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.