Revisiting a curriculum of questions

I was scribbling a note to an internal Faculty blog and trying to make a case for thinking about curriculum in terms of questions. I gestured back to the piece I scribbled about that a few years back and in doing so had to use Google's blogsearch to find it. But, as is the way of the web, I stumbled over a long piece by Bill Ayers which while writing about Peter McLaren's work made this lovely observation:

The most important lesson I learned in the earliest days of my teaching came from the Freedom Schools in Mississippi in the early 1960s. These schools were premised on the idea that while the black people of Mississippi had been denied many things—decent facilities, forward-looking curriculum, fully trained teachers—the fundamental injury was the denial of the right to think for themselves about the circumstances of their lives, how they got to where they were, and how things might be changed. The curriculum for these schools was a curriculum of questions, of inquiry and dialogue, a curriculum of posing problems: why are we, students and teachers, in the Freedom Movement? What do we want to change? This is an example of critical pedagogy at its best. It invites people to engage, to participate, to transform their lives, and to change their world.

Which, to me, begs the question, what, with our right answer obsessed curriculum are we denying the young of this country? From Ayers point of view quite a lot.

Schools R Us

It's Saturday and one should be doing other stuff but I stumbled over a post of Roger Schank's and when I stopped falling about laughing all the noisy babble by the self-appointed critics of Oz schooling more or less fell into the category he outlines here: Trying to get people’s arms around the real problem in education is not that easy. The reason is you. You all went to school so you are quite sure that what is taught in school is what should be taught in school -- only we should teach it better. Australia currently suffers from a bunch of old folk who want to reproduce their experience of schooling across the country's schools. I'm not going to link to them... it will only encourage them to write more inanities. I often think that much of the history of education can be captured by the notion of well intentioned old folk making idiotic decisions on behalf of the young. The basis of all of their commentary are the results of international tests. They always justify their pet fads on the basis of the performance of Oz kids with the performance of other kids via these international tests. To me, the first question to ask is what do these tests tell us? I know what is being claimed for them but what do they actually tell us. No one wants to go there. It is all too easy to simply cite the evidence. For my part, these tests need to be tested. What do they actually achieve other than indicate to us who is good at taking tests. If this was a serious educational goal then why do we need to inflict so many of them on children. To accept that this kind of testing is actually doing something to improve the capacity of the young to deal with the complexities of living on this planet requires considerable quantities of mind altering substances. To suggest that countries who achieve highly on these tests are somehow better than countries that don't is laughable. And what is being promoted as the solution to improve scores? Schank has a view that resonates with the back to school as I knew it noisies in Oz: This country needs to come to grips with the fact that the high school curriculum reflects a notion of how nineteenth century scholars thought about how to produce more scholars like themselves. There may be a place for a few folk like this, but entire age cohorts? If you, like me or my daughter, think that the emperor has been wandering around naked for the past half century of so then you'll enjoy more of Schank's scribblings.

Reassembling the social

I must confess to having neglected the Dear Bruno for far too long. The book has been out a while but I had been too busy patrolling the diameter of my ever shrinking life (thanks Arti) to pay it sufficient attention. I am, for those who don't know of my interest in what is generally called actor-network theory, something of a devotee of Latour's scribblings. The man has a wonderful sense of humour, fun and a delightful capacity to puncture much of the pomposity that passes as social science (I did put on a string of garlic when I typed those last two words). "Be prepared to cast off agency, structure, psyche, time, and space along with along with every other philosophical and anthropological category, no matter how deeply rooted in common sense they may appear to be" pp. 24-25.

