and I watched as it signaled Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow.  In contrast, when teachers' discourse contained lots of past tense markers, the learning opportunities for children narrowed.  At such times, the ever present moment that in fact was emerging was left unattended.  Little children tend to operate in the present--in the now, now, now. When teachers fail to do so, there is a gap that widens.

According to Bernard (as best I can tell by reading one chapter), the world of now has gained prominence, importance, and relativity as the speed of information sharing has increased with the use of stagecoach,  pony, telegraph, railroad, airplane, jet, fax, email, and most recently texting.  Bernard writes:

Now everything anyone needs to know can travel at the speed of light, circling the globe 7.4 times in one second or traveling to the moon or back in 2.6 seconds" (p. 3).

Yes, it is foolish to confuse information with knowledge, however the speed of information does alter possibility in significant ways and does influence knowledge, power, and community. Fast info makes the now, ever nower, and raises alongside it increased potential to connect, collaborate, compose, and contextualize--so long as you have access and choose to use it.

So long as you have the means and method to not only connect, but be connected.


II. Contextualizing

Last week I left a school where I will be working next year and took a tour around the neighborhood. Here poverty has a weight one cannot upend.  Boarded homes are now partially un-boarded and on this warm spring night, many people--all people of color--sat on stoops.  I wondered about connectivity here--in the absence of electricity and water.  Yes, the phone can be a great equalizer, but it loses when shelter, food, safety, and health care are not secured.

This leaves me to think that never has there been a time when public schooling is more important as digital differences increase creating significant challenges for those who cannot connect and for those who can.  This makes me wonder why we continue to invest in the naming of things to know such as that which we find in national and state standards. I wondered if such national investments don't work to oddly maintain income inequality and racism.  It's like the image I made at the top of this post, Counting.  It's folly to count stars with the hope of representing the whole of stars. That which is dynamic cannot be contained with any accuracy inside closed sets.  

The antidote to this great naming of things to know, is being in the now. It's having the courage at local, state, and national levels for us to stand up and say: making knowledge requires a community of learners to operate without the troublesome burden of someone else's 'best' thinking as the only path to follow.  As such, we are rolling up the epic constructs known as standards with their long and tiresome lists and high stakes testing and in their stead we are asking communities to define what  and how learners demonstrate learning--perhaps a few key capacities such as: reason well; compose across symbol systems with accuracy, passion, and sustained interest; communicate effectively; exhibit curiosity; make things; and be kind. 

Alongside such a grand gesture, the housing of teachers and administrators for life must equally end.   Imposed standards and tenure for life represent epic constructs that are potentially harmful to children. Teachers and administrators must be excellent, not even just okay, let alone awful.  The work among learners (including teachers) must be fluid, not static.  To be excellent happens in the company of others and these settled households we know as schools, must be places where knowledge is being made, not simply consumed by both the educator and the pupil. The money being spent on testing in this country could be better used to create such settled households--a reclaiming, if you like, of main street. 

Perhaps then, the enormous attention being paid to public education by presidential hopefuls, like Mitt Romney and other pundits, who describe schooling for some as 'third world conditions' could be spent addressing the economic and social structures that maintain income inequality alongside racism in the United States.  A century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois writing about race and oppression wrote:

This is the problem of to-day, and what is its mighty answer? It is this great word: The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

Is such hegemony behind us? The economic, political, educational, judicial, and social structures that represent massive power produce and increase income inequality and they burdens us.



III. Counting

The mindless acts that clutter our day would best be left behind.  A closed set of things to count is best left not started.

Counting is a God-thing, even an indifferent One at that, paring his fingernails...well you know the rest.

The Shallow Breath of Standards: Seeing Beyond Things

My friend, Ethel's husband, Mark, loaned me a book today: The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life (John Daido Loori).  I started reading it and could not put it down. Early in the text, Loori describes an exercise he did that legendary photographer and teacher Minor White  provided.

Venture into a landscape without expectations. Let your subject find you. When you approach it, you will feel resonance, a sense of recognition. If, when you move away, the resonance fades, or it gets stronger as you approach, you'll know you have found your subject. Sit with your subject and wait for your presence to be acknowledged. Don't try to make a photograph, but let your intuition indicate the right moment to release the shutter. If, after you've made an exposure, you feel a sense of completion, bow and let go of the subject and your connection to it. Otherwise, continue photographing until you feel the process is complete.

Well, now that exercise is pretty clear to me as a photographer and one I anticipate trying this weekend.  I have experienced that odd exchange of energy between myself and my subject when I am in such a zone. It's as if my finger on the shutter and my eye in the viewfinder are no longer limited to my body, but somehow are deeply connected to the subject, located, if you will, outside of time and space.  What is central to these moments out of time, is the state of not knowing that defines how I see.  Certainty has no voice in these dramas. It is pure spirit.

This zen reading and thinking about art, reminds me a lot of what it means to be a teacher and how critical it is to not know, perhaps more so in this time of false certainty. Like my finger on the shutter and eye in the view finder, the space that is made in a classroom with students is not defined by the physical realities of walls, floor, or ceiling.  Something far grander is composed in these learning landscapes--something akin to what Maxine Greene labels as wide-awakeness.

Greene (2008) writes:

To open spaces for learning is to give learners a sense of absence, of open questions lacking answers, of darkness unexplained. If people respond to all of this with a blank disinterest, they are, often without realizing it, acquiescing in the “given,” the fixed, the unchangeable. (LEARNing Landscapes, 1, 3, p. 18).

Formal educational standards are the "given, the fixed, the unchangeable."   I have always been graced with students willing to wander into that unexplained darkness and a deep desire to venture along.  Perhaps that is why I find the standards movement to be at best a shallow breath, and at worse an impediment to all breath.  The use of educational standards assumes a decontextualized world where there is something called "the student" and a separate something called "the teacher".  The sad truth though is that this student can never be your subject, nor one whose presence resonates. Likewise,  "the teacher" can never venture into a landscape without expectations.  Such exercises are folly or in these days, perhaps even seen as sinister.

The given. The fixed. The unchangeable.

My exercise for myself this week is to find some darkness--an absence and reclaim my voice; to be truthful, and to stand against the certainty that is likely to doom us.  

What is Written. Image by M.A. Reilly. Tuscany, 2009.

I wish you, dear reader, an educational landscape sans expectations.