Cycle Three: Schools as “Embryonic Communities”

Welcome to Cycle 3!

In what ways can schools be considered communities? And what do I mean by calling them, “embryonic?”

We have a diverse set of readings this week--readings that cover the ground of professional learning communities for teachers, and small learning communities for students. We consider green schools and Finnish schools. Yet we also come across that most classic of texts by John Dewey, The School and Society. It is from Dewey that I borrow the phrase, “embryonic communities”--it is embedded in the quote that I used to launch the course syllabus and my own blog.

I talked in my last blog post about communities as tools for the management and organization of classroom life, as means through which we learn, and as desirable ends in their own right. This week, I’d like to extend that thinking by hi-liting for you some of the exciting work that is happening across the U.S., and globally, in terms of transforming schools into “embryonic communities.”

When Dewey talks about schools as communities, he is talking about making the school a site of production. Right now, many of our students live a life of consumption: They consume not only the products they are sold through the media, but the knowledge that is handed to them in textbooks and other formal curricular materials.

Consuming is not bad. But even a basic economics course will show you the need to produce as well--goods, service, and knowledge. Consumption without the ability to produce leads to bankruptcy, both financial and spiritual.

Dewey’s insight, developed at the University of Chicago Lab School--which he founded and helped run, with his wife, Alice, as the principal--was that “occupations” are the place where the needs of society and the talents of individuals come together. As such, they are important sites of authentic learning.

Now, Dewey was against the division of technical and liberal learning. He saw the two as intimately related, and best learned in tandem. So I don’t want you to think just about shop or home economics (as valuable as those classes are) or other forms of vocational or life-adjustment education. No, Dewey viewed these courses as sites for the most rigorous liberal education one could acquire.

The insight comes from the realization that all knowledge was once an experience had by someone, somewhere. What inquiry does (both scientific and humanistic) is record the conditions under which the experience was had, in hopes of making it understandable, even replicable. If we view knowledge as potential experiences, ones that are shorn from their context, and given a logical organization, then it becomes our jobs as teachers to re-integrate that knowledge back into the everyday contexts of the world. Children can come to see the roots of knowledge in the everyday world.

Now good teachers have always done this. But Dewey tried to take this to a wholly other level. Look at this picture. Even today, this looks quite radical to me. I encourage you to read up on the Dewey Lab School at some point, or even just to search for pictures of the classroom on the web.

Dewey thought about the school as a site of production. Students learned French in the kitchen, biology in the garden, and mathematics in the shop. They learned history as they attempted to shear sheep and use the wool to weave clothing (history, for Dewey, was the study of how people supported themselves and their communities).

This is a quick sketch, and, of course, not completely accurate. The students in Dewey’s school spent time on subjects in isolation, and with a practice or drill approach. But the point was always, as much as possible, to return knowledge to its life roots, and to put it into an authentic context. It was to have students engage in the activities of the community, (re)solve the problems that the community faced--but all in simplified conditions, under the direction of adults. It was this simplification and guidance that led Dewey to call the school “embryonic.”

There is much exciting work today that draws upon this heritage. Indeed, the projects of Emily Pilloton, discussed in cycle 2, fit this mold well. Additionally, I would like to call attention to the work of garden educators all over the world, but in particular, to the amazing work of Alice Waters and the Edible Schoolyard project--where students grow and prepare food for the Berkeley School District. To my mind, this is a model of what the future of schooling can and should look like. Such projects enrich the child, the teacher, the school district, and the Earth. In this time of rising concern about childhood obesity and food safety, we could not ask for more.

Another project I’d like to hi-lite, and there are many exciting ones I could point you to, is Youthville Detroit. Unfortunately, this is not a public school, but is rather a space viewed as “enrichment.” Perhaps this type of learning space is too radical for some?

In any case, the idea is simple. Bring talented adults from the community together with kids, and let them work on socially-valuable projects in a safe and caring space. Consider this partial list of projects for the kids:

Robotics & Engineering
Introduces students to real-world engineering challenges by building and programming robots.

