Artichoke

"Take me to your leader", truants and the classroom as a space between things.

Whenever I watch those “take me to you leader” science fiction movies I am less worried by the essentially bipedal nature of the aliens than I am by the large number of kids in the crowd scenes who must obviously be truanting from school.

You have just got to know that if aliens landed in New Zealand between the hours of 8.30am to 3.30pm they wouldn’t realise that earthlings in New Zealand had a nymph form at all – all our 5 to 18 year olds are shut away in classrooms – the irony in this sequestering of our young is that we shut them away from the outside world in classrooms so that they can learn about the world outside the classroom.

I have always argued - that a significant weakness of doing all our teaching and learning in schools and classrooms is their very isolation from the real – I believe that one of the reasons schools cannot ever deliver what they promise in terms of learning what it is to be human is because of their disconnect from the real. Our schools are places identified in part by their isolation and the way they remove a large chunk of the 5 to 18 year olds in society from everyday life between the hours of 8 to 4pm each day.

I like having the things I hold most dear shaken and undermined by new thought. Which is why I am enjoying Sherry Turkle’s start up essay in The Inner History of Devices.

Turkle’s essay looks at the relationship between an ethographer and the subject. In exploring this relationship she refers to Virginia Woolf’s description of “the writer’s space’ as “a room of one’s own.”

I am always looking out for metaphors that help me understand teaching and learning. If learning at school is all about learning how to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our own thinking about the curriculum of what it is to be human, then there is something in Woolf’s “room of one’s own” sentiment, that might help me better understand how classrooms might work.

“In its safety and containment, writers open themselves to the kind of reflection, [.... ] where feelings don’t conform to a predetermined script.” Turkle The Inner History of Devices P6

“Safety” and “containment” are good descriptors for the physical classrooms we have dotted across the country. And providing learning experiences that encourage students to reflect upon their learning in a way that does not “conform to a predetermined script” seems a worthy endeavour.

Turkle develops Woolf’s idea further when she describes psychoanalysis as needing

“a space between things,” “a space that is “transitional,” a space removed from everyday life; it is a liminal space located between things. There, relationships are not based on time worn hierarchies but develop in new meaning filled encounters.” Turkle p6

This confronts and undermines my thinking. For Turkle argues that a space removed from everyday life is essential for relationships to develop - in meaning filled encounters between ethnographer and subject.

Can I extend this argument for a space removed from everyday life to classroom spaces where relationships can develop – in meaningful encounters between teacher and student/s?

I was interested in Turkle’s description of how an ethnographer creates environments where “what is there can emerge” and in thinking how this differs from what we do as teachers in classroom environments.

Turkle emphasises that

“Ethnography is not a passive practice; understanding the experience of others demands active listening. Nor are ethnographers trying to get something out of their subjects through clever questioning. They are trying to create an environment where what is there can emerge.”

Active listening versus “telling,” and getting rid of all that initiation elaboration response teacher clever questioning – now that would be an interesting change in classrooms.

I have to think about this more deeply because developing meaning filled encounters is such a sought after outcome in classrooms.

P.S. Turkle’s distancing from the real reminds me of Sidorkin’s dialogue thinking. I have always loved Sidorkin’s argument for a removal from the real in his three wine dialogue theory where wine allows deep conversation and dialogue by removing the individual from group identity.

The first drink conversations establish a group, they provide “a common text, a shared experience, an initial conversational event. ….It establishes a common set of references, a shared language for the following conversations.”

The second drink conversations occur when individuals within the group “…. challenge, deconstruct, actively agree or disagree with it, they commend and ridicule. We understand things by breaking them, turning them upside down, taking a bite, or dissolving with saliva—literally with edible objects, figuratively with texts. The idea is to enmesh the self into the text, to break down the whole, to salvage whatever is left from a common meaning for individual sense-making. We understand by trying to co-author the text, to interpret it, and to offer our interpretations to those with whom we listened together. “

By the third drink – the conversations see individuals escaping the group identity “People take things lightly, they give up on convincing each other, they talk with their emotions, while often pretending to make sense of each other. …Talking nonsense, and having a good laugh about it is obviously better than endless discussions and polarization of opinions. When people miss the third drink phase, their conversation ceases to be a source of happiness, and becomes a beginning of their misery. For different opinions to coexist, there needs to be a nurturing broth of a carnival, where all things seem to be possible, and all become laughable.”

There is obviously more to creating space between things than I first thought.

Welcome to the Learningdome: Thinking about school as a theme park

Bill, raises some good questions about physical design of spaces for learning (specifically the ability for teacher and students to give and receive feedback Hattie effect size d=0.72).

One problem is that computer labs and the way they are organised in schools are often not very good environments for the nuanced development of feedback. ie. since the computer lab is an expensive, time restricted resource then there is great pressure on the teacher to keep students on computer tasks and not interrupt those tasks for other matters. Also the physical layout of some computer rooms is poor, especially those with computers in rows. Best layout is all computers around the walls. I would argue that if students had netbooks 24/7 then very different interactions could develop in computers use. So, perhaps Hattie's research confirms that the computer revolution hasn't happened yet?

His questions made me think about what school might be like if we could align all the teaching interventions with effects sizes that made the most difference, with the learning spaces that best supported them.

And then imagining what this might look like in a physical environment, in a virtual world like Second Life and in a game based simulation like WOW.

We have an anxiety about panopticon-like experience, where everything is designed, observed and measured, forgetting we are all chemical, we are unsettled by the idea that the complexity of human experience can be reduced to a database

 Fantastic Journal has a great post Welcome to the Pleasuredome that starts to tease out how we understand designed environments and theme parks. The post exposes our fears and hopes for virtual worlds in the context of the sci fi movies Westworld, Logan’s Run and The Truman Show.

A recurrent anxiety about theme parks is that this carefully controlled environment denies us the ability to act independently. To visit somewhere like Disneyworld is to take part in a minutely choreographed experience where little deviation is allowed from the script. This is most apparent in the rides themselves where the same experience is repeated for each guest exactly, ad infinitum, like a Fordist approach to having fun. But it also occurs in the landscape between the rides where boredom, lethargy or other forms of deviant behaviour is frowned upon. Cast members constantly coax visitors into immersing themselves more fully into the concept. These cast members, like the technicians in Westworld, have their own separate circulation system from the public, appearing fully dressed and smiling as if from nowhere.

The description could well have been written about school. 

Schools are carefully controlled environments both in a real sense and in the connections we allow to the virtual.  To attend does require the student and the teacher to take part in an increasingly choreographed experience where little deviation is allowed from the script or grammar of school. There is an expectation that students, in different classes at the same curriculum learning area and level, will experience the same learning experiences, and we monitor this through assessments that target the expected learning outcomes.  Boredom, lethargy and other forms of deviant behaviour in students and staff is frowned upon, and cast members (who may be student leaders, staff, senior management, boards of trustees or even the MoE) constantly coax visitors to the theme park of school to immerse themselves more fully in the experience.  And the technicians who appear fully dressed and smiling as if from nowhere is something any student who has tried to have a quick smoke behind the caretakers shed will affirm.

It made me wonder if an outcome of designing and measuring everything we do will be a Truman like experience for both teachers and kids ... some of you will undoubtedly argue that school already has this effect on students ... school the ultimate Learningdome theme park, with an experience so manipulated that it has corrupted forever our sense of what it is to learn without the institution.    

Don't shake the system, cause the system works ...

I am having fun trying to imagine how Hattie and his colleagues at Visible Learning Labs would make a mashup between  Freddie Fiction’s  You Tube Video Big Corporation Man and the shake the system ideas in Visible Learning.   

Using those multiliteracies to get the message across ...

There is heaps of wiggle room in the lyrics given Hattie’s claim that

In many classrooms and schools, there is evidence of low effect sizes, reliance on poor methods and strategies, a dependence on “war stories” and anecdotes, and an agreement to tolerate different and sometimes poor teaching.  We beseech these teachers to be evidence based but so many government agencies and departments, teacher educators, and others are not evidence-based, and seem reluctant to accept evidence if it is contrary to current policies.  There is a preference instead to make changes to structural and working conditions.  Visible Learning P257

And that

If the criterion of success is achieving effect sizes greater than 0 then nearly all teachers could be considered effective.  But this is a false comparison and assumes that any achievement is better than none!  Students are more discriminating about teachers ....

Perhaps it is no wonder there is an increasing set of problems relating to student engagement. AS Steinberg, Brown, and Dornbusch (1997) claimed, so many students are “physically present but psychologically absent”(p67). They also cited that about 40 percent of students are “going through the motions” and say they neither try hard nor pay attention.  So many cut class and are truant, so many admit to cheating to get through, so many lose interest because they cannot keep up, and so many are bored by the lack of appropriate challenge.  So many do not learn that ability is not enough, and effort is critical. About half who do drop out of school claim that classes were not interesting or inviting, and two thirds claim that not one teacher was interested in their success in learning at school (Bridgeland, Dillulio, & Morison, 2006) All is not rosy with teachers, teaching , and schooling.  Visible Learning P250   

    

Visible Learning: The Gathering, and what to do when everything works.

I am enjoying reading all the summaries of the interventions for learning in Hattie's Visible Learning .  They are a little like reading “Wittgenstein in ninety minutes” –  the summaries are extraordinarily useful overviews of the key research papers informing learning interventions from homework, to acceleration, to bilingual programs, to simulations and gaming etc.

In truth I think Routledge missed a marketing moment here.  The research summaries and natty little d=0.33 effect size coloured dials are crying out to be captured on collectible trading cards.  They could be effortlessly developed into a “Magic: The Gathering” type trading card game to be played online or with decks of collectible cards by teachers, educators, parents and students all over the world.  I am already imagining what influences I’d want to collect for my deck.

I am trying to make connections between Hattie’s thinking about the effect sizes of different influences on achievement, and the Best Evidence Synthesis on Professional Development, to better inform what I do with teachers in the ICT_PD Cluster programme. 

 All the reading makes me realise that;

 

Almost everything has an influence on learning.

