What High School Students Have to Say About Powerful Learning

Today I wished that Arne Duncan and Governor Christie might have been in the room quietly observing the 3 hours of discussion I had with 16 public high school students about their learning. The educational outcomes I think these political leaders seek for all students were clearly demonstrated by the students as they reflected on their learning during this school year.  It is important to listen to students and I wish politicians might do this more often, especially before determining educational priorities. What clearly was told by EVERY student is that it is their love for their teachers and the respect  and care their teachers show them that most influences their learning. It is a lesson adults, especially those setting policy, must hear. It was a privilege to listen to the students.

The students volunteered or were randomly selected from three new courses and one new academy at the 1500-student, highly diverse high school in the district where I work. My goal as the director of curriculum was to understand the effects participation in these courses might have had on students' achievement and their sense of themselves as learners. All of the courses and academy were determined by teachers based on their interest and passions. 

The new courses include American Studies I, American Studies II, and African American Studies which are all team taught courses and are experiential-based.  Additionally students from the senior level Classics Academy were also interviewed. Classics Academy is a year-long engagement for students who enroll in five courses: AP Vergil, AP English--Classics Academy, AP Modern European History, Classical History and Classical Mathematics (team taught course), and the Symposium. Curricula for all of these courses were developed by the teachers, including revision to all AP courses in order to increase relevancy, intensity and connections to ancient worlds. 

The Process

I interviewed 16 students from these courses, recording more than 3 hours of discussion.  It is important to note that on traditional measures, such as marking period grades and midterms, every student in these courses earned passing grades. There were no students issued a failing grade.

In quickly listening to the audio, the following themes emerged:

1.     Learning via these courses has been unlike any school-based learning the students have done previously.  As one student succinctly said, “This year we didn’t do high school.” Students clearly expressed that they were engaged as learners in these courses in powerful and memorable ways. Every student interviewed indicated that the learning they composed  transcended the border of school and continued to influence them in their non-school life. As one student said, “This year I found that not only am I making connections in different classes to other things I learned in other classes, but also outside of school I am still thinking about stuff I learned that day or past weeks.” Students emphasized that the learning they were doing was learning for life.

2.     Choice and rehearsal matters. Students referenced specific examples of how they co-designed the learning that happened in the course and cited how this sharing of power positively influenced their learning. For example, in the American Studies I course, a student indicated that she had not selected the course as an honors option, but had carefully watched students who did throughout the year.  She noted that they did not do “more work,” but did more complex work. As a result of this yearlong rehearsal, she is opting to taken American Studies II for honors credit next year, as she “now feels ready to be successful.” Students also indicated that being able to choose texts and determine how they would represent their learning influenced them.

3.     Every student used the term, family, to describe the relationship among students in the class and their teachers. Their use of the term was completely unprompted and was said during each and every interview.  The students indicated that they "love" and respect their teachers.

4.     Students expressed that being intellectually confident is a significant disposition they have developed during the year.  One reason students gave for their increased confidence is that their teachers and peers “really listen” to them and that they in turn have learned how to not simply hear, but to deeply listen and to appreciate other points of view.

5.     Many of the students indicated that a major learning they had was that the past informs the present.

6.     For students who have struggled as learners, specifically as reader and writers, they indicated that they had strengthened their skills by being able to think deeply about topics before writing, by the type of response teachers and peers offered, by not having to attend to strict “due dates” so that they could take the time to compose carefully, and by selecting and reading/viewing relevant texts. Some students indicated that a revised grading system (A, C and Inc.) led them to learn more and to develop the habit of revision. Students indicated that the differences they experienced this year suggested that their teachers were more interested in the quality and intensity of their learning, than in issuing them a grade. Equally interesting is the fact that for all of the senior students (8) who were interviewed, they made no reference to grades when describing their learning. 

7.   Senior students referenced that through class discussions, literary works, projects, simulations, and virtual chats--they rehearsed ethical situations they might encounter as adults and felt prepared not only for college, but for adulthood.  They said that important learning was thinking about how they are responsible for treating others with kindness and justice, becoming comfortable with ambiguity, and learning how to solve problems that offer no clear method of beginning. They indicated that this learning was greatly influenced by their teachers who attended to them as adults and treated them with respect throughout the year.

8.   All of the students said that it is their teachers' passion for the learning that most influenced their learning. One student indicated that he was "not very good at English" in previous years but that his teachers helped him to love reading and to respect the quality of work he composed, and that his skills improved significantly. Another student said that her teacher ignited her passion for reading.  One student said, "They (her teachers) are so passionate about what they are teaching. I mean, that's what gets me.  It's their passion. How do you expect me to learn if a teacher isn't passionate?"

