When A School Is About Learning

Is your school about this?

I am just back from EDUCON, where a lot of the talk was about new ways to learn, the new era of education to come, the loneliness of being an innovator in a largely innovation-averse sector.

One of the things I came away with was that we don’t still, after all these years, have good models for talking about what a highly effective school looks like and feels like, from a learner’s point of view. (And I mean all learners–not just kids.)  So while I propose, as a given, a short list: the child/student is at the center of the enterprise, and the student is most important person in the school’s dynamic–here are additions to the list–a few other attributes of a highly effective “learning” school.  These have been developed after years of culture-watching in breakthrough districts, in writing about innovative school models, and in working with leadership teams now engaged in real innovation.

1.  The adults in the building are passionately engaged in learning.  In my experience, when the adults in a school are really fired up learners–passionate about their own quirky projects and deeply interested in their students’ learning–a school tends to be high performing and highly effective.  Learning more about how kids learn, learning about their own practices as teachers or administrators, learning about stuff that interests them, are consuming passions of the adults in these schools.  That passionate learning culture transfers directly to kids.

2.  School leaders model their own excitement about learning.  In meetings, in walkthroughs, on Twitter, in their own blogs, school leaders talk openly about what they are learning, how they make mistakes, and what excites them about their work.  Through this modeling, learning is regarded as pleasurable–not a chore to be gotten through, a checklist to be completed, orsomething to be excused from for good behavior.  The culture highly values expressions of learning–people are fired up about hearing what someone else is curious about, what they just read online, how they could put this together in a project! How that reminds them of something that they read about 3 years ago and let me go look it up online, no here come with me and let’s look at it together.

3.  Content is negotiated. Teachers and students together begin to negotiate what is taught and how it is taught, with increasing emphasis on independence and interdependence between learners.  Rigor–the drive towards excellence–is increasingly driven by students as they become more and more accomplished at their work, and how to meet the needs of the accountability environment begins to be something shared by students and teachers.

4.  Difference is welcomed.  Cognitive, social class, ethnic background differences are welcomed.  Leaders and teachers see difference as making the school stronger and more healthy, like any biologically-diverse community.  What this means in the adult community is that adults also get to be different from each other–and some adults are allowed to be better at the work than others.

5.  Practice is public. Adults see each other practice their work, and they talk openly about the issues they are working on.  How can you get better at your work if you are not in discussion with other practitioners about the complex business of teaching?

6.  Adults share a common understanding of what powerful teaching and learning look like in their building. In highly effective learning schools, adults share explicit languageabout powerful teaching.  They are able to describe where their work falls on Blooms taxonomy, they have ways of talking about how kids are developing expertise, they share vocabulary about cognitive complexity.  Examples of excellence are shared.

6.  Mistakes are regarded as feedback. There is a mastery orientation towards learning, in which it is understood that learning is developmental, requires practice, study, persistence–but that ultimately everyone can get a lot better at what they are trying to do.  That means messing up and trying again.

7.   Driven to be the best. George Couros at EDUCON spoke about being a very competitive principal–that he wants to be the best, and he wants his staff to be the best.  A great principal is not afraid of greatness in others, and knows that truly brilliant staff members will help make others more brilliant. In less effective schools, administrators or other teachers often are threatened by exceptional practice in one of their colleagues, and strong practitioners have to hide their expertise, skills and knowledge.  (We call this, “the land of nice,” where no one can be better than anyone else.)  In a highly-effective learning school, expertise is welcomed and prized, and adults openly seek out the expertise of their colleagues.

Many teachers and school leaders unfortunately, just aren’t very interested in learning.  They seem to regard it as a chore, a way to force kids to behave, something that has to be done to kids to get them ready for adult life. They lack intellectual curiosity about research in the field, breakthroughs in cognitive research.  My belief is that until teachers become deeply interested in their own work, and are driven to make their practice better and better, school will not really be about learning for anyone.  It will be a chore, it will lack magic.  It will be controlled by others.

What does your school look like?  Is it a highly effective learning environment for you?  Why or why not?

This is cross posted at Cooperative Catalyst.

Core Standards, Life Purpose

The Dream for everyone?

Reading the turmoil around adoption of core national standards in the last couple of days, I’m back again in a fundamental observation about education.  When we talk about what teachers should do in their classrooms, and what schools should “produce” in students, what we’re really talking about is what qualities and attributes kids need to have meaningful lives.  What do we consider valuable?  What makes a life meaningful?

The hardest project in my education course is on the purpose of education.  Why do we do education?  What is the purpose of schools?  What my students are really being asked is, what is the purpose of life?

How do we, as Americans, answer this question?  In lieu of better and more fulsome narratives, we have largely allowed the discourse to go this way:  meaningful lives are had through intense competition with other people, besting them, making a lot of money, and living in the suburbs, driving an immense car, and having a lot of stuff.  We need a new American dream?

