Outdated models

I know this is out of context, but does this paragraph make sense? Am I assuming too much understanding of factory model education on the part of the reader?

Schools are based on an outdated, scarcity production model of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that is based in traditional business economics and are not responding to changes in skills and practices needed to participate in a global world. This is not a new argument, however. Similar arguments were made in the early 20^th century during industrialization. Calls for changing schools to accommodate a changing world of work rang throughout the literature. I am not making a “change so we can have more efficient workers” argument here. My main argument is that we need to change schools so that they are equitable and just, not to compete in a global marketplace. Part of how we make them equitable and just, however, has to do with ensuring they are relevant and meaningful to children and youth. Here is where schools have become outdated in that they have not taken into account the changed and changing practices associated with internet communication technologies and social media.  De Alba et al. (2000: 9) argue that “our curricula are becoming overwhelmed by practices of diagnosis, intervention, and remediation grounded not merely in ‘basic skills,’ but in old and outmoded forms of basic skills (italics in original).” The basic skills we need are not those needed to fill a workforce, but to engage a dynamic generation of sophisticated children and youth.

Musings while writing my book

The stakes are so high. I think of George Moses and what he calls the battle for survival. It is a crisis when children are being harmed and they are. They are harmed by test driven pedagogy that is rooted in deficit ideologies about who poor children from non-dominant groups are and what they are capable of. But as Jim Gee told me one time, “schools are bad for all children, white kids just get As for it”. We don’t see the damage so much in white middle class kids because of their tendency to score well and because they receive additional supports in their home communities. Not that poor black kids don’t get support at home, that’s for sure. But something about school (don’t think it’s the ‘matching” practices issue) kills them. White kids are not killed in schools but damage is being done nonetheless. Damage to innovative and creative thinking (Robinson); damage to critical thinking. By critical I don’t mean the ability to analyze or reason. I mean the ability to deconstruct power relations evident in texts (broadly defined) and uncover inequalities in order to rectify them. This is definitely not happening in schools. Frankly, not even the boring definition of “critical” is happening in schools. Pre-packaged, test driven pedagogies have stamped that out. Comprehension becomes the ability to retell a story. Understanding doesn’t seem to count and it’s difficult to understand when texts are abridged or shortened to the point of no longer making any sense.

What’s frustrating is that we (educational researchers) know a ton about this stuff. We know that you can’t do reform from the top down, outside in (Darling-Hammond, Tyack, Cuban, Sarason). We’ve known this for 25 years or more. Yet, government continues to impose reform from the outside and districts implement from the top down. Funny that down is always teachers. And the one grass roots, teacher-driven reform I know of – Whole Language – was squashed vehemently and even banned. Never mind students – they don’t count in the equation at all until their test scores are posted on the classroom door. Now those same scores will drive teacher evaluations in spite of the complete lack of evidence of a connection between teacher performance and student test scores.

We know a ton about learning, especially now that we have been studying the learning theory in video games (Gee) and digital environments (Ito et al.), none of which is in schools. And we know that if we take video games or other digital practices into schools without first transforming schools, we’ll kill whatever it is that makes them attractive to students in the first place.  Street would call this pedagogization or the sucking in of anything meaningful or authentic into autonomous definitions of knowledge. And we are right back into assumptions of inequality of intelligence and the pedagogical myth.

Possible opening?

What do you think of the text below, or some revision of it, as a possible opener for the book? For sure I plan on using something like as opener for a keynote I am giving in the UK in July 2012.

"Imagine if it were different. Imagine if we started with equality and saw all people as valuable and worthy. Imagine if everybody counted and that by everybody, we mean everybody. Imagine if teachers and students were all learners in robust communities of learners where we all worked together to build knowledge and meaning. Imagine.

Imagine children and youth (and community members, teachers, administrators) drawing from a range of institutions (schools, museums, business, social service agencies) to solve local problems/issues all while produsing knowledge in the service of a public good that they themselves have constructed? Imagine a space where learners develop metaawareness and metadiscourse about their learning, the social problems at play, the potential solutions, and their consequences. Imagine that outdated autonomous school knowledges are transformed to be relevant in real communities and for the public good? Imagine"

Sense of urgency

Children and youth are already doing what we need to do in schools outside of school so the kind of change I am writing about won’t be unfamiliar to them. Getting teachers to buy in is tricky, but we know a ton about teacher education and development that we have not tried systematically. The same goes for reform and what we know about how to make it work. Sometimes I feel like I want to show pictures of kids in schools now that are like the ones for the ASPCA and have sappy music going on so that people will get the idea that there is real damage going on and we have to do something about it now.

Figured out the starting point

After much tribulation, I figured out where to "start" with the book. At the beginning. I know this seems pretty uninspired but it got me unstuck. By the beginning I mean ontologically. I've reread Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster and am in the middle of a reread of de Alba et al's. Curriculum in the Postmodern Condition. I'm still feeling intimidated, but I feel like I do actually have something to say.

I need to make a clear argument, building on Ranciere, that schooling is based on an ontological flaw - inequality. That is, schooling assumes inequality between humans - those who know and those who do not. Ranciere's argument is that we must begin with equality. What I have to do is talk about what follows from this assumption given the contemporary context of schooling.

Ranciere goes so far as to say that, given an assumption of equality, teachers do not have to know that which they are teaching. He claims that the myth of pedagogy is that knowledge needs to be explicated (explained) so that the learner can learn. I can see that, but I can also see that this could be read as devaluing teachers (in fact some teachers have said as much when I talked with them about these ideas). I do think that depth of content knowledge leads to maximum pedagogical freedom. Seems to me that Freire's problem posing education accounts for both expert knowledge and equality by focusing on the problem, a problem for which no one knows the "answer". This way, everyone's knowledge comes to bear on the issue (goes to Bruns's equipotentiality).

Now to say all this in the book!

Self-doubt

The more I read as part of the writing process for my book, the more I feel like I have no footing from which to write a thing. I feel like I know nothing and that I was totally full of myself when I proposed this darn thing. Yikes.

Book contract!

So I officially have a book contract with Routledge for the book on starting over in education! I'm pretty excited. One bummer though is that they don't like the "enough is enough" part of the title because it won't come up in during searches for education books. This in spite of the idea one reviewer had to call it "enough already!" They currently have a really bland title. I said okay but that I wanted to find something catchier. Any ideas?