School part 1

learning as action, interaction and environment

school (part 1)

roel krabbendam

“We have three primary modalities or means of learning: Heart (feeling), Mind (thinking) and Body (acting or experiencing).

These modalities or means of learning are part of a complex, interrelated learning system within us. When any of these modalities are ignored, the quality of the learning declines.” http://norwellconsulting.com/ILIntroduction.html

“Interested in little else than material efficiency and financial profit, our educational institutions no longer foster thinking for its own sake and the free exercise of the imagination. Schools and colleges have become training camps for skilled labor instead of forums for questioning and discussion, and colleges and universities are no longer nurseries for those inquirers whom Francis Bacon, in the sixteenth century, called ‘merchants of light’”.

Manguel, Alberto, Curiosity, p 5, Yale University Press, 2015

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table of contents

foreward .... 4 theories .... 6 experiment .... 13 .... 16

experience(s) Race Meditation Duel BullďŹ ght Swim Climb Apprenticeship Demolition Storytelling Conversation Safari Adventure

environments(s) Arena Big Map CampďŹ re Digital Environment Labyrinth Situation Room Garden Speakers Corner Sandbox Media Booth Kiosk Library Cafe Media Array Nest Cave Park Bench Attic Bar Restaurant Shrine Tent Round Table Workshop Wilderness Trail Classroom

..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... .....

17 20 26 30 34 38 42 48 52 56 60 64

.... 70 ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... .....

72 76 80 84 88 92 98 102 106 110 114 118 122 126 130 136 142 146 150 154 158 164 168 172

a new lexicon .... 176

conclusions .... 178

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forward I’m actually not at all interested in “thinking for its own sake” or producing “merchants of light”. Rather, I’m interested in making education fully engaging and emotionally fulfilling. Instead, I see it becoming more and more abstract.

In the interest of relevance, accessibility and reproducibility, the experience is increasingly computer based. In the interest of polity and getting stuff done, emotion is actively discouraged. To reduce capital cost and simplify maintenance, the classroom has become a soulless, characterless box. Education, it seems, wants to be spare, lean, and efficient. We have succeeded with the construction of our schools to institutionalize conformity. We would ask our children to spend 15 years in a well-oiled machine. It falls to the teachers and students, in the face of stupefying odds, to breathe some life into this enterprise. Some rise to the task, and some don’t. It shouldn’t be this hard.

I began this work by identifying four components of learning that I felt were often (not always!) missing, and that I felt would make a palpable difference. I defined them as: a. Engaging and Inescapable Rituals and Traditions (Action) b. Emotionally Nurturing Relationships (Interaction) c. Enabling and Ennobling Places (Environments) d. Visibility Engaging and Inescapable Rituals and Traditions stems from my experience with my own daughter. As committed as my wife and I were to helping her through school, we found that she would inevitably select the easiest, least cumbersome or challenging route forward when it came to her studies. In selecting the type and number of courses to take, and in regulating her involvement in those courses, she tended to “skate”. Had school confronted her instead with challenging, unavoidable Rituals and Traditions, benchmarks requiring for example that every senior make a public presentation about something they care about, I know she would have upped her game. Performance sometimes requires very high expectations, mitigated by Emotionally Nurturing Relationships that support and guide the student through the challenge.

A troubling experience from my youth informs Emotionally Nurturing Relationships. As an 8th grader, my parents asked me what I most wanted for Christmas, and I replied a microscope and a chemistry set. To my immense surprise, I received both. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that hiding myself in a windowless basement, and following chemical recipes or looking at things under a microscope, proved to be disastrously boring. What I actually wanted most was for my rather preoccupied father to guide me into the mysteries of chemistry and biology. Without that emotional connection, the enterprise felt futile and unfulfilling.

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I stress Enabling and Ennobling Environments for several reasons. Oppressed by the hermetic and characterless classrooms of my youth, I find they have clouded all of my memories of school. On a profoundly psychological level, those arid rooms worked a devilish and depressing magic on me. In contrast, I still remember with fondness and wonder staring as a first grader in a public school in the Netherlands, into a fifth grade classroom festooned with models of the solar system, telescopes, and posters of celestial bodies and phenomena. That dense environment was indelible and engaging in a way that classrooms since never matched. We moved to the United States, and I never again entered a classroom even remotely as inspiring.