Alfie Kohn makes this point when he describes how obsessively our educational reform discourse over that past 15 years has focused on global competitiveness, as if the greatest end result for all children is to be employed as a corporate gladiator in a globally competitive multinational.  “Finally, what’s the ultimate goal here? It’s not to nourish curiosity, help kids to fall in love with reading, encourage critical questioning, or support a democratic society. Rather, the mantra is “competitiveness in a global economy” — that is, aiding American corporations and triumphing over people who live in other countries.

Looking at kids only as future potential employees does a terrible disservice to them.  And yet I hear this dialog everywhere, in almost every school I am in.

How do you change The Dream?

How do we have impact on The Dream?

Would You Report An Incompetent Colleague?

A piece in yesterday’s New York Times describes the thin white line among doctors in reporting “incompetent or significantly impaired” colleagues.  Two thirds of  doctors surveyed said they “completely agree” that they should report all instances of incompetence to a professional society, hospital or clinic.

"Last Day" (Tabitha Russell photo on Flickr)

A profession defines itself and drives its own professional culture by insistence on widely-normed levels of practioner competence, ethical standards, and care for its clients.  In the early 20th century the American Medical Association strategically developed understandings of professional practice, in part to keep regulators out of their business, to drive up fees for service, and to establish greater technical competence around the work.

Do we have such standards in education?  Are we self-policing? Would you report a colleague whom you considered incompetent as a teacher, abusive or a bully with children, or impaired in their ability to perform their duties in your building?

What would happen if you did?

What do we need to do to make teaching a profession, rather than an avocation or a job?

Principals Say: “I Don’t Know How To Do That”

"That's not what I'm trained to do."

(This article appeared in Education Week July 14, 2010)

Recently I observed a group of high-powered principals vigorously engaged in a serious, district-wide improvement plan.  The leaders at the table, some relatively new, a few long timers who managed to tough it out during a recent superintendent transition, were having a moment of truth as they reflected on the past year. “This is like when you turn over in bed in the morning, and there’s your partner.  No makeup, no toothbrush, no mouthwash.  It is what it is,” said a member of the teaching and learning team from the central office, setting up the discussion.

Because there was a fair degree of trust in the room, principals started laying it on the line.  They talked about their sense of unfairness at being asked to change their ways of doing business.  “I resented you guys, because you were treating us like we were broken.  We didn’t see ourselves as broken,” said one principal.

“I really didn’t understand what you were doing, I couldn’t see the plan you had in your heads for how we were supposed to do the work in our buildings,” offered another leader.

But mostly, principals expressed their deep sense of uneasiness, and plain lack of comfort with the new thing they were being asked to do as instructional leaders:  to look closely at instruction in classrooms, while it was actually going on, and offer fine grained,  non-evaluative feedback to teachers on how to make learning more powerful for students.

“I’m used to being a building manager.  Being an instructional leader is very confusing to me,” one principal said, jumping in.

“Being out in classes, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing.  Oh my gosh I’m supposed to know what I’m seeing.  I just don’t feel confident.  We’re focusing on students now.  I’m not trained to do that.  I feel like a blank slate.”

“It’s new. I’m trying to do it all.  Gathering evidence around instruction is a different way of assessing.  I couldn’t identify instruction.  I don’t know how to do that.”

Hearing accomplished principals talk this way, so honestly and expressive of their real truth–was a breakthrough, a moment of transformation.   In the world they came from, being in classrooms meant ten minutes twice a year, in which you checked off “whether the bulletin boards were neat,” and “whether kids were raising their hands,” as one principal said.  ”I’m an administrator with a Blackberry. Good students comply.  Where I’m from is that I get rewarded for keeping order and calm, and producing test scores.”  And the new world of instructional leadership is saying, “Where you’re from is too limited a vision.  Where is the student from?”

In the old paradigm, students were almost like pieces of furniture: something to be sanded, filed and nailed, to be crafted, but not real individuals in the room, co-creating meaning around the work of learning.   What these brave principals were saying was that it was not natural, not intuitively obvious for them to bend down and talk to students at their desks, to ask them what they were doing right now, why they were doing it, and to try to understand how this engaged them as a learners (or not).  Moving away from the teacher as the center of the action, to the subtle, sometimes contradictory, evidence-based world of the student as knower, was hard.[1] It wasn’t comfortable.  They didn’t like it.

It was important.

There is huge, truly significant sea change afoot in the institution of schooling.  Much the transformational reform work of the past couple of decades, from readers’ and writers’ workshop, to schools for all kinds of minds, to instructional rounds, the explosion of technology that cracks open learning, to fMRIs that tell us what students’ brains looks like when they are taking multiple choice tests, is trending in the same direction:  putting student learning at the center of the institution.   How do kids construct meaning around that writing prompt?  How do students understand school when they are asked to complete worksheets for 6 hours a day?  What does it mean to a child when she is not allowed to Tweet someone to ask them a question in class?  Who has authority in thinking when a teacher relies on a textbook as the source of knowledge in the classroom throughout the course of year?  These were all questions the principals were pondering, some said, for the first time in their professional lives.