Peace Project
Leadership group that engages youth in anti-violence initiatives, community service projects, media projects and events that promote peace and community building.

Broadcast and print journalism
Members learn to write and produce stories that are aired on local TV, radio and YouTube.

Computer technology (graphics, animation, cartooning, game strategy and website design)

Working independently and in small groups, youth develop skills in graphic design, create web sites and personal web pages using Macromedia Dreamweaver and learn how to modify computer games using strategies, game development, and computer gaming skills.  In addition, participants learn how to draw anime\manga using Wacom tablets to develop their own comic book series and short animated film for play on DVD and CD-ROM formats. 

Digital photography
Participants learn to use Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software for Windows® and Mac to edit, enhance, organize, and share photographic images. 

Entertainment production (Video and TV)
Members work in a state-of-the-art production studio learning about writing, producing, interviewing, on-camera talent development, directing, lighting, studio and field camera use, video editing, audio production and more using the same equipment as industry professionals.

Music technology
Youth learn to create music using professional software programs.

Ceramics
Hands-on instruction in a ceramics lab learning ceramic techniques and creating various projects.

Fashion Design and Runway Modeling
Aspiring fashion designers and models explore their talents and creativity, learn about trends in the fashion industry and are introduced to careers in fashion, entrepreneurship, and retail marketing.

Mosaic First Stage Acting
Young artists are introduced to Mosaic Youth Theatre's brand of high-energy, high-standards, empowering and inspiring acting training.

Spoken Word Performance
An in house collective of aspiring poets, storytellers, and song writers.

Archery
Instruction on shooting techniques, safety, points of archery, and information about the history of archery and how to compete in tournament play. Youth have the opportunity to compete on a Junior Olympic Archery Team.

Our schools do already provide many of these same opportunities. So the point is not that most elementary or high schools are doing a bad job. No!! My point is simply that we have the means within our grasp to make schools into spaces that more resemble true communities, if one or two teachers can come together, with an inspiring principal, and a few community members. That’s all it took to start the Edible Garden!

So I hope, when you return to school in the fall, you will devote some time to thinking about how you can mine your community as a site for the learning of your students.

Cycle Two: Challenges and opportunities in building classroom communities

Welcome to Cycle 2!

Classroom community. It’s a word often on our lips, but what does it really mean? What makes a community a community? And is this possible in a classroom setting?

In the first place, I think we, as teachers, need to look inwardly and ask ourselves what we really imagine when we say the word, “community.” Too often, I find myself as a teacher thinking about community instrumentally--as a way to forward the teacher’s agenda; really, as a codeword for classroom management.

Some of our readings this week should help us be aware of the danger of organizing communities around what we perceive to be as the most convenient manner for us, the teacher, to teach. Tracking--as a form of classroom organization that posits it is easier to teach students who are all at the same level--is a practice that can have unintended consequences that are difficult to undo.

There is an organic coming-together in every community, one that cannot be forced. Tracking, when it assigns fixed levels of ability to students, and bases curriculum decisions on such assignations, becomes a tool too crude for the job. It seeks to eliminate the problem of human diversity by positing a single trait by which people can be grouped--intelligence. Yet the problem remains: for intelligence is fluid and contextual. Someone good at reading needs help in art; someone good at mechanics struggles in the study of civics; someone with a lot of interpersonal skills has a hard time reading expository text silently. Tracking, at its worst, simply ignores everything that a person is good at, and instead reduces the world to math and reading scores.

If learning communities are to flower, students certainly need to be able to come together based on their interests, their hopes, and yes, their abilities. They should be able to come together with their friends and their neighbors. As teachers, we should hope to provide differentiated opportunities in our classroom. This means that we seek to provide learning experiences, for as many of our students as possible, where that golden sweet spot arises--where the child’s interests, abilities, prior knowledge merge with the resources available in both the classroom context and the formal curricular materials. This rarely happens in a one-size-fits-all approach.