Visibility stems from the same experience in first grade. That fifth grade class was inspiring and motivating because I saw it: the door was open. A common tendency to contain learning inside the box of the classroom misses the free opportunity to teach and inspire through simple exposure. Break out of the box! Engage with the school community, and with the community at large.

As an architect, I know how profoundly enabling and ennobling space can be: not only making certain activities possible, but elevating those activities so that they become visceral and emotionally nourishing. The neutral classroom cedes to the teacher any effort in this regard, in the interest of versatility and economy. This is a lost opportunity and a terrible shame. We can do better.

These very personal experiences represent the origins of this booklet. It builds as well on many years of designing and managing public and private school building projects. I am more and more aware of the many opportunities untaken on these projects, opportunities that might have had a transformative effect on everyone using those buildings.

Information is now ubiquitous, the Web accessible even in the middle of the Sahara Desert. We don’t need classrooms to hand students information, a perception that generated the notion of flipped and blended classrooms. If students can glean information outside of the classroom, then school is where teachers bring that information to life and meaning. What exactly are those activities that will bring learning to life, and what are the spaces that will support those activities: these are the questions that animate this book. It is an attempt to understand education as phenomenology: to imagine the experiences and environments that might make education more poignant, memorable, visceral, mythic. This booklet is a provocation to institutionalize diversity instead of conformity and to create better schools.

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“Break the pattern which connects the items 6

theories of learning 4 inspiring Models: A. Kort: The cycle of learning includes values, seeks wisdom, and shares stories B. Perkins: Teach the whole game and not just the “facts” C. Halpern et al: Learning communities, Adult roles, Emotion, Making meaning D. Glasser: Belonging, Power, Freedom, Fun

of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality.”

Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity,

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How do we learn?

I have taken inspiration from four models of teaching and learning that address the dissatisfactions I feel about my own education, and the teaching I have witnessed. The first model comes from Dr. Barry Kort at the MIT Media Lab, in which he posits a spiral of learning that takes students sequentially through 5 “foci of attention”. He distinguishes the prevailing pedagogical model, a system focused on confronting data, asking questions in order to distill useful information, and then assembling that information into a cohesive structure called knowledge, with an expanded model which adds a value system to that knowledge in order to develop wisdom, and then distills stories from that wisdom in order to communicate anecdotes, anecdotes then fueling the spiral of learning with fresh data.1

The beauty of this model lies in recognizing that knowledge without values is not dissimilar to constructing a skyscraper without a context or a purpose: it is a physically and figuratively empty gesture. Furthermore, wisdom without distillation and communication, in other words “teaching”, undermines the entire project of civilization. That school too often abdicates a role in developing wisdom, perhaps through an institutional reticence to applying a particular value system, perhaps in a misguided gesture toward inclusion or diversity, suggests the root cause of all sorts of pathologies. My personal bias is this: schools are the bedrock of culture, and wisdom and story lie at the heart of culture. I came to the United States when I was young, to join in the project of America: not partially but completely. That my experience was colored by my

origins goes without saying, and that I struggle with competing and conflicting values would seem to be the lot of any thinking person. I only wish that school had been more open, more transparent, in presenting and debating the conflicting value systems embedded in the pedagogy. This would have required more stories and less data, more discussion and less reading on my own, and more thinking and less absorbing. It may also require reconsidering the rather insipid metaphor of “melting pot”, for a more curated metaphor of “cooking by committee”. The first assigns no value to the flavor of the stew, the latter a passionate struggle to make the meal taste great.

The second model comes from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

In Making Learning Whole, How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education, David Perkins distinguishes the tendency to teach the elements of a discipline (he calls it elementitis) and the tendency to teach about a discipline (aboutitis), from involving even beginning students in the complete discipline, the whole game, by inventing junior games. He points out that elementitis and aboutitis always keep real life and even the discipline itself at arms length, producing students adept at piecemeal performance but unprepared to find problems and transfer their skills to solving them.

This thinking meshes well with Kort’s virtuous spiral of Insightful Learning, which also describes a kind of “wholeness”.

Learning by Wholes, as Perkins defines it, would involve seven principles: 1. Play the whole game Don’t teach about subjects, and don’t teach little pieces of a subject: involve students from the very start in junior versions of the complete discipline.

2. Make the game worth playing Demonstrate meaning and value by involving students in the complete show.

3. Work on the hard parts Real understanding requires grappling with difficulties. Identifying the hard stuff, focusing on it, and reintegrating that new understanding into the whole game keeps the game moving and the students engaged.