If you are willing to consider the proposition that the institution of school, as it has been constructed in America, has largely evolved to serve the economic, social, and biorhythmic needs of adults, then putting student learning experiences–the intricate, complex and paradoxical work of learning–at the center of the institution, is nothing short of a revolution.  It is a Galilean upending, knocking the geocentric adult out of the center of the universe and placing students at the heart of it.  The factory model must be dismantled, widgets must be interviewed.  Students become the sun, and the source of energy from which light and meaning flow.   It turns the conventional paradigm of school upside down; it changes the orbital path of the institution, and dramatically alters the specific gravity of classrooms.

For many years my outlier work has been listening to students talk about creating meaning around learning within the institution of school–checking out my assumptions, making sure I circle back to talk with students to see if I got it right, querying them about whether what I think they said is what they actually meant.  (When in school always carry a notebook; write fast; wear stretchy pants; have snacks.)  Students are glad to talk to me, although at first surprised, because adults so rarely ask them about their experiences of learning in school.  (Initially, they wonder if you are for real.)  Asking students what they are learning, and how they are learning, and listening to them, in as much detail as possible, is always a reminder of how much they know about the game of school.  Powerfully, with precision, what students tell me most often is how bored they are, how underchallenged they are, how deadened by school routines they are, and how infrequently they are enlivened by their work.

So when teachers and administrators complain that students are bored in school, unmotivated and underperforming, I say, “Can you really blame them?”  If you were asked to do what they do, wouldn’t you be bored? Have you sat with them at their desks and done what they are asked to do?

The principals around the table filled me with hope.  Schools will only get better when adults become trained to see the institution from the perspective of students, and to value and honor that perspective as equally important to their own.  There is an acculturation and training function to schools, of course, a passing on of values, beliefs and images, but students are active co-constructors of those meanings, whether adults acknowledge this or not.  Our work now is to formalize this co-construction, to move our attention towards the student and his or her experiences of school, and school learning.  “I don’t know how to do this,” the principals said.

We know that great learners begin by being unafraid, unafraid to express what they don’t understand.  These courageous principals were facing these new challenges of instructional leadership by saying, “I’m willing, but I don’t know how.”

Let’s begin?

How do we change the paradigms of schooling, so that student experiences of learning are at the center of our work?  We practice doing it.

We all need practice.   Let’s begin?

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[1] For a brilliant description of the complex the work of “seeing” in the classroom is, see Nuthall, G. (2001).  “The cultural myths and realities of teaching and learning,” Jean Herbison Lecture, University of Canterbury, December 2001.

Pleasure In Learning Is the Ultimate Judo Move?

Pleasure. The ultimate judo move?

In a recent presentation about pleasure in learning at the AERO conference, a group of us talked about how we moralize pleasure in learning in our culture.

Learning cannot be important, powerful, or “worthy,” unless is it “hard”:   boring, stressful, and potentially shaming.

Maybe pleasure is the ultimate judo move in bringing down the Industrial model of education?
Judo (Japanese for “the gentle way”) emphasizes winning in combat by using your opponent’s weight and strength as weapons against him, while preserving your own mental and physical energy. It embodies the principle that good technique can win out over sheer strength. In a judo match, a slight person can overcome a heavier, stronger opponent. There are no kicks or punches. Instead, after a bow to begin the match, players score points by “throwing” their opponent or by using a hold-down, a choke, or an armlock.

Pleasure is ultimately hard to resist.

The slides tell the story.

What do you say?

Would you like more pleasure in learning?

The Inevitable Revolution

The revolution is here.  Bring on the revolution!

In what may be one of the most comprehensive, balanced, clear-eyed descriptions of the educational revolution we are currently slashing through, Allan Collins’ and Richard Halverson’s Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology (Teachers College Press 2009), based on the authors’ history of education reform course they taught together at Northwestern, describes better than almost any book I’ve read what the new world of education–as opposed to schooling–may look like in the future.  Miguel and Rosa, a Mexican American couple in LA who are concerned about the negative environment of their local elementary school, decide to homeschool their two girls using inexpensive laptops, neighborhood networks, and a curriculum devised by a Mexican American educational association; high school students get the credits and coursework they need from Colorado Online Learning or Florida Virtual School, without ever setting foot in a conventional high school building (as hundreds of thousands are now doing); Media Bridges, a community media center in Cincinnati provides access to online media for the neighborhood and acts a learning center for adults of all ages.

