relevance

[T]he brain learns better when the heart (that is, our emotions) and our hands are actively engaged in the learning. - Diane Demee-Benoit

Ayers’ chapter in his book To Teach titled “Liberating the Curriculum,” addresses the very important issue of making education relevant, interesting, and challenging to our students. Ayers asks what’s most important to teach our students - “what knowledge and experiences are worthwhile” (Ayers, 2001, p. 88) - and I think that simply asking that question is a good first step toward realizing that education isn’t all about parceling out discrete units of trivial knowledge to our kids. This realization isn’t new, and clearly, there is no single “correct” answer to this question - it’s been pondered both before and since Dewey wrote his Pedagogic Creed. As quoted in my April 14th blog post, Dewey averred that “if we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left with only the abstraction” all the way back in 1897. He added that “school must represent life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.” (1897) Ayers is not the first person to contemplate this question and posit possible solutions (and he won’t be the last).

Much of what Ayers wrote in this week’s chapter is also strikingly similar to another recent reading of mine, a chapter entitled “Pursuing Relevance” in Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Postman & Weingartner write of a hypothetical doctor who administers penicillin as a matter of course - whether needed or not - because he believes that its administration is inherently good. Some patients recover, some die. No discretion, no attention to symptoms or circumstance, is utilized when prescribing it. Such a position, Postman & Weingartner emphatically write, is not at all dissimilar to the approach often taken regarding education. When such a system is in place, one where dispensing knowledge for knowledge’s sake trumps all other factors and considerations, they bid us ask: “Where is the learner in all of this? Where is his world?” (Postman & Weingarten, 1969, p. 43)

So where are we left in pondering these questions? If we are in agreement with Dewey, Postman, and Ayers (as I am), then we can reasonably assume what education should not be. All three of these thinkers reach the same conclusion, that education shouldn’t be so abstracted as to lose all relevance to the children we’re teaching. Ayers describes a way of teaching that adapts and reacts to circumstances. He maintains that “youngsters need opportunities to choose, to name, and to pursue their own passions and projects.” (2001, p. 89) Making education relevant to their concerns helps forge a “living curriculum.” (Ayers, 2001, p. 89) Postman echoes Ayers. While education contemplates the reified “exotic interests” of those who decree the curriculum, Postman & Weingartner write back in 1969, “Native Americans are in open rebellion against their government [and] B-52s have dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped on Germany in WWII.” (p. 57) Today, we could easily substitute the war in Iraq and the precarious global financial situation as “relevant” concerns ignored in favor of abstract curricula. Instead, however, many teachers still just dole out the penicillin.

The subject need be neither so large nor so weighty as the war in Iraq in order to be meaningful in our classrooms, either. The example given by Jane a couple of weeks ago in class of a classroom tackling a perceived intersection safety problem may be the biggest concern your classroom wants to deal with. In Jane’s example, the teacher responded to this (student driven) concern and adapted her curricula. The kids researched, proposed, and saw the implementation of a new intersection stoplight - and gained a wealth of integrated, interconnected, and relevant knowledge in the process. All of this - from questioning what knowledge is most valuable, to Dewey’s, Postman’s, and Ayers’ overlapping concerns, to Jane’s example of “real life” learning to gain integrated knowledge of the world - all of it brings to mind for me the concept of expeditionary learning.

My opening quote is from A Passion for Knowledge: An Introduction to Expeditionary Learning, written by Diane Demee-Benoit. I believe it captures the heart of expeditionary learning, which emphasizes both relevance and practical application. Expeditionary learning encourages students to probe a subject deeply and puts the focus on student investigations. For example, a first grade study of frogs approaches the subject from many disciplines, such as science, in exploring the life cycle of a frog, art, in creating artistic representations of frogs, and literature, in reading folklore about frogs. Demee-Benoit writes that she and her colleagues “saw that the kids who truly mastered a subject and developed a greater passion for learning were those who had the opportunity to learn with their mind, heart, and hands.” (2007)

A school close to where I live, Thornton Creek Elementary, uses the expeditionary learning model. I was fortunate to receive a tour of the school from a friend’s daughter who teaches there. This year, one of the 1st grade expeditions is the birds of Greenlake. They’ve been exploring the basic needs of all organisms and what a fair scientific test looks like. They’ve been looking at bird physiology. They’ve been looking at the variety of birds found at Greenlake: water, land, and dabblers. They’ve been learning scientific illustration and constructing their own field guides. The class, in short, is developing a deep knowledge of birds through hands -on, backyard experience. The knowledge they’re getting is both contextual and relevant. I, for one, find this to be a very interesting and effective way to address the questions raised by our reading. I only wish UWB was still placing student teachers there!

Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. New York. N.Y. & London: Teachers College Press.
Demee-Benoit, D. (June, 25th, 2007). A Passion for Knowledge: An Introduction to Expeditionary Learning. Edutopia. http://www.edutopia.org/introduction-expeditionary-learning.
Dewey, J. (1897 January). “My Pedagogic Creed.” School Journal vol. 54, 77-80
Postman, N. & C. Weingartner (1969). Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York. N.Y.: Delacorte Press.