4. Play out of town You don’t know what you know until you can transfer it to a new problem or environment.

The Away Game enhances transfer, agility and understanding.

5. Uncover the hidden game Any complicated and challenging subject has layer upon layer of strategy, statistics and politics below the surface, and understanding them is vital to playing the whole game instead of simply skating on the surface.

6. Learn from the team...and the other teams Human activity is intrinsically collective. Friends, partners, colleagues, rivals, enemies, paragons, mentors and fellow students have a lot to teach us.

7. Learn the game of learning Standing apart from the fray, taking a general’s view of the battlefield, offers powerful insights into how to perform better. Learn better by learning how.

In a complementary approach, The Ten Principles of Effective Learning, posited by Robert Halpern, Paul Heckman, and Reed Larson, focuses more on emotional content and meaning to present their own principles of learning as follows: 1. It is In-Depth and Immersive.

In depth learning gives youth the opportunity to gain mastery in a discipline, and gain the capacity to sustain interest in question-driven inquiry.

2. It is Rooted in a Community of Practice.

Learning takes place better and faster when less experienced learners can work alongside more experienced peers as well as skilled adult mentors.

3. It provides Growing Challenge, & Opportunity to Exercise New Capacities.

Good learning challenges youth to meet difficult but accessible problems.

Accomplishments motivate learners to develop independent approaches.

4. It Attends to Motivation.

Students are intrinsically motivated to learn at deeper levels by personally meaningful experiences that connect them to their peers and to adults.

5. It Supports Developmentally Appropriate Agency.

Good learning shapes meaning that is shared, not imposed, assuring students that the world is not a finished product and leaving room for their own ideas.

6. It Lets Students Apply Knowledge & Make Meaning of Learning Experience.

Good learning creates a sense of purposefulness for the learner, and taps into the desire to use, apply, make sense, and make connections.

7. It Recognizes the Importance of Emotion in Learning.

Good learning is more than cognition. It is rooted in, draws on and engages emotion.

It supports emotion as a natural and vital aspect of learning.

8. It Links Assessment Closely to the Learning Process.

The criteria for assessment are transparent, concrete, functional and explicit markers of progress, helping youth use failure as an important part of the learning process. They are encouraged to “inspect their own ideas.”

9. It Is Diverse as a Whole.

Good learning provides opportunities for students to learn (and selectively to experience) a range of adult roles and tasks adults devote themselves to.

10. It is supported by a Rich/Multi-Dimensional Adult Role.

Strong relationships are knowledge pathways. Mentors demonstrate how adults see the world, encouraging students to trust themselves as learners.

Here, in more concrete terms, are the emotion and meaning-making alluded to in Kort’s model of Insightful Learning, and too often absent from school. Here is the sense of community and diversity Perkins claims with “Learn from the Team, and Other Teams”.

Finally, there is this formulation from Dr. William Glasser and “Choice Theory”. Glasser posits that behavior is driven by five genetically driven needs, the first being simple survival followed by: 1. Kort, Barry et all, “Evolving Educational Pedagogy in Developing Nations” M.I.T. Media Laboratory 2. Perkins, David, Making Learning Whole, How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education September 2010, Jossey-Bass

Belonging – Fulfilled by loving, sharing, and cooperating with others Power – Fulfilled by achieving, accomplishing, recognition and respect Freedom – Fulfilled by making choices Fun – Fulfilled by laughing and playing

The Glasser formulation considered as an educational model would emphasize student agency (Freedom), collaborative activity (Belonging), clear goals (Power) and close attention to spirit and intention (Fun).

These educational models together cover the gamut from the profoundly theoretical to the more practical, but they offer a visceral approach to building whole people from profound learning experiences. What are the experiences and spaces that will bring these approaches to life? What does environment have to offer an educational experience built on these models? That is what this book asks and seeks to understand.

The internet has made information ubiquitous It makes no sense to use a classroom as the vehicle for transmitting knowledge when information is available everywhere.

The notion of the flipped classroom results from this understanding, proposing that students acquire information in their own time, but experience that information curated and brought to life through profound interactions in school. It is from this understanding that I began to examine a wide variety of visceral experiences for their potential to invigorate perception and cognition. If a teacher isn’t lecturing, what exactly happens in the classroom? To reimagine teaching as presenting a powerful experience that brings good information to life is already a tremendous step forward from merely conveying content and striving for understanding. I seek those experiences.