 

As a teacher I can be a significant influence on the learning of others

 

The strategies I use to teach with vary widely in their effectiveness.

 

Learning results in some kind of a learning outcome.

 

Learning outcomes vary – let us call it a continuum between shallow and deep.

 

Effective teaching and learning occur when both my students and I can tell you; what we are doing, how well it is going, and what we need to do next.

 

Effective teaching and learning requires that my students and I can distinguish between surface and deep learning outcomes.

 

Part of the day job sees me working within the structure of the ICT_PD cluster model to change teacher practice when using ICTs so that the teacher practice that results makes significant changes to student learning outcomes. 

Changing teacher practice is an interesting challenge.  There is an irony in this activity that is kind of like being a life coach for a life coach.

When thinking about the effectiveness of any professional learning I do, or do to others, I have always been a fan of Thomas Guskey’s thinking. I have used his 5 levels thinking as a personal effectiveness audit for many years.  Evaluating Professional Development by T.R Guskey

  

1. Participants’ Reactions

2. Participants’ Learning

3. School Organisation Support and Change

4. Participants’ Use of Knowledge and Skills

5. Student Learning Outcomes over the period of the professional learning

 

The Teacher Professional Learning and Development Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (BES)  by H. Timperley, A. Wilson, H. Barrar and I. Fung (published in December 2007) means I now know heaps more about how best to change teacher practice in a New Zealand context.

Timperley’s work means we also know heaps about what doesn’t change teacher practice For example, the BES suggests that bringing in a charismatic speaker, giving teacher’s release time, holding a TOD, taking everyone away to a conference, enrolling people in an online community, or having visionary leadership may well be valued activity but they are the equivalent of “busy work” when it comes to professional learning for they do not lead to changes in teacher practice that are reflected in changes in student learning outcomes.

Being able to live with paradox means that within the ICTPD cluster programme, I am charged with and encourage all of the above.

When you read Hattie and Timperley et al it is apparent that, despite all the literature framing adult learners as having different learning needs from students stuff, there are even bigger similarities between changing teacher practice and helping kids achieve deep learning outcomes – both require hard work.

I want to learn how to teach teachers in ways that are more effective, in ways that are most likely to make big shifts in improving teacher and student learning.  The BES helps but not enough.  Without some clarity, over the strategies that make the biggest differences to student learning outcomes when using ICTs, it is hard for me to tell what I should be targeting, and then what I am doing, how it is going and what I should do next.

I don’t want anecdote to drive the decisions I make about the way I teach.  But, after reading Hattie and Timperley et al I acknowledge that I do not have enough research based evidence to judge the effectiveness of what I do when teaching teachers how to teach using ICTs in classrooms and schools.

The BES suggests that if I want the teachers I work with to have deep learning about the strategies that are most effective when using ICTs in teaching and learning I need to provide them with,

 

1.  multiple opportunities to learn through a range of activities.

2.  activities focused on content aims, eg translating theory into practice or demonstrating how assessment could be used to focus and refine teaching.

 

Part 1 is achievable but part 2, well part 2 is problematic.

The thing is that the facilitators in the ICTPD clusters don’t have any agreed upon content aims, theory, practice or demonstration of how assessment could be used to focus and refine teacher practice when teaching through ICTs.

I guess it is a whole lot easier to provide a conference for teachers to attend each year than it is to provide clearly identified professional standards for effective teacher practice when using ICTs in teaching and learning.

Unlike the numeracy, literacy or assessment for learning contracts the ict_pd cluster programme pretty much leaves clusters and facilitators to develop their own content aims.

Our cluster’s content aims are based around helping teachers;

• identify the student learning outcome in the learning experiences they plan for their students,
• identify the ICTs that might enhance the conditions of value of that student learning outcome. 
• learn how to use the ICTs identified to help student learn, and
• develop self assessment rubrics and success criteria to allow students to self assess their learning outcome and know what to do next.
  

They had always seemed defensible until I read Hattie.

Reading "Visible Learning" makes me realise that my content aims and process are based upon probability not evidence.

It is probable/ likely that the approach I take will enhance student learning outcomes but I have no evidence based practice to support this in the context of using ICTs. I have no professional standards or success criteria to let me know if I am successful or what I should do next. 

However, more significant was the realisation that what I usually take as proof of our success – all those pages and pages of milestone reporting on improvements in student learning outcomes as a consequence of using ICTs with students in our cluster schools ... is actually no big deal ... for improvements in learning outcome are a given when innovations are introduced to schools.

In fact the only result worth reporting on in a milestone would be if there was no improvement in student learning outcome as a result of using ICTs in teaching and learning.

Which means that providing evidence in a milestone report that suggests that student academic achievement has been enhanced because I have encouraged teachers to use an IWB, student blogs, an online community, or VoiceThread is not as exciting as we make it out to be.  At best it only affirms that teachers are in a cluster looking at how best to use ICTs in teaching and learning. Because the very act of looking at what we do enhances learning outcomes .

To put it another way, providing evidence of enhanced student learning outcomes is no big deal because Hattie’s research into influences on student learning outcomes identifies that most everything I do as a teacher will improve learning outcomes.

 Realising that “everything works” is a bit of a wakeup call.  It is also why the trading card game idea is a winner. 

If as Hattie describes just “having a teacher’s pulse” in a classroom can be shown to improve student learning outcomes, with an average effect size of d= 0.2 to d= 0.4 growth per year, then it is uncomfortably apparent that we need to look for other ways to discriminate between all the things that influence learning outcomes.

Because if everything works, then everything can be and is defended, and we have no professional yardstick to tell us what to do next, or how to improve the effectiveness of our practice.

I reckon we are especially vulnerable to this “everything works” effect in the ICT_PD Cluster programme.  This is because in the ICTPD Cluster programme we are asking teachers to change their existing practice, and as Hattie shows just being involved in an innovation that alters an existing practice can lead to improvements in student learning outcomes.

“the mere involvement in asking questions about the effectiveness of any innovation may lead to an inflation of the results”

 Hattie uses this to argue that we should be looking for an effect size of d=0.4 or greater when deciding on where to put our energies in teaching and learning, when deciding on the strategies to best influence our effectiveness. Noting that effect sizes may not be uniform across all students, Hattie suggests that “effects lower than d=0.4 indicate the need more consideration (costs, interaction, facts and so on)”. 

Look at the effect sizes associated with ICts and teaching and learning.

Computer assisted instruction: d= 0.37

Web- based learning: d= 0.18

Interactive video methods: d= 0.52

Audio/Visual methods: d=0.22

Simulations: d=0.33

Programmed instruction: d= 0.24

From Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning p 220 to 232

I sense some great discussions ahead.  Also worth thinking about is that the effect size for computer based instruction has remained much the same for the last thirty years - between 1975 and 2007.  Meaning that all the improvements in technologies, hardware, software, infrastructure etc, that we have purchased and introduced to schools, have made no significant improvements in the effect size on student learning outcomes.  How will the paradigm shifters and marketers make sense of that one?

There are four questions that I particularly want to hang onto, before I read more.

Englemann (cited in Hattie 2009 p253) challenges teachers and schools to ask four critical questions about the innovations we are asked to adopt in school. The kicker is in the third question.

 

• Precisely where have you seen this practice installed so that it produces effective results?
• Precisely where have you trained teachers so they can uniformly perform within guidelines of this new system?
• Where is the data that show you have achieved performance that is superior to that achieved by successful programmes (not simply the administrations last unsuccessful attempt).
• Where are your endorsements from historically successful teachers (those whose students outperform demographic predictions)?
  

When we are thinking about ICTs in teaching and learning they become:

• Precisely where have you seen teaching and learning through ICTs installed so that it produces effective results in enhancing student achievement?
• Precisely where have you trained teachers so they can uniformly perform within guidelines of this new system?
• Where is the data that show teaching and learning using ICTs achieves performance that is superior to that achieved by other successful strategies used in teaching and learning?
• Where are your endorsements from historically successful teachers – those whose students outperform demographic predictions for student achievement?
  

 

Collision theory, class size, and those deliberate acts of teaching.

"I've tried to avoid teaching, which for all its charm takes a lot of your energy and makes you doubt yourself."   John Updike cited in Robert Genn Letters 

A much anticipated copy of John Hattie’s “Visible learning A synthesis of over 800 meta - analyses relating to achievement”    was sitting in the corridor in its yellow bubble wrapped Amazon envelope waiting for me to get home from the Pakuranga Schools TOD yesterday.  I have been hanging out to read the book that summarises 15 years of his research and thinking about influences on student achievement.

I will admit here that Hattie is one of my most favourite educational thinkers.  I regard him, as I do Illich, as someone who has brought an unusual and much needed clarity to my own teaching and learning. 

For example, take Hattie's thinking on class size effects on student learning.

It seems plausible to claim that reducing class sizes will improve learning outcomes, and for as long as I can remember this has been the claim of lobbying by teachers and teacher unions for improving working conditions. Refer the Scoop piece from the NZEI.  And until I read John's take on this a while back I had never challenged the assumption.  It seemed highly plausible.

However, Hattie notes that although reducing class sizes might improve the probability that the environments for improving learning will occur; he has research that shows that it does not improve student learning outcomes per se.  

Teachers get very agitated by this claim.  But if they listened carefully to Hattie’s argument and read his research they would understand why he can validly claim that class size has minimal effect of learning outcomes.  

Improving student learning outcomes through reducing class sizes requires that teachers moving to smaller class sizes “reconfigure the interaction, curricula, and strategies” they used with large classes to change the student interactions happening within the smaller classes. 

And the provocative bit is that Hattie’s research shows that in many instances this does not happen.

We continue to use the same interaction, curricula and strategies with the students in our care regardless of how many students there are.  If as teachers we do not change our practice when working with smaller class sizes , the quality of teaching, student learning and student interaction does not change when class sizes change.

It reminds me of the way I used to explain collision theory when I taught science.   The student text put it like this:  

 A reaction occurs when particles collide.  Not all collisions between particles result in a chemical reaction.  If a reaction is to occur, the particles must collide with sufficient energy for a reaction to occur.  They must also collide in the correct orientation (or position).