Without the usual sense of personal vitriol and working through their own issues, the authors lay out a straightforward, compelling case that we are involved in an educational transformation the likes of which we have not seen since the last educational revolt in the mid-nineteenth century, when Horace Mann traipsed around New England on horseback proselytizing for common, compulsory schooling for all.

THE KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION

Not requiring horseback proselytizing, the KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION is happening before our eyes, right now, whether we recognize it or not.

“People around the world are taking their education out of school and into homes, libraries, internet cafes, workplaces where they can decide what they want to learn, when they want  to learn, and how they want to learn.  These stories challenge our traditional model of education as learning classrooms.  These new learning niches use technologies to enable people of all ages to pursue learning on their own terms”  (p. 3).

With the clarity and attention to the evidence that only years of teaching a course on the subject can give you, Collins and Halverson describe the inevitability of the new era, a revolution brought on by the invention of new tools. “[The internet] and computer…greatly extend the power of the ordinary mind in the same way the power tools of the Industrial Revolution extended the power of the ordinary body” (p. 11).  As personalized, customized, just-in-time, interactive education become the new model for learning for citizens and students, the decoupling of education from schooling transforms the landscape.  It changes just about everything.

If a customized local learning network offers a viable alternative to the neighborhood elementary school; high school students can get credit for coursework without attending high school; and exorbitantly expensive, four-year residential colleges and universities no longer guarantee high-status employment and advancement, then why are we in the game?  Regular citizens, non-revolutionary folks, plain-thinking sensible people are increasingly wondering whether the hierarchical, batch processing, mass production, certified-at-school industrial model actually makes sense in our new world.  Signs of the revolution are everywhere, and cracks in the foundation of the mass production model of education grow more glaring everyday.

TENSIONS/CHANGES IN KNOWLEDGE

This presents terrible dilemmas for the conventional schools, which are built on a model of information scarcity, and their legitimacy to certify knowing.  With our new networking tools, and new access to information, who defines knowledge, how it is produced, and who is authorized to certify it, are increasingly up for grabs.  (The book describes a 15-year-old boy who becomes one of the most popular legal advisors at an online law site because of the clarity and straightforwardness of his answers to legal questions.)  New ways of knowing–interactive, networked, organized by communities of interest, are constantly changing.  Fluid, lifelong learning poses fundamental threat to modal classroom practice in the Industrial model.  Information abundance is the enemy of control.

Back in the classroom, with these new tools come new assertions of independence from learners, who simply don’t need old-fashioned kinds of command and control classrooms and teachers, and who are skeptical about the paradigms of knowledge built into hieracrichcal model. “Young people are becoming less and less willing to learn what somebody else thinks is best.  They want to decide what is of value to them.  They are beginning to demand that they decide what they need to learn.  [Technological] enthusiasts believe that the ultimate effect of customization technologies will be to break the lockstep of school curricula”  (p. 17).   As education decouples from schooling, and the learner, along with his or her community, “design” the courses of instruction, instead of being imposed by the state, formerly docile consumers will walk away from the old schoolhouse, no matter how attractively it is reconfigured, and no matter how classroom instruction is tarted up for more appeal.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO TEACHERS/THE PROFESSION

This loss of control poses terrible dilemmas for educational institutions, but is especially difficult for teachers. “Schooling is built on the notion that the teacher is an expert, whose job is to pass on his or her expertise to students.  The legitimacy of traditional classroom instruction rests on the teacher’s expertise as the source of legitimate knowledge…Computers act to dilute the authority that teachers have in classrooms, especially the authority over what constitutes legitimate knowledge” (p. 44, 41).  Because teachers have been rewarded and expected to, “share their expertise, in environments where technology is used heavily…there are strong institutional and professional pressures that make giving up this control feel like dereliction of duty” (p. 42).  “Teachers need this authority in order to justify why schoolwork is important for student to succeed in life.  Computers can only serve to undermine their authority further.” As the authors reflect, “There are deep incompatibilities between the demands of the new technologies and the traditional school” (p. 6) that cannot be easily or superficially resolved.  We are at a crossroads,  whether we acknowledge it or not.

Those dependent on the institution for employment as a way of life cannot help but react with panic, condemnation, and pain.  Or as one teacher at a conference I recently attended asked:  “What will we do with all the teachers we don’t need anymore?  What are they going to do?”

While the book is quick to say that great teachers do much more than simply command and control, the problem of how the teaching profession redefines itself, and understands new lifeways and new definitions of the work, is increasingly the talk of forward-thinking practitioners.

But the challenge to the very heart of the insitution remains strong, vigorous, constant.  It is not going away.