If classrooms are now intended for profound experiences and not for simple lectures, then we no longer need to think of them as square rooms focused on that teacher in the front. In fact, we are free to completely reimagine what those experiences should be, and what kind of environment would enable and ennoble those experiences. Is the neutral blank slate of the traditional classroom truly the best we can do for our students? I examine the question in some detail, and explore a wide array of alternate learning environments that I believe offer a far more engaging vision for school.

School, of course, is far more than a classroom or an experience. Ultimately we must ask what we expect of school, and in this new environment of ubiquitous but uncurated knowledge, what kind of citizens we are creating and what school can and should become. As learning becomes more and more electronic and abstract, the experience of learning must become more visceral, more physical, more sensual, more emotional and much, much more engaging. This document seeks a practical path forward.

3. Halpern, Robert et al, “Realizing the Potential of Learning in Middle Adolescence” (2013) The Sally and Dick Roberts Coyote Foundation 4. Glasser, William, Choice Theory, A New Psychology of Personal Freedom (1999) HarperCollins

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thought experiment

what do you remember about your schooling?

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Answer this in detail: Grade by grade, what are your most powerful memories of school? Isn’t this a powerful clue to what succeeded in teaching you best?

The following page details what I came up with for myself. When I explore these memories, and compare them to the principles articulated by Perkins, Halpern, Heckman, and Larson, I am struck by some resonance.

Charismatic teachers figure strongly. Mentors. Yet, though their nurturing support was absolutely crucial for me, I rarely got a sense from them about what adults other than teachers did. I did not get to play the whole game. When it came time to attend college, I had no idea what interested me.

Visceral and emotional experiences engaging multiple senses figure strongly as well: sex, action, sights and smells, mistakes and failures, success. Sleep. Projects. Notably, classes like woodworking and metal shop that might have been rewarding, were instead a frustration: they did not let us design our own projects. We simply followed recipes. We didn’t play the whole game.

Agency was powerful, seductive and memorable: the opportunity to choose electives for English, History, and Science, and the ability to set your own pace in Chemistry made those courses unforgettable.

Competition was a powerful motivator: in Chess, in Tennis, in Arithmetic, for grades.

Failing to deliver a convincing election speech and losing the Junior High presidency was difficult and embarrassing and a lifelong impetus to prepare well for public interactions. Flunking a history test and having the grades read aloud definitely lit a fire.

Architecture is a recurring theme: the stairs in second grade, the modernity of the school I attended grades 4-6, inventing plans in drafting class, the noisy but inspiring open classrooms of the high school, the old reading room of the Boston Public Library: no surprise I became an architect interested in schools.

Here’s my take-away:

besides sex and charismatic teachers, my most visceral memories of school were emotional, involved action, offered agency and/or engaged multiple senses. If the flipped and blended classroom and the schools that employ it are to fully fulfill their promise, then they must surely evoke exactly these very qualities. What then are the activities and spaces that serve this agenda?

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Grade 1 Looking into a 5th grade class, festooned with huge models of the planets Making a book of pictures of objects starting with each letter of the alphabet The tree on the playground where I fell asleep and missed the bell The playground where an older student showed me a picture of a nude woman Tooth brushing lessons Learning to write with quill pens and india ink Grade 2 The smell of school paste The wood bannisters on the stairs Grade 3 The brick wall I slammed my head against after being hit by a ball Consistently winning at class “addition bees” Consistently losing at class “multiplication bees” The charismatic but emotionally volatile teacher Grade 4 Reading books about the cosmos and about race relations from my parents’ library Playing a competitive game in class in which we tried to make a hypothetical farm the most profitable Correcting my teacher on the pronunciation of my name after months of hearing it botched The modernity of the school, especially the big windows with views of nature Playing guitar, badly, for a talent show Grade 5 Science Fair: making a project and explaining it to visitors incorrectly Outdoor classroom where we staked turf, established countries and explored nationalism Grade 6 An exceptionally charismatic male teacher Singing “Hey Jude” as a class on the bus during a field trip to the Franklin Park Zoo Misunderstanding a history assignment and spending 20 hours on a 1 hour exercise Wearing highly fashionable purple plaid bell bottoms and buckle shoes Grade 7 Nightmares about forgetting where and when my classes were Returning to 6th grade class and feeling incredibly mature Inventing and drawing house plans in drafting class Mixed feelings around making objects in woodworking: why couldn’t we design our own?

