Artichoke

Edubloggers as “Prisoners of the nation state.”

I never fail to be impressed by the “tragedy of the inertia of the mind” in education – by those educational conversations where we can froth about the networking available through the internet,  the participatory cultures possible through Web2.0 branded activity, and then continue to re-imagine how we might learn through the institution of “school”. 

We are not only prisoner’s of Ulrich Beck’s nation state, we are prisoners of the sequestered classroom way of doing school.   

I think that social and political theory is, to some extent, still a prisoner of the nation-state. Most basic concepts of the social sciences –sociology, the state, democracy, community- are connected to the nation and to the nation-state form. This relates of course to the historical development of political thinking and of the social sciences - both acquired their modern form in the 19th century in the context of imagining national communities. Most of the social sciences are still sticking to what I call the container model of society and politics. Ulrich Beck

Reflecting about education when reading the transnational thinking of Ulrich Beck  is not a good idea. 

“Because of new communication structures, new communication technologies, new transportation systems and so on, all different cultures, all different nations, and all different religions live in one present, even, if they live at the same time in different pasts and different futures. This is to some extent an integrated present, because the existing communication structures do not allow for the construction of rigid borders anymore.”

Beck made me realise how we have allowed ourselves to be compromised by the lure of edu_protectionism, how we we determinedly ignore the "integrated present" when we think about education.

All that froth over new communication structures and technologies in education, (and the “oh so casual” flinging of terms like 21st Century learners, digital immigrants/ digital natives, Web2.0, social software, systemic and sustainable change into the conversation in staffrooms across New Zealand), means nothing if we continue with closed shop practice when it comes to future thinking about education.

We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning.

When it comes to smart thinking about the future of education, Stephen Downes seems like a lone voice of reason in the edublogosphere – check out his exposure of the “boundaries of the past” in this elegant critique of School2.0.  School2.0, where everyone else is happily referencing new technologies so long as they can create structures that keep themselves in jobs.

There is no particular focus for this view of 'School 2.0'. The main point is that technology allows us to change our approach to education, from one where we segregate learners in specially designed education facilities (classrooms, training rooms, schools, universities) to one where learning is something we do (and what educators provide) in the course of any other activity.

The idea is that 'School 2.0' is the first step toward being non-school, and that our objective should be to use technologies to leverage our ability to personalize learning, and in so doing, facilitate students' learning while taking part as full citizens in the wider community.

When you look at it through Beck’s analysis, the New Zealand e-Learning Action Plan, is stuffed full of the rhetoric of the South Island high country fencers. The pages are bullet pointed with "Outcome:" and "Actions" describing the ICT equivalent of laying  out fence lines, digging fence post holes and position posts, filling the holes with concrete or soil, cutting and constructing fences with boards, wiring, chain links, posts, and putting together gates and hanging them in position. 

These barriers, security fences, retaining walls, vineyard trellises, and other types of fences and walls are intended to manage the web environments schools can access.  The MoE e learning rhetoric is all about containment – those “dedicated  networks” for education, and boundary building – those Advanced Network and Virtual Learning Network initiatives.

Even our “future proofed” (by newness and draftiness) Draft Curriculum  proves on closer analysis to turn itself inside out by stressing the importance of schools adopting the boundaries of the expectations of the past – grounding itself through “local communities” rather than exploring the openness of “global networks”

Quality education is a shared responsibility of the state, the community, the family, and the individual. The New Zealand Curriculum sets national directions for education. It is expected that when schools develop their programmes, they will interpret these directions in ways that take account of the diverse learning needs of their students and the expectations of their communities. Draft Curriculum P4

Beck uses the Muhammad cartoons as an example  of how new technologies and communication structures disallow the effectiveness of rigid borders in 2007.

You may remember the clash over the Muhammad cartoons about a year ago. Initially, this was framed as a Danish problem, addressing Muslims in Denmark and attempting to provoke a debate over their integration in Danish society. Almost instantly, this became a global problem. This indicates that even if you try to articulate an issue as a national issue, in many fields this is not possible anymore. Because of new communication structures, new communication technologies, new transportation systems and so on, all different cultures, all different nations, and all different religions live in one present, even, if they live at the same time in different pasts and different futures. This is to some extent an integrated present, because the existing communication structures do not allow for the construction of rigid borders anymore.

By the same reasoning it is  hard to argue that our sense of what an educational system “might be” should continue to be imprisoned by the rigid borders of the imaginings  of  local or even national communities. 

We need to think more boldly about learning opportunities that are freed from the classroom container, school container, secondary container, primary container, tertiary container, and even the nation containers.

I reckon Illich is a good place to start this thinking

“A good education system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.” - Ivan Illich 1971

If Illich could imagine a good education system – one that didn’t need schools and classrooms in 1971, why do we keep pretending we need schools and classrooms to learn in 2007?