AS THE OLD MODEL DIES, IT CLINGS MORE VOCIFEROUSLY TO OLD DEFINITIONS OF WHAT IT DOES

Schools have repelled revolutions before of course; their structures are especially designed for it.  The K-12 institution of schooling is particularly robust, an accreted set of interlocking, self-sustaining practices, structures and beliefs that have managed to repulse threats in the past.  ”When complex systems are in equilibrium, changing one part of the system usually results in other parts pushing back to restore the initial balance” (p. 34).  The usual responses to innovation in school have been condemnation of the new technology, to defang and co-op it; or to marginalize or “boutique” it–all responses to the changing world of the learner that can be witnessed in education blogs everyday.  But the profound cultural and social incompatibilities between the old world of knowledge and learning and the new one, make simple co-opting of the technology, or marginalization of it, difficult, Collins and Halverson emphasize.  The skills teachers had and have are less desirable, and the environments in which they exercise them more poorly adapted to contemporary culture.

In a last gasp of empire, educational policy makers, state boards of education, teachers unions, and other authorizing bodies have responded to these threats by tightening definitions of what it does–ironically just as technology has OPENED the world to the learner.  “The standards movement can be seen as a conservative check on rampant customization” (p. 94) this text notes.  The wind shear for learners is intense, as one student recently commented to me, “More and more of what I have to do in school looks nothing like what I’ll be asked to do when I’m working.”

More rigidly codifying standardized bodies of knowledge, more intensive and punitive standardized testing, more arduous graduation requirements, and more insistence on school-based certification, are desperate responses by an imperiled insitution, one that fears for the very heart of its legitimacy.    Like the clueless British Parliament passing the Stamp Act on weary colonists, the standards movement is an attempt to narrow options for teaching and presentations of learning, and to measure learning through standardized tests, just as consumers have begun to figure out that they can get what they need in terms of learning without schooling.  “To the degree that technology encourages students to go off on their own direction, it is in direct conflict with the standardized assessment…So it in the interest of schools to strictly limit the use of computers…” (p. 45).  Learners of all kinds are simply going to walk away from the institution as we know it, as empire clings more vociferously to old definitions of what it does.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Although a little schizophrenic on whether or not schools are going to continue to exist for much  longer in their present form (the book suffers from two-author- syndrome, in which the authors contradict themselves on critical points), overall they say that we are stumbling and hurtling forward in a revolution that will increasingly dislocate education from schooling as we know it.

What will the revolutionized institution look like? Will it be an institution at all?  While we have glimmerings here, the real value of this book is describing where we are NOW:  the deep cultural and structural tensions between the old and new eras; the ways in which those associated with the institution cannot help but react with panic, condemnation, and pain; and how NCLB and the movement towards standards may be a last gasp of empire, an attempt to control what has fundamentally become uncontrollable–the way people learn.

Who will benefit from the revolution?  The authors don’t want to go on record too much about that, although at least they address this issue, unlike many technologists who can only see the upside of a new personalized learning era.  They describe the differentials in access to technology that are deeply a part of American society, and the construction of cultural capital as it relates educational attainment, and the tendency towards commercialization of educational options that ultimately tend to serve those who are most privileged and already connected to American culture.  They briefly unpack the vision of wholly personalized learning, which may overemphasize careerism and individualism, but given the highly competitive nature of most American classrooms, it is hard to see how serious a claim individualism is.  (Also, the new vision of education rests on interactivity and finding and creating communities of interest.)

Read this book.  It obviates the need to grind through many previous arguments about what is happening in education now, and is a platform to talk about what should happen next–what to do given the changing conditions for learning.

What are the new metaphors for schooling we need now?  How can we create a new story about education that can help people in the business make the transition?

That’s what I’m thinking about now.

Two Perspectives on Educational Change

Talking Too Much Amongst Ourselves?  Two Perspectives on Educational Change

A conversation between Kirsten Olson and Ron Miller

This article appears in the Spring 2010 issue of Education Revolution:  The Magazine of Educational Alternatives (#60).

Kirsten and Ron talk it over.

This article began as an invitation from Ron to Kirsten.  Write about something you’ve learned from the recent publication of the book Wounded By School. Kirsten Olson , educational activist and teacher who is a longtime student of deschooling and 1960s “radical” critics, ended up reflecting on the “state of the movement,” as seen through the lens of attending the AERO Conference in Albany in June 2009.   That AERO meeting was Kirsten’s first.  Ron Miller, activist, editor, and movement leader, helped put the current movement together.

Ron and Kirsten share a deep interest in the movement’s roots, and now are friends thinking about how to work together.  (The picture is taken on Kirsten’s porch, when Ron visited in March 2010.) Thus the article became a dialog, an opportunity to go deeper.

The conversation is really about:  what is your theory of change for creating real transformation in education right now?

Ron and Kirsten invite readers to go online to comment about this piece!. There is already a lively discussion going on there.  We’d like to keep the conversation visible and open to all as we think through some of these issues.

