Gallery Show

I am pleased to announce that 14 of my photographs will be shown at Trillium Gallery in Glenford, NY (Near Woodstock) along with photography by Jim Nooney and Tori Yule. Call 845-389-2027 for more information and directions.  The show opens June 4, 2011 with reception beginning at 2:00 p.m.

Dreaming of David Hockney (Mountainville, NY)

Bridge in Fog (George Washington Bridge)

Surfaced (Tuscany, Italy)

Be for Me, Like Rain (Wall Street, NYC)

Bearings Taken (Brooklyn Bridge)

Etta and Butch Go for a Ride (Greenwich Village, NYC)

Gates (Tuscany, Italy)

Zen (Warwick, NY)

A Sunday Afternoon (Nyack, NY)

Intersection (Manhattan)

Ordinary Angels (Dublin, Ireland)

Crosses (Tuscany, Italy)

Take the A Train (Harlem, NYC)

Trees in Reservoir (Ringwood, NJ)

Art Show!!! So Pleased to Announce....

Hope you can join me at this show!  More details to follow...

Mary Ann

Self-Directed & Collaborative Learning via Minecraft

Interior Screen Shot of Art Gallery from Minecraft Deigned by Devon

When I went to Columbia University, I went there for one reason: to learn how to theorize. My dissertation [Courting (in)Stability] was a rather unpolished attempt to compose a theory of learning built upon the twin ideas of folding time-space and dialogism, neither of which I understood all too well.  That was nearly 20 years ago. What I actually learned at Columbia, mostly through dialogue with Ruth Vinz, was to privilege uncertainty--be it in the dissertation process or other types of learning and living. Being uncertain is a stance that is informed through observation and wonder.  I have been wondering about play and learning and so I have been watching the last few weeks as my son and now several of his friends play Minecraft. I thought observing would help me to better understand learning, especially learning that happens outside the influence of school and is self-directed and collaborative.

I.
It's mid April when I mentioned to Devon a neat game I had downloaded, Minecraft and explain it is a game where you build a world and work to survive.
He's a bit skeptical and asks, "Is it educational?"
"Not in the way you mean," I assure. "Take a look if you want."
That was Friday, mid April. By a week later, he had built a multi-room and leveled home that included a waterfall and an elevator that opened into a glass room located above the clouds. Survival was no longer a marker of progress.

Screenshot of Farm (Growing Wheat) in Minecraft, by Devon.

A week after that he "discovered" obsidian and built a transport to take him through the portal to the Nether world. His game play was not restricted to one world as he had been designing and building  multiple worlds. It was about this time that his friends started playing. Teaching his friends to play was all hands on and began and ended with a few hints to get going and the suggestion, If you don't know what to do, go to Youtube.

A week after that he began to build intricate designs that included lava and water flows, a house that included an art gallery and had electricity, a gigantic electrically powered roller coaster that ended where you started, farming, and controls to make the place, peaceful and multiple trips to the Nether world.


It was about this time that Devon and a friend, Damian, decided they needed to show what they were doing to others.
I mentioned Jing as a way to capture what he was doing in Minecraft.
"J-i-n-g? Is it an app or on the Internet?"
"You can download it from the Internet."

II. 
Devon and Damian set about making their first two Jing movies about how to build a transport to the nether world and by dinnertime were waiting on the films to be processed so they could be uploaded to YouTube. Neither child asked for my assistance.  They did not need instructions to download or use Jing.  Now and again I could hear when they reached a dead end and had to retrace, abandon, or figure out the problem in some new way. The language I heard was not defeatist, but rather words and tone that suggested curiosity and encouragement of one another, and lots of laughter.  Some, No no and a lot of Yes, like that.  What I noticed is that they did not outline their movie before making it.  They dove in.

I noticed that after their first attempt at Jing, Devon said to Damien, "I think we should skip the whole beginning and just get to the part about making obsidian. Who's going to want to sit through all that?"
"Yeah you're right. If they're making a portal, they know all that stuff already."

Screenshot of Portal.