Finally, it is a fact that the more frequently effective collisions occur, the faster the rate of reaction.  There are four factors that affect the rate of a reaction, by affecting the frequency (and possibly the energy) with which collisions occur.  These factors are concentration of reacting solutions, surface area of solids, temperature and use of catalysts.

As a consequence I used to teach the kids to talk about increasing the rate of effective collisions rather than simply increasing the rate of collisions.

 I have to unpack the analogy a little more but it starts with “learning happens when teachers interact with students.  Not all interactions between teachers and students result in learning.  If learning is to occur, the teacher and students interactions must be of sufficient quality for learning to occur.  They teacher student interactions must also occur with  .... ”

So Hattie’s argument is that not all collisions between teachers and students will result in learning.  Simply increasing the frequency of those collisions without attention to changing the teaching and learning equivalent of the orientation of the collision and possibly the energy of the collision does not guarantee a reaction or improved learning outcomes.

As a consequence as teachers we need to talk about increasing the rate of effective interactions with students rather than simply increasing the rate of interactions. 

Hattie's work alerts us to re-look at ourselves and our practice.  To ask how can we assess and improve the quality of our teaching? 

Opening “Visible learning”   was an experience that reminded me of clasping one of those famous double scoop icecreams whilst standing in the sunshine on the banks of the Waikato River overlooking the power station in Huntly on Wednesday afternoon.

The dilemma of where to start when dealing with a rapidly melting double scoop chocolate ice-cream cone was not unlike the dilemma I faced when deciding where to start reading Visible Learning. 

There was so much that I wanted to read that I was made momentarily uncertain ...about where to begin.  

I decided on a strategy of selecting pages at random; and of reading whatever text first caught my eye as the book splayed open. And this is a book that splays well.  I was immediately rewarded by the following statement.

Constructivism is a form of knowing, and not a form of teaching, and it is important not to confuse constructing conceptual knowledge with the current fad of constructivism (Bereiter, 2002; Small 2003). Excerpt from Visible Learning “The empirical quest for explanations” on p243.

Hattie notes that his meta analyses findings back those of Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006); (researchers I’ve blogged about before) who reviewed minimal guidance during instruction teaching methods and found them wanting.

I liked the text clarifies the assumptions within inquiry and problem based learning approaches.

Assumption 1: Setting authentic problems leads to students constructing their own solutions.

Assumption 2: Knowledge is best acquired through experiences based on procedures of the discipline.  

And I liked how the text explains that these assumptions are not supported by the data.

“...each new set of advocates for these approaches seem either unaware of uninterested in previous evidence that unguided approaches have not been validated.” P243

Hattie affirms that claims of engagement and enjoyment are not evidence of student learning. 

All that “I know this works because “my students’ enjoy” or “the class is so engaged”, when we do [discovery learning, problem based learning or inquiry learning]” that I hear when working in schools. 

Inquiry and problem based learning are not evidence based practice because the evidence that they work is lacking.

A key understanding from p243 in Visible Learning is that believing that students construct conceptual knowledge DOES NOT REQUIRE us to adopt minimally guided methodologies like inquiry learning and problem-based learning.

Forms of knowing are not forms of teaching.  

If we believe that students learn through constructing conceptual knowledge, and that this is an active, social process where learners need “to create and recreate knowledge of themselves”, then direct and active teaching for this learning is the smart solution - both possible and appropriate.

Just look at the effect size data Hattie provides. 

Table 11.1 Effect sizes of teacher as activator and teacher as facilitator

Teacher as activator	d	Teacher as facilitator	d
Reciprocal teaching	0.74	Simulations and gaming	0.32
Feedback	0.72	Inquiry based teaching	0.31
Teaching students self verbalisation	0.67	Smaller class sizes	0.21
Meta-cognition strategies	0.67	Individualised instruction	0.20
Direct instruction	0.59	Problem-based learning	0.15
Mastery learning	0.57	Different teaching for boys and girls	0.12
Goals-challenging	0.56	Web based learning	0.09
Frequent/effects of testing	0.46	Whole language – reading	0.06
Behavioural organisers	0.41	Inductive teaching	0.06
Average activator	0.60	Average facilitator	0.17

Table 11.1 from Visible Learning (2009) Page 243

 The data in the table provides a powerful insight for teachers who want to make a difference to student learning; teachers who want to know where they should best put their energy.

When shared outside of the classroom it will also provides powerful argument for parents, Boards of Trustees, schools and communities who want to work together to improve student learning.

And what I like best is that, students learn significantly more when teachers adopt direct, active teaching methods.

Hattie’s effect size data resolves all that ambivalence between offering “deliberate and purposeful acts of teaching” or adopting that currently much acclaimed role of being a “guide on the side”, that stepping back and overseeing student inquiry.

And the question Hattie tackles in the next few pages (p244 to 247) is to explain the active teaching and learning strategies that teachers might work to improve their practice.  Things like improving the way we use backward design, learning strategies for surface deep and constructed knowledge, feedback, helping students know where they are going, how they are going and where to next etc.  

The effect size data and the elaboration on how we might improve the direct active teaching methods we adopt will undoubtedly help thoughtful teachers who like John Updike find that teaching takes all their energy and makes them doubt themselves.

I must continue reading.

Sustainability and Jamie Oliver drizzle words in education.

We have been writing content framed around the New Zealand Curriculum this summer break.  The process of working so intensively with the NZC document has alerted me to the things we privilege/ legitimise through inclusion in a national curriculum, and the things we omit and thus undermine.

For example in the NZC vision statement the second out of five bullet points (and yes I am alert to the irony of bullet pointing a vision) is for young people:

• who will seize the opportunities offered by new knowledge and technologies to secure a sustainable social, cultural, economic, and environmental future for our country;

 “Sustainability” is currently a Jamie Oliver drizzle word.  Be it in the context of a “Nan’s Lemon Drizzle cake” drizzle or a “drizzle over a little balsamic vinegar and season lightly with salt and pepper” drizzle, the result of drizzling “sustainability” or “sustainable outcomes” over all language symbols and text in any document you are working on in education is currently a “good thing” and guaranteed, much like Jamie Oliver’s creative drizzles in the kitchen, to find favour with your patrons.  It is so popular at the moment that I am waiting for the release of a drizzle index.

Because of the drizzle thing, I was not surprised that he NZC vision statement suggests that it is important to secure a social, cultural, economic and environmentally sustainable future for New Zealand.

But what did catch my eye was the way in which the NZC vision statement suggests these sustainability outcomes will occur.

It seems that the NZC believes that sustainability will be “secured” through “seizing” opportunities offered by “new knowledge and technologies”.

I don’t know what seize or “secured” means to you ... but my guess is that what is being alluded to by “seize” is different from to clasp gently, to linger over, or to to nudge up against, and that “secure” is something different from sharing, or distributing.

The vision statement suggests that not only will sustainability be resolved through a technological solution but also that this technological solution will need to be pursued, pinned and consumed through competitive activity. 

It makes me want to ask ... who will be doing the seizing? And who will be advantaged by the seizing?

It is noteworthy that there is no expectation in this bullet point that changes in human values – the what it is to live, love and be kind, will play a role.  And this seems strange given the emphasis on the key competencies later in the document.

Sustainability is all about discovering what is important and then discovering how we can protect what we have identified now and in the future – it is about balancing human needs with other needs, preservation, guardianship, and kaitiakitanga.

But it seems that preservation bit is not as easily understood as it might first appear.   Is preservation all about seizing?  Is preservation all about finding a technological solution?

Thinking that technology will rescue us, and that what will rescue us can be seized and secured, suggests that the collective writers of the NZC believe we do not have to take collective individual responsibility for preserving the social, cultural, economic and environmental resources in New Zealand in the 21^st Century. 

And that is kind of frightening because the problem with thinking that “technology will rescue us” in these situations  was well explained and found wanting over forty years ago in 1968 by Hardin (refer Tragedy of the commons  - The article is well worth a read and I note not without its own critics). 

Hardin’s argument was that sustainable outcomes cannot be resolved by technological solutions, if individuals are advantaged by pursuing their own interests then we will need “a change in human values or ideas and morality” not a technological solution to change things.   

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of 1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. .But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The NZC suggests that if we want sustainability we must seek a technological solution that has been wrested and secured - control and ownership stuff.

Hardin’s argument suggests that if we want sustainability we must manage how individuals and corporations use the commons – more control.

McKenna suggests yet another alternative – that we should unburden the individual from all that wresting and securing or being managed by others stuff and instead trust in the collective for sustainable outcomes. Less seizing and securing and technology and more changing behaviours and values for trusting and sharing.  (Thanks to Nix for the link)

I have thought a lot about preservation, and what it means to preserve something, an insect, a person, a story, a fantasy.  The instinct to preserve something sometimes means that we covet it and  keep it hidden away, but I have found that objects can exert their will on us and preservation can become a burden.   Rather than covet my father’s collection I’d like to let go of it.  For this reason, when I first exhibited this work in PlaySpace Gallery at CCA, I gradually gave away every image in the piece to gallery visitors.  The act of scattering these images was meant to diffuse the responsibility of their preservation and to give these objects a second life. Perhaps this gesture of dispersal can be a form of preservation, one that lifts the weight off one person and trusts in the collective. Klea McKenna The Butterfly Hunter

John Francis Fien (2003) describes what preservation through dispersal might look like in an educational context: (Thanks to RB for the reference)

 “Enhancing our abilities to learn, to live sustainably and to love is the only way we will be able to address the ecological and social imperatives we face as we seek to build a fairer, less troubled and sustainable world for our children.”  From Learning to care: Education and compassion. In Australian Journal of Environmental Education, Vol. 19, pp. 1-13

[I note that although social, cultural, economic, and environmental sustainability are in the NZC vision on page 8 by the time we hit the values “to be encouraged modelled and explored” on page 12 the social cultural and economic have been lost.  NZC Values: excellence, innovation, diversity, equity, community and participation, ecological sustainability, integrity and respect.   And that is a shame because I don’t know if it is possible nowadays to think critically about ecological sustainability without a concomitant valuing of social and economic sustainability.]