9.   Students said that "failure is important to learning. You cannot learn without failing."

10.  Powerful learning is vital. One student said, "This year is a lot less like high school than other years have been. I felt like this was not high school. Maybe this is a lot more like high school should be like…This was such a change. Such a shift. I don’t have any classes this year like XXXXX where I go memorize things and then I go home and I don’t think about it.  We leave Symposium and (another student) and I walk home and the only thing we can talk about is what we were just doing in Symposium."

11. Curriculum gets lived in the classroom, not written in a book, said several students. Our voices matter and are respected. We share intimacies with one another. There is trust. We get to be responsible for what we do and say.

In thinking about the students' comments, as well as discussion with the teachers, some potential lessons include:

1.     Teacher and student autonomy and passions matter and need to be privileged in the design of courses, more so than a strict adherence to national and state standards. The local matters.

2.     Collaborative work brings tensions and challenges that are worth exploring at the student, teacher, and administrator levels.

3.     Students who are empowered to co-design learning, learn deeply and are able to strengthen their capacity to read, write and reason in ways that "remedial" courses cannot do.

4.     Mutual respect among peers and teachers may be correlated to student achievement.

5.     Blending "achievement" levels can help students to better challenge themselves and their peers.

6.     Teacher experience matters.

7.     Student learning is aided when administrators function as instructional leaders.

8.     Reflection by students, teachers, and administrators leads to better learning.

9.     Modeling aids learning. Expert modeling influences even more.

10.  The use of technology is seen as less important by students than the power of learning.

11. Curriculum is complicated conversation.  Documents may guide, but should not be confused with the lived course. 

12. A teacher's passion for teaching and learning ignites learners' desires to innovate, experiment, and compose.

By the way, the students in Classics Academy will be presenting via public exhibition culminating projects in June.  They plan to extend an invitation to Governor Christie.  I hope he can make it.

Clocks and Learning

Image by Zoutedrop posted at Flickr here.

I sometimes wonder how students can learn in 45-, 60- or 80-minute periods stacked one atop the next, with little time they can call their own.  I wonder the same thing for teachers who are a bit more fortunate as they are usually afforded by contract, planning time each day. Students don't fare as well, as lunch is often the only time they can call their own. Such "efficiency" smacks of scientific management, which privileged the separation of planning from labor.  

The man who is fit to work in any particular trade is unable to understand the science of that trade without the kindly help and cooperation of men of a totally different type of education, men whose education is not necessarily higher, but a different type from his own (Copley 1923,45) as quoted in Thomas Newkirk's Holding On To Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, p. 14.

Learning requires both planning and labor. School requires only the latter for its students and in more repressed places, separates planning from labor for its teachers who are tasked with "transmitting" prepackaged lessons via scripts. 

The clock is a powerful force. Lewis Mumford knew this. In Technics and Civilization, Mumford wrote, "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age" (p. 14).  He said that the clock shifted how time was represented and understood from a cyclical process of nature to a quantity. With the clock came the regulation and regimentation of life, parceling work into manageable bits of time.

Is this parceling not also true for schools as well? Is the bell not the most powerful symbol of regulation at schools? 

I was reminded of the almost obscene power of bells today while participating in a 3-hour learning engagement with high school seniors from a Symposium class, their teacher Mark Gutkowski (@mylatinteacher), designer Akemi Tanaka, our school's superintendent, an instructional leader, John Madden, our librarian, Debra Gottsleben (@gottsled) and supervisor, Scott Klepesch (@shklepesch). Mark and Akemi had designed an initial engagement for all of us to do involving design, building, and team work that had all of us thinking and doing.  Akemi next explained the thinking and production processes inherent in the industrial design work she does. We all peppered Akemi with questions wanting to better understand how her work originates, how it is modified and by whom and for what reasons.  We wanted to know about the thinking she does when making eco-conscious decisions and the relationship between identification of a problem and the development of design. Akemi then offered critique to students' design presentations as they presented drawings (made on paper or iPad) and discussed how their design originated and what problem it attempted to solve. 

Throughout the morning,the mix of students and educators learning side by side marked a distance from traditional schooling and its roles.  Empowered, engaged the time passed swiftly. And yet, at 11:18 the high school bells rang signaling the start of school-wide lunch. With this, students in dribs-and-drabs left to attend to clubs, make up tests, and other obligations, forgoing all of their found power in a swift acquiescence to the clock.  It was disappointing that closure was not determined by learners, but rather by a bell. 

