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.

Enough is enough

I have the title for the book I am writing: Enough is enough: Starting over in American Education. I can no longer take the "tinkering" line of action. We've been trying this for several hundred years and we are in worse shape than ever. Been doing some reading and there are some books out there about how to change education now that we have new stuff (technical and ethos - Lankshear and Knobel) but they all seem to be arguing that we just have to tweak the current system and it will be okay. Demonstrating individual achievement still seems to be the end game. Argh.

It's so much deeper than that. We have to start over. Start over with fundamentally different ontologies and epistemologies: (from a place of equality rather than inequality - Ranciere); where everybody counts - Shirky, Bruns); and, where sociospatial relations are taken into account (Soja). I don't want to write a "how to" book. Rather, I want to lay out the argument and suggest some future pathways. I have some examples of single cases at the classroom and community levels, but not at the systemic level. The book will be about thinking that through. Lucky for me two publishers are interested in publishing it!

I'm excited, but scared. Will probably use this blog space to work through ideas and would love feedback. 

Exhaling

Well...I'm finally exhaling after AERA. I am really proud of how well the conference went. Kris and I have had a ton of positive comments, some people even saying it was the best AERA ever. Sonia Nieto told me her students said they were leaving the conference with hope. Cool. Videos of key Presidential sessions will be available on the AERA website soon. Good thing because a lot of people missed sessions because they were full. And Kris wants to put together an edited volume based on all the Presidentials.

I am inspired to continue the work I have been doing, especially with George Moses and the NEAD Freedom School corner store project. I have two books working their way through; one that will argue we have to start over with schools - no more tinkering, and one on the community ethnography Nancy, Kevin and I did. Our first articles from the ethnography will be coming out in a special issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly very shortly. We still have so much data to analyze and write about! Plus we owe the community a book. Good news is that I have two publishers wanting a prospectus on both books. Problems of abundance.

Simple check in today. On to writing...what a joy.

Meeting with George

Had another good meeting with George Moses today. George and I have been getting to know each other for a couple of years now and we are finally at the place where we can plan curriculum. I've known for a while that knowledge, learning, literacy, etc. is socially constructed in interaction and that social relationships are what matter in this process, but now I "get" it. George's emphasis on people and knowing them has shown me what this means in the heart.

So we've begun the conversation about how to combine the Freedom School curriculum with what "we" (educational researchers of a certain kind) know about content and pedagogy to move toward Bigum's idea of knowledge producing schools. George has talked for a while about what he calls "community defined evidence" so that's in the mix as well.

One of our first projects will be to have students address a community problem, in this case the food desert problem in Beechwood. They will do the work to design, build, and manage a transformed "corner" store. Community defined evidence will be gathered using participatory action research. George is pretty keen on the economic independence argument that I'm still trying to get my head around, but the corner store project gets to enough social justice issues I do understand that I'm totally in. 

This sort of work makes all the other crap I deal with fade away.

Intertextuality

Short today to simply state that I find it interesting that posts to this blog end up on my facebook profile where people read them and respond, but very few people actually read/follow the blog. To me it's a fascinating index of the complex intertextualities of digital communication.

Audience and purpose

I have to send AERA a piece on the upcoming annual meeting that will appear in Educational Researcher. The journal goes to every AERA member. I am totally intimidated. The purpose of the piece is to overview the conference as Program Chair. Chances are no one will read it even though they will all get it. It's that they will all get it that is scaring me. Man. What if I sound like an idiot? What if I make some stupid grammar mistake and everyone from now on thinks I'm a fraud?

Okay, worrying about this in this way is insane, I know. Welcome to my head. Just needed to get it out.