How should we measure visitor satisfaction in museums and engagement in learning in schools?

The NDF conference presentation on Web metrics by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum who blogs at fresh + new(er) blog had some valuable insights for institutions like NZCER  who produce surveys claiming to measure student engagement in school.  

Me and My School: student engagement survey

This year we developed and launched a survey tool aimed at finding out what students in years 7-10 think about their school and their learning. The tool was trialled on more than 8000 students before we launched it in the third term this year. Many schools have told us how useful they have found it, so much so we are looking at expanding it to years 11-13. We hope to have that work in development next year and an extended tool available in 2010. Meanwhile, the years 7-10 version will be available again in 2009, with schools able to run it in the third term. We make it available at the same time each year in order to ensure the national norms are valid.

 How we understand engagement is something that I have fretted over before on Artichoke   ... .  

I’d much prefer we put our thinking and energy into measuring student versatility and control.   Engagement is also something that I doubt can be measured on a survey so I was especially alert to the current enthusiasm in New Zealand schools for NZCER’s new measure designed to profile  student engagement  –and to listening to how principals are talking about the use of the NZCER engagement data as an evaluative measure for school programmes.  

At the NDF conference Seb Chan’s presentation was on the validity of different measurements of visitor satisfaction  used to evaluate the success of the work of Museums.

His presentation provided much to challenge our NZCER survey measurement of student engagement used to evaluate the success of the work of schools.

Chan started by looking at current measures of visitor engagement and how little they really tell us.

For example when Chan claimed that changes in the way people interact in online environments

makes traditional Web analytics and metrics that museums have used to measure and track success on the Web for the past decade increasingly inadequate. Occasional user surveys and server-side log analysis can no longer be relied upon by Web teams to guide them towards making museum sites more user-centric and effective.

The  “more user-centric and effective” bit reminded me of our NZC claim to  “put students at the centre of teaching and learning".

When Chan claimed that   

Whilst basic reporting currently satisfies government and sometimes corporate benefactors, far more complex analysis is required for museums themselves to more effectively evaluate and refine their on-line offerings for their users.

I was interested in how this might also relate to the conclusions gained from a self report survey on engagement.   

Chan was an entertaining conference speaker.  He well exposed the flaws and deceit in commonly used web analytics - “Where counting has no point” - through “A Summary Of Old Problems”;

• The Problem With Log File Data,
• The Problem With Page Tagging Data,
• The Problem With 'Unique Visitors',
• The Problem With 'Visits' And 'Time Spent On Site',
• The Problem With 'Page Views'. 

Even the number of visitors who click on an interactive such as a video talk or download a podcast was exposed when more detailed analysis shows so few of them watch the whole video or listen to the whole podcast.  

“In many ways the best measure of the success of a podcast is how much feedback and discussion it generates. This is far more valuable than the total number of downloads”.

Of much more interest to Chan was how we might measure the stuff that really shows visitor satisfaction. 

If just turning up on a website was not enough then  ....Seb argued for  third party web metric measures of visitor behaviour using  RSS feed tracking, comments on the museum website, but also on other blog posts and comments, tagging and comments on museum content on Flickr Commons photos and how these are used in other conversations in communities and blogs,  Technorati trackback, and Facebook friends, fans and profile comments, gave a better indication of the success of museums and exhibits and events than number of visitors/page views.  

He suggested combining qualitative and quantitative measures when we measure visitor comments online.  

Again, it is far better to measure interactions – comments, trackbacks – and then qualitatively assess them. Blogs should ideally be generating conversation and discussion, and blogs will rank differently depending upon your choice of what to measure (Chan & Spadaccini, 2007).

Chan identified these alternative web analytics as a way of collecting “measures of recommendation” – a kind of “how likely is it that you would recommend [the company/ experience] to a friend or a colleague? – a broader sense of those net promoter score stuff.  He suggested that recommendation (and hence allowing recommendation and sharing) is how we should understand the way people interact with museums.

It all made me think of our current excitement in education over measuring engagement.

If engagement in learning is important then counting the numbers of students who claim to be engaged in response to questions in a survey will tell us very little.

We should look carefully at Seb Chan’s museum analytics thinking and look for measures of recommendation.

1.  How likely is it that students would recommend [the school, the teacher, the learning experience] to others?

2.  How could we find this out using Web metrics?

My thinking starts with mentions of learning on student social networking sites, blogs, Rate my teacher ....

And then

3.  How could we use technology to allow for/ enhance the conditions for recommendation and sharing of learning in school?

More reading:

Sebastian Chan : Towards New Metrics Of Success For On-line Museum Projects

Understanding knowledge, George Oates, Flickr and building learning communities in school.

I spent Thursday and Friday at the National Digital Forum 2008 Conference with Nix.   

It was liberating for two teachers to go undercover at a conference for uber_librarians, (e)_historians, anarcho_archivists, web designers and museum_istas.  We spent two glorious and anonymous days learning about knowledge, ownership, access and authority, NZ cultural copyright, what this means when things are digitised, quantitative and qualitative measurement of audience engagement, what website analytics really show, the fabulous  Digital NZ  site with its Digital NZ Memory Maker remix editor and editable Coming Home search widget and and and ...

The tensions in the discussions in the Owen Glenn Building so often came back to how we understand knowledge – and the artificial polarising of the alternatives.  Those traditionalists  worried about digitisation betraying institutional authority and expertise – and what happens to knowing when we blur the privileging of particular experiences or interpretations.  The modernists  argued for the experiential basis of knowledge – that knowledge is both a social and historical product stuff, and that digitising can leverage knowledge by opening access and interpretation to all.

Moore and Young were helpful in not dismissing those with reservations, or rejecting those without.

The neo conservative position may be flawed, but it is not false.  It reminds us that (a) education needs to be seen as an end in itself and not just a means to an end (the instrumentalists position), and that (b) tradition, though capable of preserving vested interests, is also crucial in ensuring the maintenance and development of standards of learning in schools, as well as being a condition for innovation and creating new knowledge.  More generally, neo conservatives remind us that the curriculum must, in Matthew Arnold’s words, strive to,

Make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere! (Arnold, 1960, p70)

From "Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education: towards a reconceptualisation by Moore and Young. British Journal of Sociology in Education Vol 22 No 4 2001 p449 and 450"    Thanks to cj for suggesting this as mind food.

The irony being that different interpretations of "knowledge" means that Arnold's quote could have been a catch cry for either group.

Much like conversations and claims over how knowledge should be produced or acquired at an  educational conference, the conversation over digitising knowledge in the two day NDF conference could have also been framed by how the various speakers and organisations understood knowledge. 

However, there were some significant difference between the educational conferences I get to attend and the NDF08.  The first thing I realised was that librarians, historians and archivists flock differently from teachers. They dress differently, they queue differently, and they question differently.  For example The NDFers had to be encouraged to take freebies like fractured fragments of greenstone from the registration desk and ice cream from the Trade Exhibit Area.  And unlike my experience in educational conferences the end of each keynote and forum session was marked by thoughtful challenge and critique offered. The NDFers asked difficult questions, provided intriguing analogies, offered significant alternatives, and contested espoused institutional values.

The NDF2008 keynotes were notable for their focus on real achievement.  The NDF keynoters had all done the stuff they were talking about.  We heard about what had worked and what had failed; we heard about real outcomes and actual achievement. There was an absence of all that futuristic visionary rhetoric we have become so accustomed to in educational conferences in New Zealand; an absence of those paradigm shift_ers, digital native_rs, generation Y_ers, knowledge is a verb_ers, perfect education storm_ers, and  guide on the side_rs.   Conference circuit junkies, (e) learning futurists and prophets didn’t get a look in at the NDF08 conference. 

 In the opening keynote on Thursday, George Oates Senior Program Manager, Flickr talked about “Human Traffic, General Public.”

Flickr has grown to an archive of over 3 billion photos in just under 5 years. What?!?!? Once upon a time it was just a start-up with a handful of members. How did it become the world-famous photo sharing site it is today? By building a passionate community - or, more accurately, lots of co-existing communities, all bustling around the same place. What better place for public institutions to share their collections? It turns out the enormous Flickr community is very interested in The Commons project on Flickr. The key goals of The Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons) are to “firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”

A founding member of the team that built Flickr, George Oates was the Lead Designer of flickr.com for four years, and recently moved into the role of Senior Program Manager, leading The Commons on Flickr. Her keynote presentation at NDF is called “Human Traffic,” about how designing for community might actually be able to help public institutions can create digital value through platforms like Flickr, by creating an engaged, conversational and generous community.

 George Oates described how Flickr started .. The Origin Myth ... and what Flickr is today - five years on. This thinking about Flickr was very useful for educators thinking about different ways of doing school and different ways of defining knowledge. Her keynote was all about conversation, collaboration and contact networks.

George identified two key ideas learned from Flickr;

People don’t like being told what to do.

People do like to feel that they belong.     

You could tell in the post keynote conversation as we queued for coffee at morning tea that in talking about The Flickr Commons, George respectfully disrupted the ways some in the audience made meaning of their day jobs.  The coffee line conversation was all about the perceived loss of institutional authority, loss of archival context, the authentication of comments made, and control over the digital copies shared. Although, The National Library of New Zealand had obviously thought through all of this and officially joined The Commons Project www.flickr.com/commons on Thursday afternoon.

I took something different from the archivists and their concern over access, ownership and control.

Learning how Flickr had designed and then built a community provided an insight for thinking about new ways of designing learning communities in schools and between cluster schools. 

It the success of Flickr (3 billion photos archived in just under 5 years) tells us anything about human interaction and I think the sheer scale of Flickr means it does, our challenge is to build flexible places/spaces online and face to face where we change our current focus on compliance reporting.  If we are genuine in building a learning community then we need to reduce all the telling people what to do stuff and rark up all the opportunities for belonging – the contributing and participating stuff.  