I was reminded today that deep learning doesn't happen on schedule. Never has. Probably never will.  And yet, we persevere in diminishing learning by organizing school into predetermined blocks of time and signaling the start and stop of those blocks with bells, not intention.

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.

Stripping Language from Thought; Responsibility from Corpus: The Need to Invent, Not Ape

Want. (M.A. Reilly 2010)

I was participating on a listserv that privileged experimental and quasi experimental research as the sole type of research that should be used to inform classroom practice. This USDOE "think(less) tank" was an attempt to make teachers rely exclusively on recommendations by the National Reading Panel. Any pedagogical approach that was not developed directly from experimental and quasi experimental research was discouraged. 

I learned about the listserv after I had attended a conference the USDOE sponsored. It was somewhat surreal to be with several hundred professors and school administrators who believed in only using scientifically-based reading research (SBRR).  I was an observer on the listserv and at that time a professor at a college in NY.  I found my voice after reading  the following question that was raised by an employee from USDOE:

Do we want to teach preservice teachers they can use any approach...their own approach?

I thought a great deal about the question and wondered what approach is there, but one’s own? The lived discourse of the classroom is created through interaction in novel time.  Learners need response that is context sensitive. Simply aping some believed “perfect” instruction (a myth if ever there was) is a dangerous act, one we need to resist.  It strips language from thought, responsibility from corpus. What’s left?  Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin explains that “[d]iscourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life” (1981, p. 292).  Can students afford teachers speaking the “naked corpse of the word”? Can teachers?

To think that teaching will be made more effective for students by having teachers rely only on pedagogical practices associated with experimental and quasi-experimental research as singular points of knowing is misguided. There are multiple ways of knowing, let alone unknowing.

Further, the work of teaching is not simply in the design of a given lesson but in the lived experience of the classroom and school.  Teaching requires us to make sense of patterns through patient contemplation and on-going conversation. We need to be keen observers and realize that we cannot know ahead what will happen in a class with any certainty.  Teaching and learning requires ‘slow knowing’ (Claxton, 1997).  Schools are lived places with histories—with stories.  They are acentered and rhizomatic.  When designing for emergence, there is an emphasis on middles; those places of action, largely found in the comings and goings of people.  In many ways schools resist the tenets learned through experimental and quasi-experimental research—as such research is ultimately epic in construct and schools cannot afford such positioning.

Learning, is a far from hardened matter, one that is conditioned by the time, place, and ongoing action.  So, as I read the question I asked, "Do I intend the preservice teachers I teach to develop hybrid approaches to teaching and learning—approaches that use methodology beyond what the National Reading Panel Report privileges?"  

Yes. 

Do I expect that theory, research, and practice will influence their thinking and help them to shape pedagogy?   

Yes, again. 

Thinking matters. 

Unschool

In Roland Tharp's and Ronald Gillmore's (1988) seminal text, Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Social Context, they discuss the meaning of the term, school, and in many ways target the tensions felt today. Consider:

When citizens and their leaders hear of places and things calling themselves "schools" and those places and things do not correspond to the nation's internalized and shared vision, a deep offense is experienced, an offense to all the components of basic meaning-- the intellectual, emotional, activity, and historical components of the meaning of the word "school." The tendency of society is to gather back to the flock any errant geese.  It is no accident that the political movement for greater emphasis on higher academic goals has labeled itself the back-to-basics movement....Any social system will attempt to recapture those who deviate from its shared and internalized symbols; schools wander off the well-worn path at their peril. (p. 266).

Against this felt desire to maintain the known, there is also public dissatisfaction with schools. This leads to reform after reform regardless of how it is dressed that carries with it the subtext that "we're going to make it more like it was than ever before" (p. 267). Tharp and Gallimore write:

Political school-bashing and teacher-bashing are almost always based on the assumption that schools are no longer adhering to their real purposes: teachers are less knowledgeable than they should be; students are not as disciplined as they should be; the basic skills of reading, writing, and ciphering are not emphasized as they were in good old schools. (p. 267)

Tharp and Gallimore state that "intersubjectivity of the nation is the root problem--the shared meaning of school, the common history of schooling...the continual dousing of innovation and the restoration of the school to the comfortable conformity to the internalized image are reliable and reassuring political acts" (p.267).  Twenty-three years later, has much changed in the way we view "school"? Tharp and Gallimore conclude that "true school reform can come only about with a radical change in the meaning of school" (p.268).

In many ways the voucher programs and charter school movement hold the promise of something shiny and new, but nonetheless maintain the fundamental structure of school as a place students go to learn a prescribed curriculum. Yes, students may go to a charter school for a longer period of time during the school year. Charters may look more focused on the surface as they may be formed with connection to some type of occupation (the arts) or disposition (school of problem solving). Central here though is that the fundamental understanding of school as a location where students come to learn from teachers remains largely unchanged. And that's a problem.