Kirsten:

For me, attending the AERO conference for the first time had a deep personal meaning and importance that is hard to describe.  Having read, talked and thought about the radical transformation of schooling for so long, and been deeply in the words of John Holt, Ivan Illich, and George Dennison for decades, I was, in a sense, looking back as I looked forward.  What had the movement become?  Who were we?  And how were we fashioning ourselves in relation to our stormy and important philosophical past?

With my 16-year-old son Sam along as a co-adventurer and co-participant, we were eager and unanxiously expectant (as the late Ted Sizer used to say) as headed off to Albany.  Coming off a long spring of book talks, I hoped this gathering would be unlike many I attend; less hairspray and fewer powerpoints, at a minimum.

I was not disappointed.  NO hairspray!  Powerpoints be damned!  The first night we catapulted to Patch Adams, and met Mary Leue.  We ran into more folks from free schools than we thought would have the budget to be there.  Sam signed up for the talent show (why hadn’t he brought his mandolin?), we met great folks for every meal with no planning at all, and saw how children formed their own culture on site, at the pool, and did a lot of important playing while their parents attended sessions.   From these wonderfully shaggy-headed kids, to the folks in their 70s, 80s and 90s, who had lived the movement and who were greeting (what were in effect) members of their families, I felt and heard Ron’s quiet reflection, “This is my tribe.”  The sense of educational adventurers, critics of mainstream education, often much too alone, coming together in a place where they didn’t have to explain anything to anyone, was palpable.  People were coming home.   Let the mandolins pluck our joy!

Yet at a deeper level, my time at AERO also troubled me.  Not because I wasn’t stimulated and refreshed, welcomed and intrigued—but because from my point of view, the homey intimacy of the meeting—the sense that everyone knew everyone else, and even more important pehaps, what everyone else was going to say, left me uneasy.  The very clannishness of the meeting—the sense that we gather together but once a year–left me wondering:  what is the right balance between the beloved professional family reunion, and the galvanizing-ourselves-to-be-activists-in-the-work, we’ve got to kick this thing up to the next level?  How do we know, and who is going to tell us?

Ron:

This is an important question, Kirsten. You are asking us to reflect more carefully on the character, and ultimate goals, of an educational alternatives movement. Are we even a “movement” at all, or an isolated tribe or clan? I think you’re right to seek a balance between camaraderie and critical inquiry. Since we are outside the mainstream, working in our various ways to significantly change how society thinks about education, we do need this comfortable place among allies and friends to recharge our enthusiasm, to reassure ourselves that we’re not completely off the deep end. However, if all we do is congratulate each other for belonging to our exclusive club, we’re not going to build a very effective movement.

Even so, I do think there is more diversity at the AERO gatherings than you’re acknowledging here.  We don’t always know what a workshop presenter or a colleague with whom we’re chatting is going to say, and it is not uncommon to disagree, to challenge, to raise hard questions. My experience of these conferences is that the collegial atmosphere enables us to engage in intense, probing conversations without falling into the sort of rancorous, ideologically purist disputes that plague too many progressive movements.  Surely there’s great value in that; indeed, I’d say we have something to teach these others about process. I agree with you, though, that we could be more deliberate, more explicit, about galvanizing the movement by exploring potentially prickly issues.

Kirsten:

Good point about many progressivist movements Ron.   I agree that collegiality and respectfulness leads us all to be able to consider deeper questions–and intimacy is important, too.  On this note, I was also really struck by how empowered most attendees were in their learning.  As one session I attended veered dangerously into teacher-centeredness and academic talk, members of the audience took charge and insisted, “Let us ask questions about what you are saying.”  “Slow down.”  If only all the audiences I work with were that activist and sure of themselves!   It was good to see what belongingness, a sense of being home, and lots of practice with managing your own learning, engenders.

But in spite of this activist stance towards learning, what ideas were actually in play intellectually? What important questions–like about the nature of authority, who has traditionally been served by alternative education, and the purposes of education–were being discussed?  How was the future of the movement being framed and galvanized?  In spite of Ira Shor, and Debbie Meier, and many good old time free school founders, I attended only one session (I couldn’t attend them all) and one lecture where really new questions about the political stance of the alternative school movement came up, and these discordant ideas seemed to be greeted with some sense of dis-ease.  (Uncomfortable shifting in chairs, a casting about for “who is authorized” to speak in the audience.)

In many sessions, everyone appeared comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, too practiced in confirming the rightness of each other’s opinions and outlooks for this to actually be a lively exchange of ideas.  (Many of the stories had been told before—many times before—session presenters’ ideas were frequently familiar to audiences, and there were few probing questions.)  Someone mentioned to me at a lunch one day that “the same people speak every year,” and I was shocked.  How could this be, when there are so many swirling, shifting opinions out in the educational reform world—when there is so much to talk about?  How could the organization be forming so few alliances and failing to learn from the world out there, even from folks with whom it does not agree?