Screenshot of the Nether World

We might label that idea as revision and narrowing the focus.  For the boys it simply made sense as they were doing what Aristotle said writers need to do, consider audience. They did not need to define vocabulary terms or use terms in a sentence. They did not need to outline the steps they would take before taking them.  They didn't need to do a lot of what gets privileged as important learning in school and I am hoping that gives you pause.

What they did need was some relevant prior knowledge about the way "how-to Jing films" work.  Having watched a fair amount of how-to films about Minecraft on YouTube, they had some models in mind and were delighted to find out that those movies were made using Jing.  They had to have a sense of the audience for whom they were creating the films. They needed to understand what they were going to demonstrate, but not fully.  Perhaps most important though, they needed to be willing to experiment, fail, and retry--to collaborate and to be self-directed. 


III.
Will Richardson via his post, Have Schools Reached Their Limits? shared The Right to Learn: Identifying Precedents for Sustainable Change, a white paper generated by Bruce Dixon and Susan Einhorn and informed by those who attended the Big Ideas Global Summit 2010.  About halfway through the report I stopped as I read this:

What is becoming better understood is what personal computing in the hands of learners allows. The emphasis is more about who controls the learning than about content. It’s about learners learning through the lens of topics and issues that are of interest, relevant and purposeful to them; it’s about them constructing knowledge; it’s about connecting to an unlimited resource of people, ideas, and conversations that gives all learners unique insights, insights that underpin deeper understandings about the world in which they live, and how they might act collectively to influence their world and their lives. It's about having the freedom to learn in a way that is appropriate in a modern world. It’s about acknowledging a learner’s innate drive to learn about, and understand, his or her place in the world (p. 11).

The very thinking dispositions we continuously attempt to engender in students at school are the ones I see and hear occurring as I watch my son and his friends playing Minecraft. Through self-directed and collaborative play, they continuously demonstrate what it means to be adventurous, to persist, to problem solve, to sustain intellectual curiosity, to clarify and seek understanding, to be strategic, to be intellectually careful, to seek and evaluate reasons, to be metacognitve. When they need assistance, they seek it out from resources they discover: videos about Minecraft, a Minecraft Wiki, and Minecraft apps. What's equally interesting is that not all of these resources remain valued as they learn.  Much like Lev Vygotsky describes, these scaffolds are self-destructing.

Empowering students to determine their learning matters.  In talking with Devon about what he had created in Minecraft, he explained, "People don't give people enough credit. It takes a lot to put things together and to figure it out. The roller coaster is more than a 1000 pieces of rail. It was hard to figure out slope to make the roller coaster keep going and eventually I figured out how to power it. It took a few tries." 
 

Screenshot of Roller Coaster, Designed by Devon

Screenshot of Roller Coaster, Designed by Devon

Looking Closely

Yesterday, spring had finally arrived (at least in ways I can see) in northern New Jersey.  I set the task to observe no further then my yard and record what I saw.  Here are a few images from that venture.

Submissions Sought: Call for Cover Art

This is the mock up of the cover for the first issue of (Re):Mix:  A Transnational Journal of Artful Teaching and Learning. I am looking to replace the cover image with an image you submit.

Call for Submissions: Issue 1: Exploring Uncertainty within Artful Practice

For this issue, contributors are asked to consider how uncertainty is elemental to the artful practice of teaching, leading, and learning. Contributors are invited to submit written and visual works that explore, question, (re)present and challenge the idea of uncertainty being a necessary element inherent in artful practices.

Some questions to consider might include:

• What does uncertainty look and/or sound like in your work?
• How does uncertainty influence the work you do?  
• How does meaning emerge in your work?
• What conditions give rise to uncertainty? What conditions inhibit uncertainty?
• What does it mean to be uncertain as a teacher? As a leader? As a learner?
• How do you privilege uncertainty in your work, in colleagues' work, and/or in students' work? 
• Is there a cost to being uncertain?

Submission of Artwork:

1. Email jpg images to maryann.reilly58@gmail.com
2. Include CONTACT INFORMATION:

YOUR NAME
ADDRESS
EMAIL and Twitter contact (if you have one)

3. Include title of work(s) submitted
4. Indicate if your submission is only for cover consideration o can be used in the journal.
5. Submit work no later than June 15, 2011.