The Medici effect

Any book with the subtitle: what elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation is at least worth a scan. Leaving aside the usual hype that goes with a lot of business publications (yeah, I read stuff from the dark side), this 200 page little jolter is worth a peek for folk who puzzle about the I word (I is fer innovation), although to be fair, Johansson writes more in terms of break throughs than innovation. One of the intriguing observations about break throughs was just how much hard work is involved. Often such things are popularly presented as "Ah ha" moments while sitting in or imbibing fluids. Johansson reports that Mike Oldfield (remember Tubular Bells?) did 2,300 recordings before he got what he wanted, and that Edison did 50,000 experiments to develop the storage fuel cell (p.107). Johansson's thesis is that the break through stuff comes at the intersection of two, often quite disparate fields and gives a good number of well told accounts of this phenomenon. I must confess that this book probably encouraged (or even justifies!) my weird tastes in reading and pursuing ideas that don't even remotely look educational. It also offers yet another telling crit. of what goes on in the name of curriculum in most formal educational systems as being quite daft. Put simply, if we play the Medici game with this book and curriculum, schools (at all levels) come out as places of incrementalism and conformity. As Johansson argues, incrementalism has its place but its not the place you want to be if you want to do anything that either stirs or feeds you passions. If nothing, the book is a great source of "off the wall" PD ideas for jaded educational consultants or tired university lecturers looking for a new riff for their stuff. To help, Johansson offers a kind of framework for the break through phenomenon and includes some interesting counter intuitive ideas. In my humble opinion, it would be such a neat way to think about curriculum, kids and turning schools into sites that did interesting, even useful knowledge production (yeah cheap plug for the KPS stuff.... ). The other thing that struck me was the importance for the intangible stuff around all of this, passion (and I love this gem from Arti's recent scribble: I have always felt that grappling without lust is unethical), energy, persistence, faith in self and ideas and all those other qualities the school system is so good at squashing in kids. There is a lot more to say, the book resonated with a very large number of memes that are important to me and I think might rank up there with the current top 100 of selfish memes busily looking for compliant hosts.

The rise and rise of the quants

It was in James Boyle's keynote at Beyond Broadcast 2006 that I guess the term behavioural economics was first raised for me. Apologies for y'all for which it is old hat. Then Christopher Lyden's Open Source podcast on Economics Reimagined helped the penny to drop, if indeed it has. Lyden's chat with a number of behavioural economists opened my eyes widely. David Leonhart's piece in the NY Times refers to them as intellectual imperialists. It is apt. What is behavioural economics? Quoting Lyden: Economics used to be about markets and predictions: tax rates, interest rates, fiscal policy, monetary policy. In short, about money. But with the advent of behavioral economics, economists began to realize that markets are simply aggregations of human choices, and that to understand these choices — imperfect, often irrational or counterintuitive — is to act as a psychologist. For this insight the economist Amost Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize together in 2002. If economics is not necessarily just about money, then, but about human behavior, it can be applied to any number of other fields. In the Times article, brand-new economist Emily Oster applied her talent to the field of AIDS research to solve a problem that epidemiologists couldn’t. Oster is one of many, a generation of economists looking for new fields to conquer. Put very bluntly, given buckets of data, not collected for a specific research purpose, i.e. an experiment, and given ever growing computer power, the opportunity to fashion interesting questions of social importance and to use existing data to examine them gives you, very crudely, behavioural economics. One of the folk in the Lyden conversation was interested in the question, why poor kids do poorly at schools. Now folk with interests in this area will be aware of the little war that has been raging in Australia about this. Very simply, them who say it is all about school effects and them who say that socioeconomic background is very important. Enter player three from left field with none of the history but access to a lot of data and the economic routines to explore/examine and tease out patterns. To me, this is an interesting shift for those folk who dabble in the broad church we call research in education. Anyone for economics 101?

Breakthrough ideas for education in 2007

The Harvard Business Review has published its 20 breakthrough ideas for 2007. The list makes for some interesting reading, at least for my quirky tastes but it got me wondering what would a similar list for education or perhaps schooling look like? Is there an educational imagination out there? Perhaps the notion of breakthrough and education are antithetical? As Heather-Jane Robertson wrote some time ago: "The only thing you can do quickly in education is damage" Heather-Jane Robertson (1998) No More Teachers. No More Books. The Commercialization of Canada's Schools, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.

Old influences, happenstance and the whirl of fun ideas.