Ron:

I agree that the “political stance” (or better, stances) of the educational alternatives movement is not explicitly defined. The discomfort you observed may have reflected the deliberately non-political orientation of many in this movement. Before we can decide what our political stance is, we need to ask whether an educational movement does, or should, contain a political element at all.   If “politics” means challenging the practices of powerful social institutions, activists can do so directly, through lobbying, organizing, demonstrating, and voting—or indirectly, by going around the institutions and cultivating new ideas and new practices. The “A” in AERO, after all, stands for alternative; most of us are not trying to reform existing systems but to bypass them, gain a fresh start, build something new.  We are not interested, as a movement, in conventional politics. We tend to see such organizing and struggling as the less direct approach—as being remotely removed from the lives of children (to borrow Dennison’s phrase) or the lives of families and communities.

Some of those swirling opinions about educational reform, then, are not especially relevant to the work that many of us are doing. I’m glad that courageous educators are challenging the system from within, putting political and moral pressure on society to change its schools. They are our allies and some of them participate in AERO conferences; they bring good ideas and fresh energy, and I think many of them are inspired by what they encounter among us. Yet I think the predominant strategy among folks in this network is countercultural activism. As Paul Goodman and Dennison said about the free school movement in the 1960s, the value of radical alternatives is that we are building the world we want, now; we are not interested in struggling with the entrenched system, accepting compromise and defeat in the (usually dashed) hope that the system will change someday.

To whatever extent it is true that the same people speak every year (and I don’t think it’s a fair judgment), we need to remember that this is still a marginal movement; there really is not a large pool of potential speakers who understand its core principles and would inspire this group. Still, I accept your point that maybe we should look less for inspiration and more for a “lively exchange of ideas.”

Kirsten:

Ron, I find myself thinking what the great Paulo Freire said frequently:  “All education is political.”  All attempts to educate are about engendering a view about what is important, what is morally valuable, what is admirable, what makes life meaningful–what we’d fight for.  So I’m confused about how any orientation towards education would not, at some level, involve a political stance.   And what is indirect activism?  Does that mean no confrontation with the mainstream?  I’m worried about how marginalizing that stance is.  And in my own work I think a lot about the millions of kids who are actually in school right now, who don’t really have an alternative to being in conventional public school because, for most kids, alternatives aren’t abundant.  How do we square their lives with an indirect stance towards the institution that coerces them around their thoughts, behavior and learning choices, and criminalizes them if they do not attend?

So I think it’s important for us, as a movement, to talk openly about these things.   These topics should be on the table.   Because as important as confirming belongingness is (and from my own biography I understand how important that is, when we feel misunderstood, marginalized and misrepresented in a mainstream discourse), shouldn’t challenging each other towards political and social action, and the further honing of one’s ideas, positions and thinking, also be a part of the agenda?  And more to the point, from my vantage—what political actions and alliances was the conference helping members to form?   Whose voices are NOT being heard?  And isn’t there a new, younger generation of alternative schoolers who should be at the center, blogging and networking and challenging?  They need to claim authorization to speak.

A close colleague, a professor of education and a long-time observer of the politics of educational reform, recently called the alternative school movement politically “invisible.”  In spite of its protestations of growth and far greater impact, in comparison to the charter school movement (which also seeks to disrupt and challenge the monopoly of public school education), alternative education is a very, very quiet sister—hardly a voice at the table.  If the movement, which has much to say about the nature of learning, authority and consent, and about conceptions of the student, is to become intellectually and politically influential, how is it engaging in broader, more mainstream conversations about how school and learning should look in the future?   If the alternative school movement is to become more than “isolated countercultural enclaves with little influence on mainstream educational thinking and policy,” as you wrote in “A Brief History of Alternative Education,” how will this happen?

Ron:

I spent about twenty years trying to give this movement a voice at the table. I finally concluded that what I (and most of my colleagues in this movement) most deeply believe actually represents an altogether different table. It now feels rather pointless and futile to me to engage the vast interlocked establishment of public school systems, state and federal politicians, corporate elites, teacher training colleges, textbook publishers, and mass media. We are, in fact, building a counterculture, and we’re just going to have to be patient while the monstrous system of educational imperialism collapses, along with the economic and political imperialism within which it is embedded.

Going back to Freire’s point, I think it is political—radically so—to abandon the system and start a new culture. We aren’t playing the system’s game and accepting whatever modest, sporadic, and tentative reforms it allows us. We are insisting on living our lives and educating our children in opposition to the dominant culture. Isn’t that political? It’s true that we are not thereby immediately liberating the millions of children stuck within the system, but why is that the measure of political authenticity? Jonathan Kozol raised the same concerns about the free school movement, and John Holt responded by saying that whatever pockets of liberation we could achieve represented progress toward change, that none of us can be held responsible for altering the entire system. Yes, there are very difficult questions about the limited race and class identity of this movement, which we do worry about and try to address as best we can. Unfortunately, these limitations are caused by complex social and economic forces far beyond our control. I don’t see public school reformers having all that much success dealing with these forces either; Kozol himself has observed that the “savage inequalities” within the system have only worsened over the years.