Grade 8 Running for President, and failing Removal from the grading curve for an extraordinarily high grade on a history test An exceptionally charismatic History teacher French cooking class after school More mixed feelings in metal shop: again the rote object making Grades 9-12 Self-paced chemistry classes in High School held in an amphitheater with a great teacher A classroom where I first saw a girl’s breasts after an accident with her halter top The new open classroom concept of the renovated high school Creating holograms using lasers in an elective Physics class Art classes and art projects Writing short stories for elective English courses Camping, Hiking and Skiing trips Falling asleep in driver’s ed Rebelling at the painfully rote methodologies employed by the French teacher Flunking a test in History of the Russian Revolution and having the grades announced Getting tutoring for the SAT tests from my history teacher after school Taking the commuter rail into Boston to work in the beautiful reading room of the Boston Public Library Passing notes beneath the tables during study halls Chess Club, and playing 3 D chess Competing for grades with my peers and my little sister Tennis Team

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experience(s) Instead of understanding school as a way to convey information, we need to rethink class time as an opportunity for profound, deeply emotional experience. We are defeating our students at the moment of cognition, by eliminating action and emotion and sensation: by feeding it to them passively.

We might consider school a tableaux, where students explore character archtypes in order to define who they are. Enriching the tableaux offers an appeal to the student imagination, thrusts the student into different environments that demand an emotional response, and requires that student to adopt a psychological stance: to assume a role and come to understand what it means to them as they also deal with content.

Herewith, educational experiences that invite a visceral, emotional, possibly archtypal, and potentially transcendent response. The point here is not that education is throughly devoid of transcendent educational experiences: only that experiences this engaging and emotional are few and far between.

They should be ubiquitous.

Every day.

01. the race 02. the meditation 03. the duel 04. the bullfight 05. the swim 06. the climb 07. the apprenticeship 08. demolition 09. storytelling 10. the conversation 11. the safari 12. the adventure

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1. the race Inviting students to be an: Athlete Avenger Gambler Knight Martyr Saboteur Trickster Victim Warrior

Our source for archtypal roles, not Jung directly, but instead: http://archetypist.com/what/archetype-list/ Their disclaimer disavows any claim to “exhaustiveness�

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Winning is unforgettable stuff.

Creating races out of learning opposes the current teaching ethic however, since one “winner” after all leaves behind a classroom full of “losers”. Academics have learned something from sports, creating math teams and debate teams and the like, in essence leaving the more visceral experiences to those students that self-select concentrations.

Thus a debate team or soccer team, it might be argued, can lose because they took the risk of losing upon themselves, an agency not typically available in the classroom.

Unfortunately, many students don’t choose participation, never take the risk, and are never exposed to the rewards. How do we make the race or the contest an integral part of learning without disenfranchising a significant segment of our students?

One clue, again from sports, is intramurals. By removing the high-stakes risk of losing, sports found a constituency of students in it simply for enjoyment. The Platonic ideals of aretê: (piety), and sophrosunê (courage and justice), or the modern ideals of self-knowledge, discipline, courage and justice, are no less evident in intramurals: the stress is simply turned down a notch. This is where classroom competition justly thrives. By making learning a low-stakes game, and as Perkins would encourage us, a whole, junior game, a game that nonetheless inspires a spirit of competition and the desire to try, and perhaps even the desire to help fellow students struggling with the material, learning adopts some of the juice, some of the visceral emotional sensations that the race inspires in sports.

In a recent discussion about school culture, and the characteristics students needed to acquire in order to build a community, the group struggled with the issue of teaching humility to somewhat self-focused teenagers. Empathy is certainly teachable, and community could be defined and felt, but humility eluded us. You can laud it and you can talk about it, but how do you help students feel it viscerally?

Only, I would suggest, by losing.

Perkins would tell us: “learn from the team and from other teams”, and this suggests another way to make the race both more useful academically, and a loss less personal.

The game does not need to be individual: it can be based on teams that not only teach each other, but also share in the glory and the defeats.

Teams lower the emotional stakes.

Perkins would tell us: “play out of town”, and this operates on many levels in a race.

Teams can literally play other teams out of the classroom, but the race is also a chance to shift knowledge to different problems, in different situations, with different stresses.

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The race itself can be “playing out of town”.

Halpern et al require immersion, certainly a possibility in racing. A race between teams creates a community of practice, just as a sports team does. A race carefully calibrated surely offers challenging problems, personally meaningful experiences, and a sense of purposefuless, plus a chance to apply knowledge and make connections.