A final way to think about community--one that goes beyond community as management tool, and community as learning tool--is as an affective bond that creates a feeling of inclusion. In such a community, students and teachers come to care about each other, and in that caring, they begin to see their own well being tied up in the well being of others. In my mind, this is the most expansive and lovely way for us to think about community. It integrates the notions of community as management tool, and community as learning tool, but into a higher and greater good. It makes of community an end in itself, and the most educative force that our classrooms might invoke.

Such a community, ideally, moves beyond the formation of groups around similarities--whether those be of race, social class, gender, ability, or any of the many other ways we as humans deny love and respect to each other. In such a community, true hospitality begins to emerge, as we open ourselves up to living with and learning from those who have been strangers to us.

As Jim Garrison writes about Tony, a student who had come to be marginalized by a classroom reality focused only on his inabilities, rather than his strengths:

We do know this much, though: There is only one Tony, he has unique potential, and only moral perception recognizes the unique, irreplaceable, and one-time-only characteristics of persons and contexts. In the end, only moral perception can see beyond the actual into Tony’s best possibilities. It is a prophetic art.

As teachers, we must seek a form of prophecy, one based on the conviction that each child is absolutely unique and irreplaceable--the view that each child has something to give to the world that no other person is capable of giving, and that it is our job, along with the community we create within our classrooms--to teach the Tonys of the world to find within them what their true vocation is.

Cycle One: Interpretations of the meaning and causes of failure

Welcome to Cycle 1!

What does it mean to fail? We use that question to open the course.

Now, despite the potential to start us off on a depressing note, I think it is important that we do so.

To begin with, this course asks us to think about equity. To my mind, this means confronting failure. It means exploring why things don’t always go so well. It means confronting, I think, our own limits as teachers, as well as the limits of children and parents. It means exploring what is possible, what is reasonable, and what is to be hoped for.

The last ten years have taught us, more than ever before, to be scared of failure. We have been taught to expect punishment, of some sort, to come along with the various euphemisms we have now invented as codes for failure--AYP, VAM, ACT.

Failure is a natural part of life. Indeed, one day our bodies will “fail,” and we will pass from this Earth. To speak of this type of failure should invoke no shame. Only a confrontation with ourselves. Some of our readings in this first cycle will take, therefore, what I will call an “existential perspective” on failure--that is, failure as part and parcel of living, learning and loving.

However, there is another, darker side to failure--failure as it is produced within and through institutions. Our readings will also explore this, to varying degrees.

A big part of my research involves asking people to recount the most significant moments in their schooling careers. I sometimes get stories of unadulterated joy and pleasure. More often, I hear stories of struggle, conflict, and even tragedy. Very few of these stories involve the actual learnings of the curriculum. Rather, they are about the implicit, unintended learnings that kids can, if we are not extremely careful, take away from school--

•  “No one likes me.”
• “I’m ugly.”
•  “I’m stupid.”

These unintended learnings are tricky matters. As teachers and parents, we work as hard as we can to prevent such messages from going through. But, inevitably, I think, some of them do.

The question then becomes: What can we do to prevent such messages from entering into our children’s mind? Because, we know as teachers and parents--damaging labels are hard to undo. My hope is that the cycle’s readings will help you in this regard as well.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that there are a whole set of issues about why kids fail that I leave untouched here. Here are just a few of them: extreme poverty, unequal resources for schools, physical abuse, mental illness. While I do not want you to forget about these issues, I do not think they can dominate the conversation, either. I encourage you to explore the tricky line between the material and the spiritual throughout this course.

In conclusion, I want to remind you that, as you construct your post for this cycle, you may reference any (or all) of the articles or videos listed on our syllabus. But mostly, I want you to write about your own experiences relating to the guiding questions for the cycle!! Help us see how you have lived out the question of failure in your own living, learning and teaching, the complexities and paradoxes you see in this topic, and ultimately, how you tend to act in the world to resolve them.

So, I wish you enjoyable learning. Please have your posts up by July 7. Please read over and comment upon another person’s blog by July 8. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

All the best,

Kyle