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?

Stuck at an airport

So I'm stuck at Pittsburgh airport after having been diverted from JFK because of a hurricane of all things! It's amazing how many people whip out their electronic devices and get busy with some thing or another. Literacy is everywhere! People are looking up the weather, calling hotels and rental car companies. One woman (a famous one I won't name) is posting to her blog. I posted to Tics and Tantrums. Now I'm writing here. I see books, laptops, cell phones, smart phones, ipads, newspapers, and tons of mindless fashion or celebrity news magazines. Lots of reading going on. Not sure why there is so much drama around the losses brought on by electronic texts. Sometimes they save the day.

Book description

So here's the description of the new book, Enough is enough: Starting over in American education, that I am submitting to a publisher who's interested (after I sleep on it). You have until tomorrow to offer suggestions:)

Abstract:
Tinkering with the current educational system from within for the past two hundred years has not provided a just and equitable education for all children. We need to start over. Moreover, if schools do not respond to profound sociocultural changes that have occurred in human interaction and meaning making in the 21^st century, they are in danger of becoming more irrelevant than they are already. This book will articulate theoretical, curricular, pedagogical and assessment principles to start over in American education from preschool to higher education in order to adequately respond to these changes.

 

Description:
This book argues that schools are in what Bruns (2008) calls casual collapse because they have not responded to the profound changes in knowing and being that have occurred globally in the 21^st century. If we do not respond with profound change in schools, they are in danger of becoming even more irrelevant to our children and youth than they are already. Working within the system as it is will not work to prevent this collapse. We need to start over with different ontological and epistemological foundations. We need to assume equality rather than inequality (Ranciere, 1991). We need to understand what it means when everybody comes (Shirky, 2010) and when everybody counts.

Drawing from several theoretical frameworks, I will argue that the purpose of schooling should be to facilitate human learning, meaning making, and knowledge production for the common good as determined by local communities. The book will describe principles of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that will frame a plan of action to start over.

What is the purpose of schooling?

Part of what I will have to articulate in the Enough is Enough book is a radical new purpose of schooling that is not just a balance of the old binary of workers/citizens. And not just something that integrates constructionist ideas into that binary. So what needs to be there?

• Power
• Agency
• Shared purposes with social justice ends
• Fluid identities and learning trajectories
• Heterarchy
• Equipotentiality
• Sustainability
• Cosmopolitanism – everyday (local) and intercultural (global) identities
• Spaces for ideological becoming
• Spatialized practice
• Innovation
• Knowledge produsage

And, again following Shirky, if we celebrate what we value, what do we celebrate in schools? With the deficit model running rampant, especially in urban schools, and with high-stakes testing, it seems we don't celebrate much. On the ground in classrooms there are everyday celebrations of the creation and sharing of human generosity, but that celebration stops at the classroom door and has to be done subversively. We have allowed external forces - non-educators - to break the culture in the name of accountability (neoliberal agenda). Accountable to who? Why?  Whose purposes are being served by this reductionist focus? Is the social contract of school irrevocably broken?

 

Making a difference

Sometimes I make a difference.

Some days I wonder what difference I make but other days a student will come to me with something they did in their classroom or life that they say they did as a result of being in my class. Then I feel like I make a difference and that that difference matters to real people and matters in a way that engenders a change for the better. On those days I feel awesome and I feel like that is why I teach. On those days I can’t believe I get paid for this work.

But on some days the mountain feels so big that the small changes that happen from the work I do will never make a difference. Yet I’ve come to realize that difference is relative and that the differences I do make actually have a meaningful effect in that someone, even one person, has changed the way they see the world, see other people, and see literacy because they took a class with me. There can’t be anything better than that.

Writing

I write because I have to.

I need to get the words in my head out and onto paper. My job is to write but it is more than that. I didn’t know that writing would be my work or my need. It has come to me as I write. I write so that others will listen. I write about inequity and marginalization so that it will stop. I suppose it’s naïve to think anyone will listen or that my writing will make anyone stop anything but I write nonetheless.

Writing in the writing project helps me to focus my thoughts and to remember that writerly part of myself that gets lost in the hubbub of everyday life and work. Even though I write for work, writing during the ISI is healing for me, even if it’s also for “work”. I know that probably doesn’t make sense but I know what I mean.

It amazes me that, even in a digital, multimodal world, the word has such import. I love reading the word (and the world) but, as vain as it is, I love reading the words as I write them. They appear on the screen at the tap of a finger and can vanish with just as much ease. Yet some words can be dangerous, even deadly. Amazed.

A lot of people are saying similar things

A lot of people for a long time have been saying schools are in dire need of re-forming. So what will make my call to start over any different than another shout in the wind? The wind is so strong that whatever voices have come before mine have been drowned out. I am one that thinks this is on purpose; that, as my friend Carlos says, there really are men in the back room. And those men don't want a dynamic, thinking, action-oriented, collaborative, and articulate public so they've make good and darn sure we don't have it.

The latest of the books I'm reading in preparation for Enough is Enough is Linda Darling-Hammond's book  The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. She nails it. The more I read of the book, the more I wish Obama had selected her to be Secretary of Education. I'm grateful she's still in the conversation though.

I'm still thinking I have something to offer the movement to transform schools. Emphasis remains on achievement and I think that's the wrong direction. I know policy types need the numbers though, so I'll have to do more thinking on this part. George Moses's idea about community-based evidence seems like a really productive direction.

Same old argument

I thought one way to get some inspiration for my new book would be to go back through some of my writing to find the main claims I have been making over the years. Turns out I've been making this argument about needing to start over in schools for a long time. Not sure this gave me inspiration though. Now I wonder whether it's worth trying to say it again.