Teemu Arina’s blog posting  Serendipity 2.0: Missing Third Places of Learning starts to develop the conversations that we should be having about  different ways of learning, different places for learning – different ways of doing school. Lets hope his thinking excites others to think without rigid borders about what learning might be.

"Razor wired by faith, privilege or wealth" schools

The Magnet and I get invited to work with state schools and with “razor wired by faith, privilege, and or wealth” schools.

These “razor wired” schools can only exist  because parents are unhappy with what state education has to offer their children. I sometimes think that “keeping my kids from mixing with your kids” has never been more desired, nor more profitable in the history of educational provision in New Zealand.

After visiting some of these walled garden campuses last term I reckon that McLuhan’s notion of a “global village”  also captures the drivers for our walled off “independent/private school” educational system.  Places where we are so frightened by "the other’s child” that in a state of “panic terror” we design schools to isolate and sequester our own children to ensure they hear a different world of tribal drums from the children of the others.

And I will admit that I am fearful that this whole mind shift towards “personalisation” for the 21st Century learner increasingly validates a walled community approach to education.  Rather than seeing education as a system for developing the collaborative needs of a democratic society - we find campuses increasingly designed as “small world/s of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”. And these razor wired fences ensure the competitive advantage of the children of the already advantaged is not challenged.…

The government finds it acceptable that state schooling is not meeting the needs of  a subculture of children:  those children with different faiths, and children with parents earning above the average parental income brackets, and as a consequence provides “integrated school funding”  to allow them access to different ways of doing school. I don’t know if anyone has ever suggested an alternative that offers say four hours of state education in the mornings and then the option to explore alternative learning in the afternoons, but in New Zealand we seem to prefer full time sequesterisation.

The latest South Pacific edition of TIME magazine  focused on the Mongrel Mob and Black Power gangs in New Zealand, and the subculture of South Auckland’s teen gangsters.

"With its remote location, small population and favourable international reputation, New Zealand is regarded as a pleasant and peaceful place to live. Yet this island nation harbours a small, unique and brutal street-gang culture that has defied authorities for more than 30 years and now appears to be nurturing a new, more violent mutation."

This article captured my attention because of the recent announcement of a $3.4 million government allocation to a “different ways of doing school” project involving fifteen schools in the Setting Boundaries Budget 2007 Education Initiatives as Support for Schools Facing Gang Issues in Counties Manukau

This initiative provides new funding of $3.4 million over the next four years for extra staffing, plus a project manager to enable schools to strengthen their pastoral care and build positive school environments. The target group is 15 schools in Counties Manukau. It forms part of a co-ordinated inter-agency response to reported youth gang activity in Counties Manukau.

I am interested in the nature of the staffing interventions that the three point four million will fund. Just what is proposed for the 15 schools to help address a gang culture problem described by criminologist Associate Professor Greg Newbold, as being “beyond control”.

"They might manage to suppress it in one area temporarily, and it will just crop up again somewhere else. The problem is generated by the cultural milieu and the economic conditions in that area."

A youth gang situation that a youth worker describes as ubiquitous

Paea says gangs are everywhere. "Every street corner has one," he says. "A lot of kids we deal with have no direction, no activities, nothing whatsoever. You've got some who have grown up without a dad—just a mum—and the only role model they've got is the older guys in the neighborhood who are gang connected. They are connected into the wrong environment, and it's the same in school: they connect with the wrong child."

The Setting Boundaries budget for extra staffing for 15 schools in Manukau acknowledges, in a similar way to the integrated school funding, that state schooling is not meeting the needs of a subculture of children from South Auckland’s youth gang culture.

And this makes me curious about the following, 

1. If we are identifying (through provision of government funding) increasing subcultures of children whose needs are not met through the state school system, then just who are the subcultures of students whose needs are met through the state school system?
2. Is level of staffing the key issue in changing schools to meet the needs of young people who have adopted a learning community that is estranged from the mainstream?
3. And if increased staffing is the answer, is 3.4 million dollars of extra staffing over four years enough to make 15 existing schools meaningful agents of change for youth gang members?
4. What are the new ways of doing school being proposed for the 15 Manukau schools?
5. What ways of doing school for kids who are part of youth gang cultures have been successful in other countries. [I am interested in reading blogs from teachers and students involved in these initiatives elsewhere]

The Setting Boundaries initiative is an exciting challenge for the Manukau schools involved.   I am going to be tracking the outcomes over the next four years. The kids targeted deserve interventions that will make a difference to the options they will have and the choices they can make in the future, just as much as the kids identified as having special faith or special parental wealth do.

Bring out your sheep bladders the “key competencies” have arrived.