I much enjoyed the opening keynote, I liked the way “historical authenticity” is understood on Flickr, how it is not the end of the world if something happens that is not controlled, how the best  protection may well come from proliferation, how Flickr increases public access to public things, but best of all I liked George Oates reference to hand crafted objects and Malcolm McCullough

The handcrafted object reflects not only an informal economy of energy (as opposed to one of process efficiency), but also pleasure. Its production involves some play, some waste and above all some kind of communion. P10 Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand 

The quote has such resonance in understanding the work we do in schools with knowledge building.

so what happens when we look at student learning outcomes against the criteria for identifying a hand crafted object and when we can do this using digital platforms?

Can we create learning experiences where we scaffold for both an economy of energy and the opportunity for pleasure?  Where in planning for a student learning outcome we ask ourselves;

Where is the opportunity for play?

Where is the possibility for waste?

Where is the prospect for communion? 

The early adopter and “Waiting for Godot”.

I spent much of the last ten years teaching teachers how to use thinking strategies and technologies for learning. 

Although I have witnessed radical and ubiquitous family, community, business and society wide adoption of ICTs in New Zealand in this time, I have yet to observe any significant school wide adoption of effective use of ICTs in teaching and learning.

For example,
Outside of school I see ICTs in use everywhere I look, from waiting staff at local restaurants taking orders on wireless mobile devices and pinging them to them to the kitchen, to the over eighties I meet using electronic banking, texting pictures of their grandchildren to Flicker and saving money on keeping an ear and an eye on the family through Skype, to The Magnet who has yet to read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother installing an electronic tracking device on her phone that will enable Air New Zealand to track how many times we approach the wine bar in the Koru Club departure lounge. 

Within schools and classrooms I continue to see patchy use of ICTs; (e) learning practice that is too often based on the enthusiasms of individuals rather than that of whole staff.  In the glossy ICT educashin magazines I continue to read articles promoting individual even idiosyncratic success rather than collective successful practice.  And if your day job allows you to travel around as many schools as we do each year it is hard to claim the adoption of effective use of ICTs in teaching and learning in New Zealand as common collective activity in schools.  

We are pretty good at promoting the activities of individuals we describe as “early adopters” in schools, we are pretty poor at finding and promoting schools where all the “late adopters” have arrived.  

All this thinking makes me realise that a little bit of me is still hanging out for the arrival of the late adopters.

I feel foolish when I realise how long I have been waiting for something that never arrives. I am the equivalent of Estragon waiting for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.  "Personally I wouldn't know him if I ever saw him."  

My Mr. Godot like waiting is unlikely to surprise Cuban who identified the expectations, rhetoric, policies and limited–use stages in the use of technology in education cycle over twenty years ago, (Cuban 1986).

However waiting has its uses. 

Careful observation of patterns of adoption by teachers in ict_pd clusters allows me to realise that the notion of the early adopter has limited the ways in which we understand the use or non use of ICTs in education.

Our focus on the early adopter means we are asking the wrong questions.  

Each year the ictpd cluster milestone reporting has encouraged me to focus on the barriers that are stalling the “late adopters”.  To survey our teachers and principals and ask them about the barriers they face in the adoption of ICTs in teaching and learning.

Each year I have faithfully collated “barrier data” from ictpd clusters; and each year I have generalised from the “barrier data” to create those “we need more” lists.

Before we can master ICTs and use them effectively in teaching and learning ...we need  ...

•    Professional development
•    Time
•    Hardware, software and connectivity
•    Technical and infrastructure support
•    Management strategies when students are learning though ICTs.
•    Money for all of the above

However, given the improvements in; professional development, time allowances, hardware, software and connectivity, technical and infrastructure support, and management strategies available to teachers and schools in 2008 compared to what was on offer even ten years ago it is tempting to suggest that some of these barriers are “in the eyes of the beholder” barriers rather than actual barriers.

The resourcing, time and ICT environments available to all teachers in 2008 more than meet the barrier busting “we need ...” lists of schools in the late 1990’s, and yet, and yet, we are still waiting for those late adopters..

It seems to me that “barriers” are relative frustrations.  Frustrations that are are independent of conditions experienced. For as conditions improve in our schools and classrooms so our expectations increase ....  and as a consequence our frustrations remain the same. 

If I am right in thinking that barriers are relative, that barriers are perceived and will always be with us, then focusing on identifying barriers in the ictpd clusters is a logical fallacy,  institutionalised busy work .... red herring activity.        

This is possibly why the content of the “we need more” lists have remained the same ever since teacher were first asked about their use of classroom radio and educational TV in the 1940’s (Teachers and Machines Larry Cuban p25 Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 and remained the same across countries, refer Lai, Pratt and Trwern’s New Zealand research cited on p11 of E-learning Communities: Teaching And Learning With the Web

It seems we have been collecting “barrier lists” in education for a long time. 

Perhaps it is time to stop pretending that identifying perceived barriers to implementation will bring the late adopters on board.  Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that identifying what teachers suggest are barriers to their use of ICTs in teaching and learning is akin to identifying learning styles or referring to Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience ... spurious and unhelpful. Perhaps it is time that we threw out the term “early adopter”.   

For the descriptor “early” implies there will be a “late”.  “Early adopter” suggests that “the late adopter is just around the corner.” This presumption of earliness causes us to focus on barriers to adoption.  To identify barriers that might explain why teachers don’t use ICTs in their teaching and presumably address them we hope to encourage the late adopters to arrive. But barriers are relative notions, subjective rather than objective measures.

It seems likely that this focus on finding and identifying barriers has prevented us from understanding what is really going on when teachers fail to collectively adopt the effective use of ICTs in teaching and learning. 

I suspect this focus on barriers has prevented us from asking the right questions ...

If everyone else on the planet is integrating ICTs in their programmes of living then something more is at work when teachers do not buy in to ICTs in their programmes of learning. 

I sense we have to look past notions of "We need:  ...

• Professional development
• Time
• Hardware, software and connectivity
• Technical and infrastructure support
• Management strategies when students are learning though ICTs.
• Money."

What I need is to explore different questions from questions that focus on barriers ... I am not sure what they might be ... perhaps I can start by asking ...

• Why are new practices universally adopted [by people/teachers]?
• How are new practices universally adopted [by people/teachers]?
• What determines whether a new practice will be universally adopted and sustained?

“Pieces of string too small to be of use.”

This post represents a return after the longest ever abandonment of Artichoke since we started talking together in 2004.  We have grown so distant this time... I feel like we have both been bottled and preserved in formaldehyde

The specimens were preserved in alcohol or formaldehyde.  Colour seldom survived this treatment for long, so that fish and newt, frog and worm, jellyfish and jeroboam, shared a kind of tuberous pallor, something like that of a parsnip.  The jars ranged in size from tiny phials crowded together and containing dozens of small shrimps to great towers of glass holding goannas from the outback or carnivorous lizards from Comoro.  Here was the profusion of the animal world pickled in perpetuity, a washed out parade of the panoply of life.  It was a place to make one think of the transience of all things.  P26 Dry Storeroom No.1

That the demands of the day job find me blog “pickled in perpetuity” ... sharing a “a kind of tuberous pallor, something like that of a parsnip.” Is a desperate situation ...  I knew this for certain when a friend in Italy, who finds Artichoke unreadable, Skyped me to plead that I restart my conversations with Arti... “if only so that that poor Jane Gilbert who has sat there for ages can move on ... “

Today is a public holiday In New Zealand ... it is Labour Day  ... and it marks carpenter Samuel Parnell's refusal to work more than eight hours a day in the 1840’s.  The irony in celebrating Labour Day in 2008 is that I don’t meet too many people in the day job who can claim to meet Parnell’s yardstick of eight hours a day.  Everyone who has a job in the 21st Century seems to be working much longer than eight hours a day and this doesn’t seem to be a high income or low income thing.  It makes me wonder what New Zealand would be like if we were all compelled to work to Parnell’s eight hour rule.

In deference to Parnell I have eschewed the ictpd exit milestone and spent the day offering unwanted advice to the rest of the household – advice on how best to stake a tomato plant, how best to unleash your inner rock hero in Rock Hero III’s Legends of Rock, how best to groom Scarface Claw without being dobbed, how best to get fit by cleaning the bathroom, and how best to purchase a stuffed ferret on TradeMe. 

Once my advice had been roundly rejected it was safe to settle down with my latest Amazon must read - Dry Storeroom No.1 – The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey.

Fortey is highly entertaining, he has good stories, he plays deftly with words and ideas, "All our lives are collections curated through memory".

He has a great eye for people their eccentricities and whimsies.  His behind the scenes anecdotes about the characters and exhibition history at the Natural History Museum are totally compelling.  I especially enjoyed the new learning I got from his arguments balancing the value in Linnaean binomial nomenclature against PhyloCode – or the case for the inconsistencies of the common language of “people like gardeners or bird watchers or fungus forayers” versus the case for the efficiencies in the strict logic of cladistic phylogenies.

But it was the parallels between how the museum staff coped and didn’t with the changes that introduced a business based management, accountability and performance outcomes and how teachers have coped and not coped with the same stuff that made me smile.  Fortey manages very astutely to value both camps in his analysis.

One of my favourite Fortey characters is Leslie Bairstow - who started work in the Department of Palaeontology in the 1930s and managed until retirement to publish absolutely nothing.  He may not have been publishing but he was not idle, he was filing ....

He developed a reference system that operated with cards and knitting needles; a kind of Heath Robinson precursor of the punch-card filing system.  His collections grew and grew.  It is said that he filed everything.  When he was sent specimens in parcels to identify, which he did with great thoroughness, he would unpick and save all the bits of string with which they had been trussed and file them all according to length in special boxes.  When he retired there were discovered a number of such boxes, labelled “string: 2-3 feet” and so on. One box was labelled “pieces of string too small to be of use.”

And because it is Labour Day and I can step away from work for a moment I can see analogies between Bairstow’s filing of string into different boxes and my linking of wikispaces data into the tables in the exit milestone template.  How much of what I do is in truth “too small to be of use”?