During a race, only the race matters.

A race is rooted in, draws on, and engages emotion. Emotion influences motivation, satisfaction and endurance, but also how well students remember hard-won lessons. A study out of Reed College in Oregon by Heuer and Reisberg entitled “Vivid Memories of Emotional Events: The Accuracy of Remembered Minutiae”.1 addresses the importance of emotion in memory. In it, the researchers organize four groups of students: an “arousal” group who will see a set of very emotional slides, a “neutral” group asked simply to view a set of mundane slides, a “memorization” group shown the same mundane slides but asked to remember as much as possible, and a “problem-solving” group asked to figure out the actual event the slides depict. The groups are asked, two weeks after seeing the slides, to recall as much as they can of what they saw. The “emotional” group proves much better at recalling both central and peripheral aspects of the slides.

Emotion improves long term memory.

Halpern et al require good learning to be supported by a Rich and Multi- Dimensional Adult Role, stating that strong relationships are like knowledge pathways. Mentors exemplify how professionals see the world, encouraging students to learn to trust themselves as learners. This suggests strongly that the coach is an important player in a race. A good coach also addresses some pitfalls of teams: peer pressure, problems of motivation, and camoflaging non-performers.

Only active coach participation setting the tone makes this work.

Because many students shy away from competition, the generous spirit of competitions must be understood by the school culture, with some races obligatory: a ritual and a tradition. Thus reluctant students have an opportunity to be coached to success. One powerful race I recall from 4th grade involved students using arithmetic and logic and strategy to make hypothetical farm the most productive in the class. This was a whole game as Perkins defines it: stretching for days and involving random events (weather, drought, disease). Winning was not half as interesting as figuring out why you lost.

1. Heuer, Friderike; Reisberg, Daniel (1 September 1990). “Vivid memories of emotional events: The accuracy of remembered minutiae”. Memory & Cognition (Springer-Verlag) 18 (5): 496–506. doi:10.3758/BF03198482. ISSN 0090-502X. Retrieved 15 December 2012.

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2. the meditation Inviting students to be an: Angel Alchemist Dreamer Guide Healer Hermit Monk/Nun Mystic Seeker Servant Shaman Student Visionary

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“Adults tend to talk about learning as if it were

medicine unpleasant, but necessary and good for you.

Why not instead think of learning as if it were

food something so valuable to humans that they have evolved to experience it as a pleasure?”1

“I have no idea what my gut says; we haven’t spoken in years.”

Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection (Hazelton, 2010), p. 88

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stillness It’s a week before the end of the semester and my daughter is home to finish her final papers. She has her headphones on, playing a Spotify playlist. I see five windows open on her computer as she researches her topic. A movie frozen mid-scene sits on her IPad, as if she found the drama just a little too distracting. On her phone, there is a constant beeping as friends log facebook, snapchat, instagram and text messages.

This distracting multi-tasking environment is her life, and has been since middle school.

Stillness would be such an incredible gift to her, though she would be loathe to admit it. To habituate her to the discomfort, until she saw the possibilities in it. To pose no questions, present no dilemma, suggest no theme, but ask for silent consideration. To experience the sound of your own thoughts: why do we imagine this is useful to adults but not to younger students?

Brene Brown from the University of Houston in her study of shame identified people who seem to live what she terms “wholehearted” lives. She describes “cultivating stillness” as an important practice for these subjects. Stillness, she writes, “is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.”

With stillness, “anxiety loses its hold and we gain clarity about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what holds true meaning for us.”1 If school is wholly predicated upon student “improvement”, then we might forgive our children for internalizing the unpleasant corollary: “You are not (yet?) good enough”.

From that perspective, is it surprising schools struggle with discipline, with motivation, and with a host of emotional pathologies? What if, instead, we were to teach joy? Marianne Williamson says: “Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are”. Joy, in other words, is directly tied to consciously feeling gratitude. Brene Brown describes this linkage, further describing gratitude as a practice: a state of mind achieved not by waiting for it to happen, but by consciously creating it over and over again in our minds.4 Meditation creates a space to consciously create a pathway to joy.

A number of San Francisco schools introduced “Quiet Time”, Transcendental Meditation early and late in the day for 15 minutes (by extending their day by the way), and tout the behavioral results: dramatically reduced truancy, violence and disorderly behavior, and scholastic improvements as well2.