I've been thinking a lot lately about learning and less about schooling.

Although still formative, what is emerging is an unschool: think of it as a commitment to learning that young people and some not so young make and in doing so form alliances based on interests, curiosities, questions, and passions. These alliances are not located solely in one geographic place, but can and do exist both in real and virtual spaces. Unschools have no prescribed state of national standards as the idea of a single prescribed curriculum runs counter to the stated goal of helping young people to compose themselves as learners.  Some critical ways of coming to know are privileged however, and find expression as composing and consuming--problem solving and problem generating, as well as the development of heuristics. Learning decisions are informed by mentors and peer-learners in concert with unschool community members, as well as peer-learner defined "expert practitioners". The mentor and peer-learner work is largely to fashion personalized learning that is inherently iterative and attends to the critical ways of knowing and doing. Peer learners, like mentors, are not restricted to a single place as virtual learning is part of the unschool design, although it is expected that there will be mentors and peer learners who will come together in real space for certain work.  Self assessment is privileged, alongside some external norms that the mentor and peer learner determine jointly.

That's what I am seeing currently and I would love to know what you think. Unschools will make most of us uncomfortable as they resist our understanding of school. As such, imagining unschools is difficult, especially as the remembrance of our own "schooling" is often romanticized and will be of little practical value, except in pointing at what it is not like.  Instead, it is better to think of a deep learning experience you have had that did not take place at a school and consider how that learning evolved, and trace as best one can the often nomadic journey of such learning.


There will be lots of ideas and content that unschool learners won't know.  What they will know and have experience with are the challenges, frustrations ,complexities, beauty, and perseverance necessary to learn well and deeply and to share that learning in meaningful ways. 

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?

A Brief Introduction to Rhizomatics Via Sheri Leafgren’s Reuben’s Fall

prepared by Jane M. Gangi, Ph. D.

Last semester Driscoll (2005), in Psychology of Learning and Instruction, discussed rhizomes in connection with constructivism:

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. 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)

Driscoll thinks of “spaghetti”; Eco thinks of “marbles”; I think of daffodils.

Sheri Leafgren (2009) thinks of Reuben’s fall:

Reuben fell. My professional life defined itself eighteen years ago when Reuben fell on the hard school-linoleum floor outside my classroom door. I was a young(er) person and a more naïve teacher at the time, blithely enjoying my lively class of kindergartners, covertly noticing some of the more interesting children in the kindergarten class down the hall, and on that morning, fully engaged in minding the interactions of the children in my own classroom when I heard the hard smack and muffled grunt signaling Reuben’s fall. When I went to the door to see had happened to disturb the commonplace silent, gender-based, double-lined trek connecting Mrs. Buttercup’s kindergarten class to the restrooms at the end of the hall, I witnessed a significant event.

            In the aftermath of Reuben’s fall, Julian—one of those spirited, full-of-verve, curious, “bad” children whom I had coveted for my own classroom—had left his place in the back of the line to reach Reuben where he had fallen near the front of the boys’ line and, as I  arrived at the door, was helping him off the floor, asking, ‘Reuben, are you okay?’

            As the other children steadfastly maintained their places in their straight, silent, boy and girl lines, Mrs. Buttercup shook her head, held up two fingers, and said to Julian: “That’s two, Julian. You are out of line and you are talking. You’re on the wall at recess.” (p. 15)

As a result of Reuben’s fall and Julian being made to stand on the wall, Leafgren conducted research on disobedience and wrote a dissertation. Her dissertation resulted in the book, Reuben’s Fall.

James Baldwin

“The greatest achievement of art is the ‘laying bare of questions which have been hidden by answers’” (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 110). So, asserts Leafgren, is great research.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework for Leafgren’s dissertation (and book) comes largely from Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (1987): “In developing a comparison between a rhizome and a tree as a metaphor of the contrast between two forms of logic, they name the tree’s linear structure—from roots through the trunk, to the branches—as a metaphor of the fixed, determining and linear logic that explains things in terms of cause-and-effect relationships…” (p. 36). In contrast with this vertical structure is the rhizomes lateral structure.

Leafgren’s 5 lines of inquiry on classroom disobedience:

1.     Disobedience (and childhood itself) as a form of deficiency (developmental, moral/religious, social, and behavioral) and/or as problems to be solved.