About the Journal
(Re):Mix - A Transnational Journal of Artful Teaching & Learning.  (Re):Mix

seeks to explore, question, (re)present and challenge depictions of teaching and learning in order to uncover the emerging complexity of artful practice. At a time when teaching, leading, and learning are often situated as simple input-output models, this journal seeks to challenge that understanding by showcasing and juxtaposing works that illustrate artful practices by learners.

(Re):Mix is an on-line, open access journal. Print copies will be available at a cost. Art and written work remain owned by the artist/writer.

For Trillium Gallery

Bridge in Fog (NYC, George Washington Bridge)

Bearings Taken (NYC, Brooklyn Bridge)

Be for Me, Like Rain (NYC, Wall Street)

Etta and Butch Go for a Ride (NYC, Greenwich Village)

A Woman Gathering Silence (NYC, Grand Central)

Watching (Milton, NY)

Student Performance on NJ State Tests: A Poor Measure of Teacher Effectiveness

Graphic from this Site

I. The State Test

In 2010, 86,000 11th graders in New Jersey wrote responses to a "persuasive" prompt as part of the high stakes state assessment. Student who do not pass the assessment cannot graduate. This was the prompt:

Writing Situation
Several teenagers in the neighborhood are suing a local fast food restaurant, claiming that their poor health resulted from consuming the restaurant's food. The lawsuit has forced the owners to close the restaurant. This has caused a controversy in the community.

You decide to write an article for your school newspaper expressing your opinion on the teens' lawsuit against the restaurant.

Directions for Writing
Write an article either supporting or opposing the teens' lawsuit. Use reasons, facts, examples, and other evidence to support your position.

These 86,000 students were not actually allowed to conduct any research or gather facts, examples or other evidence to support their fictitious positions, as no resources nor external research may be used, nor did their response actually have to ascribe to the genre specified (newspaper article).  Rather students had to invent reasons, facts, examples, and other evidence that supported being for or against the teens' lawsuit and then put these "ideas" into paragraphs (hopefully 5) and do so in 60 minutes.

As I read the prompt and thought of so many students composing responses, I wondered what students had learned about writing and persuasion?

• Did they learn that making up reasons, facts, examples, and other evidence is acceptable practice when writing to persuade?
• Did they learn that the five-paragraph response penned in an hour is the same thing as composing a newspaper article?
• Did they learn that all persuasive positions result in either being for or against something?
• Did they learn that one takes a definitive position after being presented with only a situation, sans details or other texts?
• Did they learn that research does not require any searching?
• Did they learn that persuasion does not require actual facts, truthful statistics, reasoned examples?
• Did they learn that writing is a task you do without careful and honest thought?
• Did they learn that audience doesn't actually matter to a writer?

Although I don't write a lot of persuasive texts, I cannot recall an instance when I resorted to making up facts, reasons, examples, or other types of evidence to prove being for or against something.  Anywhere I have worked, such an approach would be classified as academic dishonesty, not a strategy for writing. Is this an apt measure that would allow you to feel confident that your child had developed the requisite skills, dispositions, and habits of mind to be able to and want to continue learning after high school? I would be disappointed if any of my child's teachers taught my son to write based on this limited sense of composing.

Now to be sure, this one task is not the whole of the two-day assessment.  Students also read two different texts, answer multiple choice and open ended response questions, and write another response, this time in 30 minutes to different prompt.  None of the work students do during this test would one characterize as examples of authentic work, the type one would expect do outside of a testing situation.  For example, when was the last time you tried to identify the "best" central meaning of a text you were reading? Or spent time identifying a specific literary term with a sentence from the text you were reading? Is being able to select the statement from a field of four that includes personification really an important indicator of "language arts literacy" prowess?