School has historically focused on logic and reason, typically addressing not at all the power of intuition, at least formally. Yet, from Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs we learn that intuition was at the very foundation of their achievements. If we take to heart

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Perkins’ recommendation to “Learn how to learn” then we need to work on this. If we are teaching our students how to think and how to succeed, it would appear logical to devote time to cultivating their intuition.

Research does in fact support the premise that intuition can be cultivated. A particularly helpful overview in this regard comes from Asta Raami at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. In her paper “Intuition Unleashed”, Raami offers the following diagram to describe the environment required and the three steps integral to developing intuition:

“Expanding the boundaries of the mind” sounds very much like what Brown describes as “Creating a clearing”, though Raami also emphasizes the role of teachers in breaking down student bias and other barriers to accepting the process. More crucial still is “Intention”, at the heart of Raami’s process.3 As Brown noted about stillness, it is how we gain clarity: how we build intention.

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Intuition is of course a key building block in creativity, an oft stated goal of 21st century education but a process often denatured to a simple cycle of problem solving: problem definition, brainstorming, selection, implementation, testing and then refinement. It is in the quality, breadth and originality of the solutions that creativity finds its real juice, and here again, meditation has been shown to improve acuity.

A study from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands found that a certain type of meditation, Open Monitoring or OM, indeed enhances creativity or “divergent thinking” as they hypothesized (the practice “opens” the mind)4. Meditation is classified as either Open Monitoring (OM) or Focused Attention (FA), with one source proposing a third classification: Effortless Presence (EP)5. OM invites the meditator to monitor all aspects of experience, without judgment or attachment. “All perceptions, be they internal (thoughts, feelings, memory, etc.) or external (sound, smell, etc.), are recognized and seen for what they are. It is the process of non-reactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment”5.

Examples of OM include Mindfulness Meditation and certain types of Taoist Meditation.

FA focuses attention on something for the entire duration of the meditation. Attention may be focused on the breath, on an object, on a mantra, on a part of the body or on a visualization. Through FA, practitioners learn to tune out distractions and sharpen their focus ever more deeply on the object of their attention. The University of Leiden study hypothesized that FA would improve “convergent thinking”, but the results were not promising. They theorize that the feeling of well-being resulting from FA (actually all types of meditation) counteracts the increased concentration. It remains possible, and even likely, that the expected effect kicks in after the immediate relaxation of the meditation subsides, but this was beyond the scope of the study.

Examples of FA include Vipassana, some forms of Zazen, Loving Kindness Meditation, Chakra Meditation, Kundalini Meditation, Pranayama, Sound Meditation and some forms of Qigong.

EP is proposed as a third way, in that it seeks to achieve directly that state “where the attention is not focused on anything in particular, but reposes on itself – quiet, empty, steady, and introverted”5 that is the ultimate goal of all meditative practice.

Examples of EP or Effortless Presence include the Self Enquiry (“I am” meditation) of Ramana Maharishi; Dzogchen; and some forms of Taoist Meditation and Raja Yoga.

Brown, Brene, The Gifts of Imperfection (Hazeldon, 2010), p.78 http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/schools.html 3 Raami, Asta, “Intuition Unleashed-– On the application and development of intuition in the creative process”, Aalto University publication series, DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 29/2015, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Media, Aalto ARTS Books, Helsinki, Finland 1 2

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In considering the type of meditation to pursue, a school or teacher might consider their goals, circumstances and resources. Goals might include behavior modification, self-compassion, stress reduction, mood elevation, heightened intuition or enhanced creativity. Schools in the northeast US might be concerned with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Circumstances refer to how supportive or distracting the environment may be. FM may be more helpful to students faced with powerful distractions in the environment. Resources refer to whatever expertise might already exist at the school, to how much time is available for the activity, and to how that time is deployed: in large blocks, or dispersed in small quantities throughout the day.

It is in the quality, breadth and originality of the solutions that creativity finds its real juice, and here again, meditation has been shown to improve acuity.

Is meditation the best use of the time available in school? In San Francisco, the day was lengthened to afford the time for meditation, at some cost to be sure. Meditation is a meta-skill, a way of training the mind, of as Perkins would say, “learning how to learn”.

