Cycle One Concluding Post: Reweaving the Fabric of Life

Hi everyone, and thank you for your work during the course of our first cycle together. There was a lot of wonderful writing--much of it quite personal, quite insightful, and quite moving. Also, there was some excellent blogging. For those of you new to the craft of blogging, I encourage you to pay attention to our peers in class who seamlessly weave their own ideas together with articles and videos from around the web. It makes for fruitful reading and thinking. Again, thank you to you all.

Before I move to a few of my own comments, let me first introduce you to our class. As in most virtual classroom communities, we are an eclectic and diverse bunch in terms of interests and life experiences. We have traveled much. I can’t begin to summarize it all here, but I can give you a brief overview of some of the salient professional characteristics of our class.

We are all teachers.

In terms of geography, we  are currently working in: Webster City, IA; Colorado Springs, CO; Raleigh, NC; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Houston, TX; and Baltimore, MD. We have several teachers from the east side of the state (with several of you located in central Detroit), and several from the west side. We also have several folks in the East Lansing area, in Battle Creek, and other locales in southern and mid-Michigan. More than a few of you have just finished interning at MSU. Congratulations to you especially!

In terms of subject matter and/or grade, we have: one early childhood teacher; nine elementary teachers; two middle school science teachers, one middle school music teacher, one middle school math teacher, and one middle school social studies teacher; and three high school English teachers, one high school Spanish teacher, one high school science teacher, and one high school math teacher.

Welcome to you all!!

Let’s start with a point that many of you made--success and failure are subjectively-determined. They have to do with the expectations placed upon us, and those that we place upon ourselves. There is nothing essential about failure, nothing inherently successful. It is our expectations and emotional investments that make them so.  As even our most reluctant students seem to implicitly understand, you can’t fail if you don’t care, and if you don’t try.

Nobody goes through life attempting to fail. But what follows from the prior point is that different students are going to define success differently. For some students, especially older ones, making the teacher look like a bumbling fool is success! For some students, especially younger ones, pleasing the teacher is success! However, as we all know, in neither case has anything necessarily educative taken place.

Education, or as John Dewey would call it, transformative growth, is rooted in a type of failure. That is, failure as a source and phase of an enveloping and emergent cycle of inquiry. As creatures, we desire equilibrium, balance, stasis. But we live in a world of change and transformation. We are driven to action--to thought, to communication--by disequilibrium in our environment. A problem or discomfort that is sensed before it is understood or named. Already, some might say, we are in an area of failure--breakdown, decomposition, dysfunction.

Our next moment is the moment of proper viewing. It is, says Dewey, a moment of taking aim. It is a melding of a desired future with life experience from the past, in the name of making sense out of the present. It is the “fusing” of “temporal horizons.” That is, it’s a coming-to-grips. It’s a making-sense. It’s already a step toward the overcoming of failure.

Inquiry is often inauthentic in school settings because this moment is glossed over. Yet this is, as Parker Palmer would note, the moment where fear can most easily creep in, and close down our ability to frame problems in the correct fashion. My fear of others, of the unknown, or of myself--it is those fears that divert a moment of potential growth into one of blind repetition--of an unceasing eternal reoccurrence of the same.

Inquiry is fulfilled when its results are communicated. When we share and listen. When we make meaning together. Where two people are in communion together, when experience becomes shared, I am of the opinion that failure is simply a superfluous concept--it simply is not a part of the picture.

The goal of education, says Dewey, is the ability to extract more joy from future experience. If we live our lives right, if we take failure in stride, and teach our children to do likewise, failure should not only spur us to action in the present, but allow us to live more wisely in the future.

Dewey reminds us that thoughtful inquiry always has a social dimension. It is done with and for others, as well as for ourselves. This is an important point for us as teachers to keep in mind.

Success might ultimately be measured by the consequences of our actions--do they make the world a better place?

So the challenge for us as teachers becomes:

• Can we imagine assessments and assignments that contribute value to society?
• Can we help students to see that their success is tied up in the healthy maintenance of the social and ecological fabric of life? That no one wins when the Earth is damaged, that there is no victor when others are hurt by our actions?
• Can we help students to develop the ability to see that the consequences of their actions may be quite far-reaching, and therefore they best approach their own accomplishments in a spirit of humility and grace?

Currently, as many of you have noted, the larger public, and in particular, politicians and policy-makers, are woefully out of touch with these existential realities of life--with the pain, the struggle and the joy. Our job, as teachers, on one level, is simply this: to remind them all of the way life really is.

Thank you for your work, and good luck on cycle two!