II. Inside English Teachers' Classes
A few months after students took the HSPA, I was visiting a high school English teacher's class.  This is the narrative I recorded after visiting:

Students in Jillian Honoria's English class are performing monologues based on their reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on the day I visit. Once seated I quickly noticed the life-size doll propped on a rolling desk chair.  Dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and scruffy boots, this class-made version of Raskolnikov, the protagonist from Crime and Punishment, sported wild black hair topped with a hat.  During the class period, the students would address him as they performed monologues written from the perspective of other characters from the text.  Dr. Honoria began class by having students compose a 10-minute journal entry.Within seconds, the room was silent, save the noise of everyone in the class writing. After some discussion about the texts students had written, the student performances began. The students’ performances demonstrated their significant understanding of the text.  Dr. Honoria directed students to choose a character other than the protagonist, compose a written monologue that would extend the narrative in some manner, and then perform the monologue in class.  One student stepped into the character of Sonya, Raskolnikov’s love, and set the scene for her monologue in Siberia, years after the novel’s close.  Seated on the tile floor of the classroom at Raskolnikov’s feet, with a basket of knitting, wearing fingerless gloves, she delivered a powerful six-minute monologue that highlighted her remembered relationship with Raskolnikov, her faith in God, and how each informed her understanding of love. It is this newly made knowledge she conveyed that I found so compelling.  Her performance was preceded by a young man who assumed the character of Alyona, the pawnborker who visits Raskolnikov from her place in hell, who is more insulted by his disrespect of the money he stole, than being murdered by him...

Or considered this synopsis of class work: 

In another humanities' course team taught by Ms. Carmen and Ms. Joseph, I watch as eleventh grade students present ten-minute presentations intended to persuade their peers to vote for their global citizenship project.  The students had determined five potential global projects and students working in teams created film-based multimedia projects. Students researched global problems that they believed they could adequately spend the year helping to solve, determined a project, created a film that would not only explain the project, but also potentially persuade an audience to adopt their project, and then embedded that film into a ten-minute presentation and presented in front of their peers, teachers, principal, assistant principals, and myself (Director of Curriculum).

III. Teacher Evaluation

In New Jersey, Governor Christie and Acting Department of Education Commissioner Chris Cerf want to base at least 50% of teacher evaluation with how well students do on tests, such as the HSPA. NJDOE reported:

Governor Christie today proposed and sent to the legislature a package of bills that gets at the root of the problems in New Jersey’s public education system by reforming the tenure system to demand results for New Jersey’s children in the classroom and reward the best and brightest teachers

The Governor believes that basing at least 50% of a teacher's evaluation on his/her students' standardized test performance, such as the HSPA is an apt indicator of successful teaching.  Keep in mind that currently NJ does not have any state-issued assessments that can be used to evaluate any teachers who teach K-2, teachers who do not teach mathematics or language arts in grades 3 - 8, or science in grades 4 and 8. At the high school level the state only has assessments that could be used to evaluate biology, algebra, and 11th grade mathematics and English teachers.

No one else.

Already there are gross examples of abusive and frankly idiotic tests being used to measure teacher effectiveness. One example comes from Colorado where 6-year-olds were subjected to an art test. 

On exam day in Sabina Trombetta's Colorado Springs first-grade art class, the 6-year-olds were shown a slide of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," a 1937 cubist portrait of the artist's lover, Dora Maar, with tears streaming down her face. It is painted in vibrant -- almost neon -- greens, bluish purples, and yellows. Explaining the painting, Picasso once said, "Women are suffering machines."
The test asked the first-graders to look at "Weeping Woman" and "write three colors Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable answers: blue, green, purple, and yellow.) Another question asked, "In each box below, draw three different shapes that Picasso used to show feeling or emotion." (Acceptable drawings: triangles, ovals, and rectangles.) A separate section of the exam asked students to write a full paragraph about a Matisse painting.

In a 29-year-career as an educator and as a working artist, I cannot think of anyone I have met who would subject children to such a test as a means to measure students' understanding of a state's fine arts standards.

IV. Effectiveness

To be sure, understanding teacher and administrator effectiveness is complex and needs to be determined locally.  It is a mistake to think student performance on a single measure is a reliable indicator of a teacher's capacity to teach. Further, we have additional concerns when the test content is so disconnected from the century we live in. Using the results from that same out of date state test to measure teachers like Dr. Honoria, Ms. Carmen and Ms. Joseph  who are engaging students in aesthetic and complex learning is foolish at best.