And then that makes me wonder about stuff that I do that is "too big to be of use".

There are some interesting Auckland Museum games being played out in the New Zealand Herald today regarding what is too big to be of use ... I note that the photo caption in the online version of the newspaper is quite different from the provocative and misleading caption in this morning's paper version where the photo and caption gave the distinct impression that the statue (1.8m high) when standing on a table would stand as high as the Weta workshop staff members head and shoulders.  It is a great article for students exploring critical literacies to unpack ... and it is not just the photo caption that was dodgy ...I am going to build the article into a media assignment for students to use with Henry Jenkin's Five core questions 

•    1. Who created this message?

•    2. What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?

•    3. How might different people understand this message differently from me?

•    4. What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?

•    5. Why is this message being sent?

and all this makes me think ... How important is it to find the right scale for what we do? Does everything we do, or anything we do, need to be of use?  Who determines what is of use? 

Fortey's book is the perfect Labour Day read in that it has allowed me to indulge in all of these wonderings about the scale of how we spend our time in the day job  ... and I have done this in the context of one of my most favourite places ... the museum.

If only Jane Gilbert had a blog .... and NZCER had a wiki ....

Last week a local principal gave me a copy of Jane Gilbert’s  “Progress” in 21st century education? – a New Zealand Council for Educational Research conference paper.   In it Gilbert claims that we need to rethink “progress” and think differently about what it is to learn.  Apparently schools need to change to better meet the needs of 21st Century Learners and Gilbert postulates this might happen if we;

• build learning capacity,
• develop deeper and richer networks and links for core competencies,
• think together and develop collaborative teams of learners, and
• find ways to ensure that everyone achieves.

It feels kind of strange to be learning about the need to change the way we learn in the 21st Century  in a 21st Century conference paper that is accessible only to those prepared to attend the conference or to pay for the print copy of the conference proceedings. 

The experience of reading the conference proceedings was in truth a retreat to a past way of learning.  The freedom that comes from living outside of the institution in the day job is balanced by relying heavily on accessing my professional learning online rather than from print sources or from officially sanctioned professional reading circles. My ability to interact with content and ideas in Gilbert's paper seemed limited in some way ... In reading the NZCER conference paper I felt like I was practising pedagogical austerity.  

So it was ironical to read future focused calls for schools to change “the way they do learning” when the researcher and research organisation calling for change is operating in an environment where;

• content is still centralised,
• communication remains in the form of a monologue with no opportunity provided for online collaborative comment, trackback  or conversation,
• learning is all about push over pull, and
• where unlike a wiki document, the learning manuscript is presented in its final form, ensuring that the learning process and editing involved in creating this thinking is not available for scrutiny.    

It is a little like the teacher who claims to value discussion and student questioning for learning when talking to other educators but whose educative classroom practice reveals that for their students “learning is listening”.

Our limited access to Jane Gilbert’s paper, “Progress” in 21st Century Education? is worth thinking about. 

It is worth challenging why we are so ready to accept espoused values of educational researchers in New Zealand when the integrated or lived values of their institutions are so different.  If only Jane Gilbert had a blog.... and NZCER had a wiki.... how different would our learning opportunities be?

My experience working with and in schools in the day job suggests that the ideas in “Progress” in 21st century education?” are dated.  Especially the ideas around how to measure the complexity of what a person is able to do in real- world situations.  After all Eisner was talking about curriculum connoisseurship over 20 years ago.  But I have no easy way of testing these ideas in the context of the paper, and I guess there is often a dislocation between what educational researchers claim is happening in schools and what schools are actually doing...

Many of the educators we work with in the day job would claim that Gilbert’s building learning capacity, developing deeper and richer networks and links for core competencies, thinking together and developing collaborative teams of learners, and finding ways to ensure that everyone achieves, are already with us.   And unlike the NZCER conference paper, New Zealand schools are no longer broadcasting their learning outcomes solely through print copies of the school newsletter or at meet the teacher evenings where the teacher shares a paper sample of a student learning outcome with the parent.  

A virtual (or face to face) tour of students’, teachers’ and principals’ practice would reveal that primary, intermediate and secondary schools across New Zealand are already building learning capacity, rich networks, collaborative teams, learning through participation and collaboration.  And they are using social media with their students, their teachers and their communities  to help them do this - including using wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, social bookmarking, tagging, online photo libraries, Diigo, Google docs, Open notebook, shared online calendars, aggregators, RSS feeds etc.

In fact there are so many of these 21st Century appropriate learning conversations going on that I sometimes worry about the adverse influence of social media on the relevance of the local.

I increasingly want to explore Mejias’ question 

Does social media contribute to the irrelevancy of the local?

In the words of Lowell Monke: As the computer has amplified our youths' ability to virtually "go anywhere, at any time," it has eroded their sense of belonging anywhere, at any time, to anybody, or for any reason.   Monke, 2005, Charlotte's Webpage: Why children shouldn't have the world at their fingertips

I want to ask

Does social media create learning networks that discriminate against the student's immediate surroundings?

Or in the context of the Auckland ICTPD Cluster Home Group Meetings

Does social media create learning networks that discriminate against an Auckland ICTPD facilitator’s immediate surroundings?

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to claim that in embracing social media ... in creating our own personal learning networks (all that Twitter, Skyping, blog reading and commenting, wikis, YouTube and TED talks and or podcasts vodcasts etc) we have increased the irrelevancy of the opportunity to meet f2f to learn with/ from our immediate companions in our local surroundings in a Home Group Meeting.

After all if you consider that the learning networks available to those attending the Auckland Home Group Meeting ... they rely largely upon happenstance ... who decides to turn up, for how long on the day .... It seems we cannot even count upon the National team members attending given that “This is not a day where the national team deliver content - this is a day for you all to participate and contribute.”

There is an interesting tension here.... in advocating for the increased use of social media for building learning networks by educators we undermine the relevance of the local ... the opportunity to attend the Auckalnd Home Group Meeting for building learning networks. 

This argument holds even when looking at the “loss leader” ... the “outside expertise” attendance enticer.... it seems plausible that the opportunity to learn from/network  with  the “outside expertise involved in the session” would lose some of its relevance if this same presentation and shared expertise were available online through social media .

All this thinking makes me wonder  

How should we re-approach nearness at the Auckland Home Group Meetings?

And this in turn makes me suspect that “Progress” in 21st Century education?  will end up being an exploration of: 

How should we re-approach nearness in our schools?

References:
“Progress” in 21st Century education? By Jane Gilbert Paper presented at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER)  Conference: Making progress - measuring progress, Wellington, 13 March 2008. p.63-73
URL: http://www.nzcer.org.nz/default.php?cpath=139_133&products_id=2194 

Re–approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis by Ulises A. Mejías
First Monday, volume 10, number 3 (March 2005),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html

Dolly Parton and the MOE’s Best Evidence Research Synthesis

Given that so much of what “we do” in education in New Zealand is directed by meta-analysis, including all our Best Evidence Research Synthesis reports, reading Gene Glass on “Meta analysis at 25”  makes me feel insecure and vulnerable ...

For .... much like reading Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect  undermined my faith in the Best Evidence Synthesis on School Leadership and Student Outcomes.   .... Glass’ meta-analysis critique promises to betray me ...

It is important to note here that I don’t know enough statistics to refute Glass.  This lack of statistical referencing probably explains why, as I read Glass’ paper, I am reduced to imagining myself Dolly Parton-ised, belting out “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene ...I’m begging of you please don’t take my man  ...” 

If I sing loudly enough perhaps I will block the following Jolene thoughts from undermining all the MoE “evidence based practice” “Best Evidence Synthesis” stuff in my mind

Jolene Thought #1: Does the process of selecting and discarding studies as described in the School Leadership and Student Learning Outcomes BES  equate to Glass’ censorship by some a priori set of prejudices?

.... newly minted confections such as "best evidence research synthesis," a come-lately contribution that added nothing whatsoever to what myself and many others had been saying repeatedly on the question of whether meta- analyses should use all studies or only "good" studies.

I remain staunchly committed to the idea that meta-analyses must deal with all studies, good bad and indifferent, and that their results are only properly understood in the context of each other, not after having been censored by some a priori set of prejudices. An effect size of 1.50 for 20 studies employing randomized groups has a whole different meaning when 50 studies using matching show an average effect of 1.40 than if 50 matched groups studies show an effect of -.50, for example. Glass 2000 Meta-Analysis at 25

Jolene Thought #2: Is it valid to make inferences from meta-analysis generated “effect sizes” when the nature of the studies used means that meta-analysis must lack both “a well defined population that has been randomly sampled” and “subjects that have been randomly assigned to conditions in a controlled experiment”?

Moreover, the typical meta-analysis virtually never meets the condition of probabilistic sampling of a population

It is common to acknowledge, in meta-analysis and elsewhere, that many data sets fail to meet probabilistic sampling conditions, and then to argue that one ought to treat the data in hand "as if" it were a random sample of some hypothetical population. One must be wary here of the slide from "hypothesis about a population" into "a hypothetical population." They are quite different things, the former being standard and unobjectionable, the latter being a figment with which we hardly know how to deal.

...... If the sample is fixed and the population is allowed to be hypothetical, then surely the data analyst will imagine a population that resembles the sample of data. If I show you a handful of red and green M&Ms, you will naturally assume that I have just drawn my hand out of a bowl of mostly red and green M&Ms, not red and green and brown and yellow ones. Hence, all of these "hypothetical populations" will be merely reflections of the samples in hand and there will be no need for inferential statistics. Or put another way, if the population of inference is not defined by considerations separate from the characterization of the sample, then the population is merely a large version of the sample. With what confidence is one able to generalize the character of this sample to a population that looks like a big version of the sample? Well, with a great deal of confidence, obviously. But then, the population is nothing but the sample writ large and we really know nothing more than what the sample tells us in spite of the fact that we have attached misleadingly precise probability numbers to the result. Glass 2000 Meta-Analysis at 25

Jolene Thought #3:  Are the statistical tests used to determine homogeneity in meta-analysis studies adequate for the task?