I find inspiration in social critics and visionaries who are entirely absent, if not completely unknown, in the school reform literature. I’m thinking, for example, of David Korten’s analysis (in The Great Turning) of the imminent collapse of currently dominant systems, and Paul Hawken’s account (in Blessed Unrest) of the growing global movement for a new culture. I’m inspired by people like Joanna Macy, Riane Eisler, Wendell Berry, Derrick Jensen, and Vandana Shiva, who explain how the very foundation, the underlying worldview, of our civilization is no longer viable. If school reformers think they can tweak the system without raising these fundamental questions, they are not interesting to me, or relevant to the work we need to do. Our task is to build a new world–one community, one small school, or one unschooling family at a time if need be. That’s the message of my book The Self-Organizing Revolution.  That’s what we talk about, and celebrate, at AERO gatherings.

Kirsten:

But how do we build that new world?  Can we really do this on our own?  I wonder how we move out, beyond the pool, to be in conversation and form alliances with those who may not have the same points of view yet with whom it might form strategic networks and partnerships?  Who are potential friends and allies?  Do we know?

A recent online discussion of my book, Wounded By School http://www.edweek.org/go/forums/wounded/, and my last months of traveling talking to a range of people about the state of education in this country, suggests a vast number of administrators, public school officials, teachers, parents and students who would make wonderful allies in the work of making alternative schooling more visible.  How can conversations with these folks be strengthened?  Where and how can this happen, in every readers’ life?  Shouldn’t everyone be getting out just a bit more?

So in spite of all the wonderful and lively connections and sources of energy I sensed at AERO and in the movement(s) itself, I was not at all satisfied by the savvyness or outward-reachingness of this movement, this revolution.  We will never remake the world by talking quietly among ourselves, with those of us who agree with us and tend to look and think like us.  We radically disempower ourselves by withdrawing from mainstream talk—that stuff going on in mainstream educational publications, blogs, statehouses, and over at the Department of Education in Washington.  It is our job, I believe, to make ourselves heard and understood.  We must be flexible and outreaching and innovative—and be open to new ideas.  (I love this quote:  “I am not willing to trust you until you are willing to be as changed by my experience as I am daily by yours.”  -Victor, in the movie The Color of Fear.)

As a student of John Holt, and of the strategic marginalization of the radical critics of the 1960s within the political discourse, the dangers of withdrawal and turning inward, of failing to insist that one’s voice be heard, or on giving up on the mainstream discourse, is politically perilous. It  does not serve children well.

A recent email from my friend Parker Palmer, another potential ally, observes,  ”I agree with you about the nature of institutions which, almost by definition, have some element of coercion built into them. The problem, of course, is that most of society’s work is and always will be done in institutional contexts. The alternative education movement must always be an option for people, one that becomes more widely known and accessible than it is. But my hope is not that it will someday be our dominant mode of education, which is not going to happen, but that it can see itself in part as a ‘lab school’ for things that can and should be done in public education, and act accordingly.”

Is the movement earnestly working to become as widely known and accessible as it can possibly be?  Are every one of us, as educators, contributing powerfully to the discourse on school reform in your community?  If not, why not?

Shouldn’t this be a part of how the mission is defined?

Ron:

I’ve always loved Parker Palmer’s work. He is a wise and inspiring teacher. But I am troubled by his claim that society’s work “always will be done in institutional contexts,” and I respectfully dissent. It is a reasonable and pragmatic observation; ultimately he may be absolutely right. But I and my colleagues in this movement envision a culture that does not build coercion into its social forms. Maybe we’re a lost tribe of dreamers, after all, but when I see where humanity is heading, I have no confidence in centralized, managed, coercive institutions. Everything is too big and distant, beyond any reasonable human scale—governments, corporations, health care systems, and school systems. I think our sanity, if not our survival, depends on a radical downsizing and relocalizing of modern culture. I don’t trust systems, and I think they are headed for collapse. It is time to secede from them.

So where does that leave us, in this conversation? We are revisiting themes that were apparent during the heyday of this movement, forty years ago, and that show up in many radical movements, such as the Greens. Do we want to be marginal visionaries or frustrated reformers? Are we ideologically or psychologically drawn to purity or to pragmatism? What happens when we try to combine the two sides? I agree with you that we should find allies and talk with them, learn from them, and encourage each other. Ultimately, though, I don’t think either strategy has a proven, effective solution to the troubles of our age. Perhaps the best we can do is each struggle in our own ways to plant the seeds of a more democratic, compassionate and life-affirming culture. ]

Ref!

Kirsten and Ron:

Readers, we invite you to join in.  What do you have to say?