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.

griot

Although we might agree that having a community is important, how do we know when we have one? - Mara Sapon-Shavin

This week’s readings by Mara Sapon-Shavin, Building a Safe Community for Learning, by Maxine Greene, Imagination, Community, and the School, and a reading for Jean Eisele’s class, Hello Grandfather: Lessons from Alaska, by Lisa Delpit, brought home for me both the importance and challenges of community building. One idea that resonates with me, which was articulated explicitly by Greene, is storytelling, and I was reminded of a talk I went to last year given by Jourdan I. Keith, founder of the Urban Wilderness Project. A large component of this project is the “Griot Works” - pronounced gree-oh - which cultivates storytellers. A Griot preserves community and culture through story, myth, and folklore. When I heard about this project, I thought it was a fabulous way to build community - and preserve the integrity of its component cultures. Everyone is welcome, children to adults, no matter your experience level or background. This project seems an ideal way to feel a deeper affinity for your own cultural background as well as providing an excellent way to experience the “other,” a concern of Delpit’s that I’ve given a lot of thought to. Building a strong storytelling tradition within a community could be a great way to “learn to see the other rather than merely look.” (Delpit, 1996, p. 91)

Another seductive quality of this project is that it promotes, in a sense, alternative “literacies.” A more comprehensive definition of “literacy” can be fostered when we incorporate traditional ways of sharing knowledge, like myth. As Delpit warns, “[w]e risk failure in our educational reforms by ignoring the significance of human connectedness in many communities of culture.” (1996, p. 95) Many of these cultures possess a strong oral tradition that uses folklore to stress this idea of connectedness. Using these stories to promulgate a deeper understanding of these connections is a good lesson for all of us. Similarly, Sapon-Shevin suggests a “diversity treasure hunt” (1995, p. 107) as a community building exercise. The end result of such an exercise would be a kind of story, too. Finding someone whose parents are from another country and exploring a tradition or custom that came from those parents writes a cultural story that can be shared with the community. I really liked that idea. Finding a way to integrate the Griot tradition in our classrooms would, in my opinion, help us learn about and from one another - and help to see each other more clearly. A strong sense of interconnectedness could develop - stories intersecting and complementing one another - and a healthy community of mutual respect can develop. Hearing and acknowledging each other’s stories is one way we can gauge the strength of our communities.

For Greene,“interconnectedness and communion” (1995, p. 33) characterize a strong democratic learning community. The arts, including storytelling, are an important component of this type of community. She writes that “teachers incapable of thinking imaginatively or of releasing students to encounter works of literature and other forms of art are probably also unable to communicate to the young what the use of imagination signifies.” (1995, p. 37) And it is imagination that “feeds one’s capacity to feel one’s way into another’s vantage point,” (Greene, 1995, p. 37) - or as Delpit says, the capacity to see the other.

What sounds like just a story can be a powerful element of Greene’s democratic community. The act of telling a story helps students find their voice. The story promotes an “emerging solidarity, a sharing of certain beliefs, and a dialogue about others.” (Greene, 1995, p. 39) It’s a way of talking about each other and to each other. Having open lines of communication is essential to a strong community, which must be able to both speak and listen. The story also wields enormous power to “break the hold of…constructed categories.” (Greene, 1995, p. 40) What we thought we knew about others and how we thought they fit into the world was, perhaps, merely a reflection of our own wishes and beliefs, not their reality. Stories can help us uncover the unknown truths about one another.

Delpit laments that when she went to Alaska she “was very much the ‘other’” with “no opportunity to see [herself] reflected in those around [her].” (1996, p. 104) The Griot tradition, I believe, can help answer that concern. Sapon-Shevin bids us ask whether our classroom practices will “bring students closer together…or push them further apart?” (1995, p. 112) Incorporating the Griot tradition, in offering a way to experience and empathize with the traditions and values of others, definitely encourages solidarity. Through stories, we “can keep seeking connection points among [our] personal histories.” (Greene, 1995, p. 42) Vitally, these stories and their resultant dialogue promote a respect for the diversity that makes up our communities, enabling us to evolve a relationship together that’s adaptable and open.

Delpit, L. (1996). 'Hello, Grandfather': Lessons from Alaska. In Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom (pp. 91-104). New York, NY: The New Press.
Greene, M. (1995) Imagination, community, and the school. Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change (pp 32-43). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Sapon-Shevin, M. (1995). Building a safe community for learning. In W. Ayers (Ed.), To become a teacher: Making a difference in children's lives (pp. 99-112). New York: Teachers College Press.