2.     The need for a particular order and control in schools and the means of achieving child compliance—and, as a result, “a positive, productive classroom atmosphere conducive to student learning…

3.     The teacher’s perspective and role in children’s moral and social behaviors, and the complexity of child compliance. Often discussed from a constructivist perspective in comparison to the more behaviorist approaches in the two prior categories, the goal here, however, is the same—to assert the authority of the teacher, but as a moral authority instead of a coercive one.

4.     The political, philosophical, and spiritual constraints of school morality. Within this category are researchers who study the state of school itself and authors who, with a more philosophical bent, write about the ideals of school(ing) in contrast to what they perceive as the state of school.

5.     The value of dissent and noncompliance toward an authentic democratic good life, reflecting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s caution: “your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none” … (p. 19)

Leafgren’s rationale for using rhizoanalysis as methodology:

…identities grow and shift rhizomatically. And so, ways of researching with children also need to be rhizomatic—overlapping, multi-focal and shifting with time. Rhizoanalysis challenges the idea that one moment in a child’s life may be “caused” by his/her stage of child development, his/her gender, his/her teacher or by what another child said or did. Scientific findings of research using the representational “tree logic” of cause and effect are difficult to implement in education because humans in schools are embedded in complex and changing networks of being and social interaction. As each participant in every interaction has variable power to affect one another from day to day, and in the ordinary events of life, the generalizability of these educational research findings is greatly limited (Berliner 2002, McNaughton 2003). The non-representational lateral logic of rhizoanalysis serves to create tensions related to “changeability, diversity, ‘noisiness’ (complexity)” and so highlights the complex and shifting links between…gender, cognition, class, race, culture, obedience, and compliance as the links shoot in unpredictable ways into a particular moment in a child’s life…. (p. 22)

Leafgren’s Research Questions:

1.     In what ways do the kindergarten children disobey in the context of the kindergarten classroom?

2.     In what ways are the kindergartners’ moments of disobedience representations and enactments of something more than merely disobedience?

3.     In what ways are the kindergartners’ moments of disobedience opportunities for responding to others in caring, ethical ways and for acting out the possibilities that a spiritual childhood provides, such as reverence, awe, wonder, reflection, vision, commitment and purpose; and the sensitivities in awareness sensing, mystery sensing, and value sensing…? (p. 83)

Connections between rhizoanalysis and “Dissent and the Democratic Good Life” (Leagren, 2009, p. 77)

Butchart (1995)

Since the fifties, disciplinary literature has fallen silent on the long-term social objectives of school discipline, stressing the immediate control of students. The emphasis has shifted from ends to means and strategies. Rather than developing philosophies of discipline linked to visions of a preferred social order, writers have developed systems and models whose only criterion for success is their short-term goal of classroom order.

Dewey (1985):

[Democracy is]

Simultaneously a way of life, an ethical ideal, and personal commitment. Specifically, it is a way of life in which individuals are presumed to be self-directing and able to pursue their own goals and projects. No society that maintains order through constant supervision and/or coercion can be rightly called democratic. Further, individual benefit and the common good are mutually enhancing in a democracy. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 119).

More from Deleuze and Guattari:

Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting, and being. Rhizomatic thinking deterrorializes arbolic striated spaces and ways of being. Rhizomes are networks…build[ing] links between pre-existing gaps between nodes that are separated by categories and order of segmented thinking. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 90).

Rhizomes are about mapping new or unknown lines and entry points, not tracing which records old lines or patterns. (as cited in Leafgren, 2009, p. 23)

In conclusion, Leafgren (2009):

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I worry about small things being lost. Children are not just small things themselves—they are great appreciators of small things: a silly joke, a fly crawling on the window, a ray of sunlight, a tickle fight, a secret” (p. 248).

“The memory of Reuben’s fall forever serves as a symbol of my resistance to order for the sake of order, valuing control over concern and sacrificing kindness to a keeping of the rules” (p. 253).

References

Driscoll, M. P. (2005). Psychology of learning and instruction (3^rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Leafgren, S. L. (2009). Reuben’s fall: A rhizomatic analysis of disobedience in kindergarten. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

For Further Reading

Deleuze, G.

Guattari, .

More Thoughts

George Betts (creator of the Autonomous Learner Model) at the University of Northern Colorado was invited to study high school drop-outs. By hanging out on street corners, he gradually coaxed them back to school. Once there, he gave them IQ tests, which showed them to be off-the-charts (NOTE: I am not a huge IQ fan [see S. J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, 2^nd ed., for the whole sorry history of IQ testing]; they are easy to undertest and hard to overtest, so that is where Betts’s information is helpful).  Betts called them “disenchanted” and tried, in the Autonomous Learner Model, to formulate ways that would make school more engaging to bright, although often disobedient, students.