Once a hypothesis of homogeneity is accepted by Hedges's test, one is advised to treat all studies within the ensemble as the same. Experienced data analysts know, however, that there is typically a good deal of meaningful covariation between study characteristics and study findings even within ensembles where Hedges's test can not reject the homogeneity hypothesis. ..... The best data exploration and discovery are more complex and convincing than the most exact inferential test. Glass 2000 Meta-Analysis at 25

However, my biggest Jolene Thought Moment came on reading “Another reason why I'm leery of meta-analyses”  on the Respectful Insolence Blog (thanks to link from Stephen Downes)

Jolene Thought #4:  Are meta-analyses nothing more than systematic reviews of the literature with attitude?

The Respectful Insolence Blog post describes an investigation into the use of meta-analysis in evidence based medicine (EBM),  which does not sound all that dissimilar to the use of BES in New Zealand education.

One increasingly common method of trying to make sense of the morass of data addressing various clinical questions is the medical literature phenomenon known as meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is different from a clinical trial in that it is a statistical reanalysis of data from existing trials. Generally the highest quality trials are chosen in accord with the principles of EBM, and the data from these trials is all lumped together and analyzed in order to provide in essence a more rigorous treatment of existing data than a systematic review of the literature. To be subject to meta-analysis, a medical question must have multiple studies addressing it, and the results must be quantitative. Orac The Respectful Insolence Blog

The post goes on to describe an investigation into the meta-analysis of “randomized clinical trials (RCT) and review articles on the efficacy of intravenous magnesium in the early post-myocardial infarction period.”

The investigators found that 

“....given the same studies and the same extracted and abstracted data, different investigators came to very different conclusions. This is in contrast to the dogma that tells us that meta-analyses represent the most objective method of reviewing large bodies of studies. This study casts considerable doubt on this contention, as the authors point out:

Although systematic reviews with meta-analyses are considered more objective than other types of reviews, our results suggest that the interpretation of the data remains a highly subjective process even among reviewers with extensive experience conducting meta-analyses. The implications are important. The evidence-based movement has proposed that a systematic review with a meta-analysis of RCTs on a topic provides the strongest evidence of support and that widespread adoption of its results should lead to improved patient care. However, our results suggest that the interpretation of a meta-analysis (and therefore recommendations) are subjective and therefore depend on who conducts or interprets the meta-analysis.

The significance of this study is that it doesn't look at differences in the selection of studies for the meta-analysis or the interpretation of or extraction of data from the studies included in the meta-analysis. Every reviewer was given the same package, the same data, and the same statistical analyses of the included studies, thus eliminating this issue. Even given that, reviewers still interpreted the results of the meta-analyses very differently.

The results of this clever exercise provide just one more bit of evidence that leads me to believe that meta-analyses are nothing more than systematic reviews of the literature with attitude. That's not to say that meta-analyses of the literature aren't often useful, just as systematic reviews of the literature, are. They are in the same way that systematic reviews are: They boil down a large number of studies and suggest an interpretation. Let's just not pretend that meta-analyses are so much more objective than a systematic review as to be considered anything more. Orac The Respectful Insolence Blog

Gene Glass has a future focused suggestion in his paper – one that in 2008 we would most certainly claim as Web2.0 or even Web3.0 thinking ..... he suggests that researchers contribute to online data archives instead of publishing meta-analyses and or BES studies ... it sounds worthy ... it sounds like something that just might let me un Dolly myself and stop singing Jolene ...

Meta-analysis needs to be replaced by archives of raw data that permit the construction of complex data landscapes that depict the relationships among independent, dependent and mediating variables.

Five years ago, this vision of how research should be reported and shared seemed hopelessly quixotic. Now it seems easily attainable. The difference is the I-word: the Internet. In 1993, spurred by the ludicrously high costs and glacial turn-around times of traditional scholarly journals, I created an internet-based peer-reviewed journal on education policy analysis (http://epaa.asu.edu). This journal, named Education Policy Analysis Archives, is now in its seventh year of publication, has published 150 articles, is accessed daily without cost by nearly 1,000 persons (the other three paper journals in this field have average total subscription bases of fewer than 1,000 persons), and has an average "lag" from submission to publication of about three weeks.

Two years ago, we adopted the policy that any one publishing a quantitative study in the journal would have to agree to archive all the raw data at the journal website so that the data could be downloaded by any reader. Our authors have done so with enthusiasm. I think that you can see how this capability puts an entirely new face on the problem of how we integrate research findings: no more inaccurate conversions of inferential test statistics into something worth knowing like an effect size or a correlation coefficient or an odds ratio; no more speculating about distribution shapes; no more frustration at not knowing what violence has been committed when linear coefficients mask curvilinear relationships. Now we simply download each others' data, and the synthesis prize goes to the person who best assembles the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into a coherent picture of how the variables relate to each other. Glass 2000

How should we understand “Student Silence”?

All this thinking about “Student Voice” as a “good thing” makes me wonder about what our response to a call to value “Student Silence” would be.

To ask ....

How should educators learn to understand “Student Voice”?
How should educators learn to understand “Student Silence”?

I guess the answers will depend in part on what we assume from the silence of others and on how we understand or see “Student Silence” in the context of school.

I think I have seen silence ..... in some profoundly moving and breathtakingly beautiful images in a book about to be published by photographer David Maisel, Library of Dust.  Link and exerpt from Geoff Manaugh's  BLDGBLOG

Each canister holds the remains of a human being, of course; each canister holds a corpse – reduced to dust, certainly, burnt to handfuls of ash, sharing that cindered condition with much of the star-bleached universe, but still cadaverous, still human. What strange chemistries we see emerging here between man and metal. Because these were people; they had identities and family histories, long before they became nameless patients, encased in metal, catalytic.

In some ways, these canisters serve a double betrayal: a man or woman left alone, in a labyrinth of medication, prey to surveillance and other inhospitable indignities, only then to be wed with metal, robbed of form, fused to a lattice of unliving minerals – anonymous. Do we see in Maisel’s images then – as if staring into unlabeled graves, monolithic and metallized, stacked on shelves in a closet – the tragic howl of reduction to nothingness, people who once loved, and were loved, annihilated?

After all, these ash-filled urns were photographed only because they remain unclaimed; they’ve been excluded from family plots and narratives. A viewer of these images might even be seeing the fate of an unknown relative, eclipsed, denied – treated like so much dust, eventually vanishing into the shells that held them.

It is not a library at all – but a room full of souls no one wanted.

It disturbs to imagine/know that no one “listened to their silence" until Maisel,
... and if he had arrived earlier or later we would never have been able to listen to/ value their silence either.  

Ivan Illich allows us to appreciate silence in a different way from Maisel’s photographs and Manaugh's text ... his  meditation on silence provides some significant new thinking for educators wanting to understand the language of “Student Voice” - (This meditation is designed for  a group of missionaries learning Spanish in a way that allowed them to “attune their ears and open their hearts to the anguish of a people who were lonely, frightened and powerless”)

 “The science of linguistics has brought into view new horizons in the understanding of human communications. An objective study of the ways in which meanings are transmitted has shown that much more is relayed from one man to another through and in silence than in words. Words and sentences are composed of silences more meaningful than the sounds. The pregnant pauses between sounds and utterances become luminous points in an incredible void: as electrons in the atom, as planets in the solar system. Language is as a cord of silence with sounds the knots - as nodes in a Peruvian quipu, in which the empty spaces speak….”

“It is thus not so much the other man’s words as his silences which we have to learn in order to understand him.  It is not so much our sounds which give meaning, but it is through the pauses that we will make ourselves understood.  The learning of a language is more the learning of its silences than of its sounds.” 
"The Eloquence of Silence" in Celebration of Awareness – A call for institutional revolution 1969.

I didn’t understand the significance of silence in understanding another until I read Illich ...
Before Illich I saw student silence as a challenge, silence as a pejorative notion, silence as a communicative pathology, I wanted my students to talk, to discuss, to argue, to debate with each other ... I didn’t want them mute ...

I guess I had imagined “Student Silence” as failure akin to the interpretation in Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence ...

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

Understanding silence as a communicative pathology is probably not far off the mark for many of us the context of school.  For example, I saw “Student Silence” in school in simple terms ... as in there are times to be silent and times to talk ...

I think we are encouraged to see “silence” in simplistic terms because our institutional power over students means we indicate these times of student silence and student voice in much the same way we might switch a room light on or off.

For example, there are times in school when teachers expect “Student Silence” and there are other times when teachers expect “Student Voice”.  In both cases a refusal to oblige on the part of the student is frustrating to the teacher who is orchestrating the soundscape. To be met with “Student Voice” when you have asked for “Student Silence” or to be met with “Student Silence” when you have asked for “Student Voice” can precipitate a teacher rage out  entertaining enough to be worthy of posting on YouTube    

Which makes me suspect that when we ask for “Student Voice” and are met with “Student Silence” many of us assume that this “Student Silence” is a failure to communicate that means that students are not thinking (not learning).

For if we saw “Student Silence” as communicating that students are thinking deeply about something (aka learning) then instead of insisting through elaborate questioning strategies on Student Voice we would pause and embrace the silence.

I guess to be fair our response also depends on whether we assume that “Student Silence” indicates that students are thinking/learning about something related to what they have just been reading, watching, doing or listening to (intentional learning outcomes)?

Or whether the thinking/learning is about something tangential to what they have been reading, watching, doing or listening to (unintentional learning)?

Or whether we assume that when students are silent they have disconnected from what they have been reading, watching, doing or listening to and have retreated to a happy/ safer place, daydreaming, woolgathering?

And there are many reasons for students to disconnect when they feel marginalised, or coerced into providing a “Student Voice” that makes them vulnerable if they respond in a way that is different from the norm. 

But as Illich’s meditation on silence when learning a foreign language suggests that silence is much more than the Sounds of Silence lyrics indicate.  He classifies four forms of silence that missionaries need when learning Spanish ... in school we only recognise the first when trying to understand the language of “Student Voice”  ....  and we do that grudgingly. 