Reports of “Alleged Terror Cells drawn from the Medical World”  mean that I am thinking today about the learning communities that develop such social cohesion, purposefulness and behavioural changes within their membership that after learning together, individual members are prepared to kill themselves and any number of unknown others.

Doctors have been in the news in New Zealand this week for different reasons – The “Keep Smokers and Fatties out – Doctors”  article in the NZ Herald saw doctors railing against the cost of treating preventable diseases – those caused by predictable and what should be avoidable human behaviours, that are clogging up the health system.

The NZ Herald headline was provocative.  And the response in letters to the editor was mixed.  Not many endorsed an international airport customs hall scenario where specially trained dogs sniffed out the nicotine addicted, before rows of disembarking scales culled those with an unacceptable body mass index    

The cost of treating preventable disease has always been with us – it’s a bit like the unresolved "litter problem" in the playground, and the permanence of the “discontented by school” students in our classrooms.  What should be easily preventable proves surprisingly enduring – seemingly resistant to all interventions designed to change the human behaviours that contribute to the problem. 

It seems that in the health system a relatively small percentage of the population eats up the vast majority of the budget.  And this small percentage front up with predictable and largely behavioural diseases. Admissions related to how we choose to live our lives are far more significant than admissions for genetic or environmental factors.

Of even greater interest to anyone looking at “changing attitudes and behaviours” is finding out that how we choose to live our lives is largely unaffected by the experience of being saved. Even after life rescuing medical interventions the majority find it impossible to change the behaviours that led to their admission.

"If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller

The question that interested me was - so when does change in lifestyle happen? The article suggests that a change in lifestyle occurs when medical interventions look at the socio emotional needs of the whole person rather than at a personalised data profile that reduces the complexity of what it is to be a social human being to a series of statistical data profiles, spread-sheets and graphs.

I suspect that this is why so many of our well meaning initiatives to change behaviours, attitudes and skills in schools (where the consequences of change fall far short of life and death), remain both “well meaning” and “initiatives”.  And makes me wonder how  future educationalists will view learning interventions like AsTTle and the Key Competencies?

All this new thinking is making me look again at how the Magnet and I help schools integrate the Key Competencies with respect to our SOLO coded learning experiences HOT planning template  … and in my idle moments I have been amusing myself by imagining a mashup between NZCER’s Dr Rosemary Hipkins wildly euphoric Key Competencies video presentation –

“… they are something akin to an earthquake that potentially will create all sorts of upheavals and really revolutionalise learning in New Zealand through the curriculum project.”

And Monty Python’s Holy Grail conversation,

Sir Bedevere: ...and that, my liege is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.
King Arthur: This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes. Monty Python and the Holy Grail 

I want to insert the sheep bladders just at that moment where Hipkins cuts loose into a stream of hyperbole that conflates the Draft Curriculum Key Competencies with earth quiver and insurgency.   

I just cannot imagine what precipitated this recklessness in KC conversation, Hipkins is usually more measured in her analysis.  The idea that integrating the five key competencies in The draft New Zealand curriculum, [managing self/ relating to others/ participating and contributing/ thinking and using language, symbols, and text],   into student’s learning experience , will create “upheavals” and “revolution” sounds more like the outcomes desired by the “Alleged terror cell drawn from medical world” than anything coming from the MoE.  But I guess if the KCs reliably and validly represent the cluster of competencies required for people to know themselves as learners then they deserve a closer look.

Nassim Taleb helps me here – he has a fascinating piece in The Edge - “Learning to expect the unexpected” There is a heap of good thinking in his piece.  One paragraph in particular clarifies how we might introduce unwarranted assumptions when we accept the Key Competencies as necessary (and sufficient) for students learning to be better learners. 

“There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.”

In a similar argument, I can think of plenty of my colleagues who manage themselves, relate well to others, participate and contribute, think, and use language, symbols, and text but could never be held up to others as examples of the MoE’s  life long learners.

Indeed simple behavioural observation reveals that like me, most of my colleagues are “lifelong deluders” trapped in ground hog day like activities where we continue to make the “same old same old” mistakes throughout our professional and private lives.  Like the coronary-artery bypass patients who stubbornly refuse to learn from experience and modify their behaviours our vices (and our virtues) remain deliciously intact. 

Hijacking Taleb’s interpretation it seems entirely plausible that that the few “life long learners” amongst us are mostly a product of happenstance, of luck and nothing to do with the key competencies.

Even if we could exclude observational bias and prove a statistically confident correlation between adoption of the key competencies and "learning to learn" like behaviours, to claim that adopting the Key competencies will create “earth shiver and insurgency” in New Zealand schools seems just a little OTT. 

It ignores the reality that creating attitudinal change in humans is complex and unlikely to happen when meeting the needs of the 21st Century learner sees us increasingly fragment, isolate and personalise approaches to learners, learning and learning environments.

The sheep can rest easy for a while yet.