I was reading a blog (I should write an old blog mate's blog but I have never met the blogger and would never want to attach any kind of chronological measure to folk one stumbles over online). Nevertheless, for folk who enjoy the odd bit of good fun around curriculum, schooling, computing and so on then Arti's little blog is a heap of fun. I was responding to a post about Starbucks and the NZ curriculum and was pointing out my own preference for drawing on business ideas and thinking. I do this because, generally there is a lot of good, hard-nosed thinking goes on about teaching, learning, leadership, change etc. It was also how I stumbled so long ago into the fun little habit of scenario planning after reading Stewart Brand's the media lab (which is also where I stumbled over the size/problem of so-called global money!!!). But back to the Artichoke post and Arti, true to form, goes beavering away and pulls up some stuff about Semler that I had not heard about, Semler's Escola Lumiar. From the bits you can find online it sounds a bit like KPS schools on steroids. Some quotes from the Telegraph report: "One of the things that is very silly - and I hear from educators all the time - is that schools essentially teach kids to learn. They don't need school for that. Learning is what they do best. We kill it for them." "We are trying to prove that by giving kids freedom, they will in the end be better educated, with much more residual knowledge than the kids in the disciplined schools. They can have a much happier existence and be much more prepared for life if we don't teach them the stupid things that traditional schools do." and Armed with University of Chicago statistics showing that 94 per cent of what we learn in school is never used in later life, he decided to ditch what he calls the "unsuccessful teaching methods" used in millions of schools around the world.

My (bad) digital habits

As a pseudo/semi-functional academic, I am always interested in ways of tracking contemporary writing, ideas (memes) in and around the stuff in which I have interests. i/e/ how to drink from the fire hose without drowning. One little trick I have been exploring is to do a Google Blog search for the key words/phrases and to copy the 100 RSS feed into my RSS aggregator. I end up with an always updated set of posts, many of which often point me to a publication I have missed, a conference, or call for papers, and even occasionally some useful commentary. And you can filter and search the inputs from this into the aggregator with the search facility in the aggregator.

Widget's for blogger

As you probably know, Google owns Blogger and has a neat widget for posting, so this is a small test of how well it works. 

For something that probably reflects my weird online reading habits than much else but I must say a good deal of this is a darned good read. It is stuff from The Edge and it a collection of short speeches, transcribed or available in mp3 format that were given to mark the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Maybe some quotes to whet the appetite. From the book: "They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." from the book River Out of Eden: Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don't. From Dennett: First I want to remind you of what Francis Crick called Orgel's Second Rule. "Evolution is cleverer than you are." Now what Crick meant by this jape, of course, was that again and again and again evolutionists, molecular biologists, biologists in general, see some aspect of nature which seems to them to be sort of pointless or daft or doesn't make much sense — and then they later discover it's in fact an exquisitely ingenious design — it is a brilliant piece of design — that's what Francis Crick means by Orgel's Second Rule. a virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude From Krebs: I first came across the notion of an intellectual plumber when I was sitting in my then Oxford College, Pembroke, next to Simon Blackburn, the philosopher now at Cambridge. I turned to him and asked, "What's the point of philosophy anyway, Simon?" And he said, "Well, think of it this way, John. You're just a biologist, you sometimes have leaks in your thinking, and what you need is an intellectual plumber to patch up those leaks, and that's what philosophy will do for you. " From Ridley... size doesn't matter: From this end of the telescope, human beings look like they have quite a big genome, but if you turn the telescope around and look from another direction, the human genome looks rather a small one, compared with that of grasshoppers, which is at least three times as large, or deep-sea shrimps, which have ten times as much DNA as us. From McEwan My son, William McEwan, last year completed an undergraduate biology course at UCL. When he was studying genetics, he told me he was advised to read no papers written before 1997. One can see the point of this advice. In the course of his studies, estimates of the size of the human genome shrank by a factor of three. Such is the headlong nature of contemporary science. But if we understand science merely as a band of light moving through time, advancing on the darkness, and leaving darkness behind it, always at its best only in the incandescent present, we turn our backs on a magnificent and eloquent literature, an epic tale of ingenuity propelled by curiosity. and from Dawkins at the end: So what are the general principles of life, wherever life might be found? I just want to suggest some candidates, as a sort of stimulus to get other people thinking of others. First, Darwinism itself. I've mentioned that. I think it's universal. Can't prove it, but I think it is. Second, digital genetics, with very low mutation rate. Does it have to be DNA? Presumably not. Does it have to be a polynucleotide? Possibly not. Does it have to have a triplet code? Almost certainly not. Et cetera; those are the kinds of questions I'm trying to ask.