[Note to self: suspect there are some analogies to be drawn with Illich’s classification and the rhythm of blog commenting and responding on Artichoke .. all those times when a comment is left in silence while I wait for words that are worthy to sit alongside it. ]

1.  The silence of the pure listener.

“ ....the silence through which the message of the other becomes “he in us”, the silence of deep interest. “  Which he contrasts with  “... the silence of indifference, the silence of disinterest which assumes there is nothing I want or can receive through the communication of the other.”

2.  The silence of syntony,”

“It is the silence which closes man in on himself to allow him to prepare the Word for others.  .... the silence in which we await the right moment for the Word to be born into the world. This silence too is threatened, not only by hurry and by desecration of multiplicity of action, but by the habit of verbal confection and mass production that has no time for it.  It is threatened by the silence of cheapness which means that one word is as good as another and that words need no nursing. .... This is a silence before words, or between them; the silence within which words live and die.”

3.  “The silence beyond words,”

“The silence that does not prepare any further talk.  It is the silence which has said everything because there is nothing more to say.  This is the silence beyond a final yes or a final no.  This is the silence of love beyond words, as well as the silence of no forever; the silence of heaven or of hell.”

The last category is harder to imagine in a school classroom where timetables mean that the time shared in voice and silence may be only 55 minutes ... still I will leave it in because some educators work outside of the classroom world of the tame and form different conversations of voice and silence in the world of the wild ... where maybe this silence is possible.

4.  “The silence of the Pietà”

“There is still another silence beyond words, the silence of the Pietà . It is not a silence of death but a silence of the mystery of death. It is not the silence of active acceptance of the will of God out of which the Fiat is born nor the silence of manly acceptance of Gethsemane in which obedience has its roots. The silence you as missioners seek to acquire in this Spanish course is the silence beyond bewilderment and questions; it is a silence beyond the possibility of an answer, or even reference to a word which preceded. It is the mysterious silence through which the Lord could descend into the silence of hell, the acceptance without frustration of a life, useless and wasted on Judas, a silence of freely willed powerlessness through which the world was saved. Born to redeem the world, Mary’s Son had died at the hands of His people, abandoned by His friends and betrayed by Judas whom he loved but could not save - silent contemplation of the culminating paradox of the Incarnation which was useless for the redemption of at least one personal friend. The opening of the soul to this ultimate silence of the Pietà is the culmination of the slow maturing of the three previous forms of missionary silence.”

“The Eloquence of Silence” by Ivan Illich in Celebration of Awareness – A call for institutional revolution 1969. P46 to 51

Student Voice as a "good thing"

If my “good thing” monitor is working then “Student Voice” has been re-branded and re-visioned and we are going to hear a lot more “Student Voice” stuff in the next 6 months.  

Calls for educators to listen to “Student Voice”  have been with us since Dewey .... This recent promotion of “Student Voice” is probably a response to the collective educational ennui over “personalisation” - the last “good thing” to be broadcast, MoE glossy pamphlet-ed, and edu_conference work shopped and keynoted across the conversational corridors of education in New Zealand. 

Much like personalisation  (see “Personalisation as education’s killer app”  ), “Student Voice” is one of those terms we assume is a “good thing” and as such is a term whose meaning is never interrogated and clarified ... we carelessly fling “Student Voice” around in educational conversations along with terms like “learning community” “child centered classrooms”, “inquiry learning”, "engagement,  or “relevant and authentic” ..... and we all take different meanings from what is said.

For example, listening to “Student Voice” (all that talking, laughing, crying, yelling, txting and whispering) is one thing .... acting upon “Student Voice” quite another .... 

For if we are only charged with listening the first thing you'd want to ask is whose voice are we listening to ...

'we must recognise that the school's embossed invitation to participate looks unfamiliar, unattractive, or out of reach to many students, especially those most in need of serious changes at their school.'  Elena Silva cited in Fielding 2001

And if we are only charged with listening with no expectation of action, the next thing we might ask is why those students who can see past the personal glory of being the chosen one ... the “safe one” invited to represent “student opinion” by those with institutional authority .... would continue to bother to share their voice ...

It is a bit like what happens to teachers who are consulted widely by SMT but find none of their suggestions acted upon ...

In truth there is a sad irony in hearing all these educators talk about the importance of “Student Voice” when so many of their colleagues work in schools where they lack “Teacher Voice”.   

Michael Fielding’s analysis is useful here, and his Framework for Assessing Student Voice pasted below is a great place to start looking at what is really happening in schools who claim to value “Student Voice”

Framework for Assessing Student Voice

Speaking

Who is allowed to speak?
To whom are they allowed to speak?
What are they allowed to speak about?
What language is allowed or encouraged?

Listening

Who is listening?
Why are they listening?
How are they listening?

Skills

Are the skills of dialogue encouraged and supported through training or other appropriate means?
Are those skills understood, developed, and practiced in the context of democratic values and dispositions?
Are those skills themselves transformed by those values and dispositions?

Attitudes and Dispositions

How do those involved regard each other?
To what degree are the principle of equal value and the dispositions of care felt reciprocally and demonstrated through the reality of daily encounter?

Systems

How often does dialogue and encounter in which Student Voice is centrally important occur?
Who decides?
How do the systems enshrining the value and necessity of Student Voice mesh with or relate to other organizational arrangements (particularly those involving adults)?

Organizational Culture

Do the cultural norms and values of the school proclaim the centrality of Student Voice within the context of education as a shared responsibility and shared achievement?
Do the practices, traditions, and routine daily encounters demonstrate values supportive of Student Voice?

Spaces and the Making of Meaning

Where are the public spaces (physical and metaphorical) in which these encounters might take place?
Who controls them?
What values shape their being and their use?

Action

What action is taken?
Who feels responsible?
What happens if aspirations and good intentions are not realized?

The Future

Do we need new structures?
Do we need new ways of relating to others?

From Fielding, M. (2001). “Beyond the rhetoric of Student Voice:new departures or new constraints in the transformation of 21st century schooling? Forum 43(2): 100-109. Pdf

 

In response to Fielding’s questions about new structures and new ways of relating to others ... I’d say yes, yes, yes ...

For calls for “Student Voice” in school, to have any credibility we need to see educational institutions where students are not only participating in the ways identified through the framework, they should also be participating in different contexts ...

“Student Voice” should see institutional structures develop where students are participating and contributing as:

teachers,
researchers,
planners of curriculum delivery,
appraisers of learning, classroom environments, classes offered and teachers,
decision makers on system-wide school issues around finances, budgets, employment, curriculum, pedagogy, technologies, property, health and safety ... 
advocates
etc etc

And when they participate, students need to see their contributions acted upon.

And even then, if the balance of authority means that what is acted upon is determined by teachers then it would seem fair to challenge the whole notion of “Student Voice”  ... to ask what exactly are “Student Voices” participating in.

Still this week I am more interested in exploring the other side of “Voice”  - in interrogating the many meanings of "Silence' .

and that is making me wonder about how we should understand “Student Silence”....

Seduced by the screen: From both sides of the gaze

Thinking about Gaze A: The screen observes us

I am imagining what a digital voyeur would see if they could gaze out of the “screens” in schools across New Zealand at all the student faces gazing in.  I am reading “Blown to bits – Your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion” by Abelson, Ledeen and Lewis.  It explores the social and political notions of privacy, identity,  freedom and who is in control in the digital world.  It is an easy read, and full of topical examples that clarify the many provocative issues raised.

The first thing “Blown to bits” made me realise was that I didn’t understand “privacy”.

“Privacy is not, .... the right to be isolated from society – privacy is a right that makes society work.”

If privacy is a right that makes society work ... then perhaps the lack of privacy in our schools .... might be a wrong that explains why our schools oftentimes don’t work.

Gatto’s seventh lesson taught in school ... “One cannot hide”..... can only be exacerbated by the  exhortations of the hawkers of screens for digital learning. Because the adoption of SMS student management systems, learning management systems (LMS) and increasing calls for transparency in school assessment data sharing must increase the  panoptic like surveillance of students identified by Gatto.

LESSON 7. ONE CAN'T HIDE
The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn't likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.
I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework," so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.The Seven Lesson School Teacher

So what are the social roles that we limit and exclude when students are learning what it is to be human in an environment that precludes privacy?

Blown to Bits argues that for three important social roles for privacy (p63 and 64)

The right to maintain the privacy of one’s personality can be regarded as part of
1.  The right of self preservation: the right to keep your adolescent misjudgements and personal conflicts to yourself, as long as they are of no lasting significance to your ultimate position in society.
2.  The way society allows deviations from prevailing social norms, given that no one set of social norms is universally and permanently satisfactory – and indeed given that social progress requires experimentation.
3.   The development of independent thought – it enables some decoupling of the individual from society so that thoughts can be shared in limited circles and rehearsed before public exposure.  

The passage suggests that the institutional structure of a school is designed to deny students the right to self preservation, to make social progress, and to develop independent thought.   

Thinking about Gaze B: We observe the screen

This thinking allows me to explore Illich’s claim that objects change who we are. 

Brown: So the objects, like a car or even like a school, change who we are.

Illich: Who you are and even more deeply they change the way your senses work. Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia [?], my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. Even if I gaze at you. Even if I enjoy your face. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror. Anybody who says, I want to communicate with you, I say can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are. Ivan Illich with Jerry Brown March 1996

This passage from Illich is one of my favourites ... when I read it I always want to switch off the screen and go find a human face that I can gaze at in the way of the old Greeks  ...  Although gazing at someone in a way that “fingers” or “touches”  is an activity that would be viewed with enormous suspicion in the culture of the screen.   Attempting this with the wrong person is liable to lead to uncomfortable exchanges, complaints to authority or even arrest.

What does an object that captures our gaze (aka a screen) do to us?

Or to ask this question another way,

If  the introduction of digital technologies into schools means that students are spending increasing amounts of time immobilised, gazing at the screen ... more time in fact than they do gazing face to face with another or gazing at the dirt and the sky, then how are they changed... ?