Recommendations for meditation run the gamut, from 1 to 20 minutes to start, possibly adding time with practice and motivation. All agree, however, that a little time is better than no time, and that consistency is crucial. In San Francisco, the efficacy of the entire school improved dramatically as a result, justification enough for the time allotted: Greater happiness, focus and self-confidence, 40% reduction in psychological distress, including stress, anxiety and depression, and improved teacher retention and reduced teacher burnout among other improvements.2 I think back on the “moment of silence” occasionally invoked during school, whether as a memorial or a remembrance or a way to capture and focus our attention on something momentous. That minute was sufficient to interrupt the flow of emotion, energy and thought, but rarely yielded self-reflection. It was also never consistent, and the purpose was never articulated as “learning to learn”. There was no “learning to learn” as a result.

Without more research on time and meditation, the issue of how much time to devote remains obscure: trial and error in the particular circumstance might be an excellent learning activity. Clearly though, understanding intention and maintaining consistency are most important. Once a student recognizes that meditation can prepare them to learn, help them adopt the right mind-set for a particular task, improve their enjoyment of an activity, and help them appreciate and put an activity in context afterwards, then they might adopt a meditative stance more often throughout the day, especially if short.

Front. Psychol., 18 April 2012 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116 Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoringmtraining on convergent and divergent thinking, Lorenza S. Colzato*, Ayca Ozturk and Bernhard Hommel, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116/full 5 http://liveanddare.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Types-of-Meditation-PDF-LiveAndDare.com_.pdf 4

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3. the duel inviting students to be an: Avenger Bully Coward Fool Gambler Judge Knight Martyr Predator Saboteur Victim Warrior

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“When we set children against one another in contests-from spelling bees to awards assem semblies to science “fairs” (that are really ccontests), onte from dodge ball to honor rolls to p rize es for the best painting or the most books prizes rread-we ead-w teach them to confuse excellence with w inning as if the only way to do something winning w ell is is to outdo o well others. we encourage them to mea asure their th own value in terms of how many measure p eople they’ve they people beaten, which is not exactly a path to mental health. We invite them to see th their peers not as potential friends or collaborators, but as obstacles to their own success...

Finally, we lead children tto regard whatever they’re doing as a means to an end. The point isn’t to paint or read or design a science experiment, but to win. The act of painting, reading or designing is thereby devalued in the child’s mind”.

Alfie Kohn, The Myth of the Spoiled Child

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Too confrontational for school?

Perhaps the issue is not what but how. My third grade teacher occasionally broke our class into two parallel lines, and at each pair of students, showed a flashcard with an unsolved addition problem each student tried to be the first to solve. If you were slow, you sat down, and the winner went to the back of the line to duel again. The experience was visceral, win or lose. When the class moved on to multiplication, the addition champion found himself on the bench. The skill was different. Most interesting, not winning was as motivating as winning. The secret was in the active and emotional mano a mano nature of the duel, and in engaging the bench by having them repeat the winning answer aloud as a group.

Our present educational environment seems loathe to engage winning and losing: to either remove competition from the environment or to make every student feel like a winner. Removing competition entirely however, serves to perpetuate an emotional blandness in the classroom, and also eliminates a useful tool for teaching resilience.

A compassionate teacher, teaching compassion to their students, can create a space for healthy competition. There’s nothing better than a victorious underdog, a phoenix rising from the ashes or a deposed king, especially in a cooperative atmosphere.

None of these are possible, however, without the duel. A particularly cogent analysis of competition in the classroom comes out of the California State University/LA: In Healthy Competition: o The primary goal is fun. o The competitive goal is not “valuable/real” nor is it characterized that way. o The learning and/or growth goal is conspicuously characterized as valuable. o The competition has a short duration and is characterized by high energy. o There is no long-term effect from the episode. o All individuals or groups see a reasonable chance of winning. o The students all firmly understand these points. o Examples include: trivia contests, short-term competitions for a solely symbolic reward, lighthearted challenges between groups where there is no reward

In Unhealthy Competition o It feels real. The winners and losers will be affected. o o o o o o

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The competitive goal/reward is “valuable/real,” and is characterized that way.

The learning task is characterized as a means to an end (winning the competition).

Winners are able to use their victory as social or educational capital at a later time.

Competition implicitly or explicitly rewards the advantaged students.

Over time students develop an increasingly “competitive mindset.”

Examples include: long-term point systems, competition for grades, grading on a curve, playing favorites, awards for skill-related performance.

The article suggests three aspects to successful competition in a learning environment: “First, make certain all competitive contexts are healthy as defined [above]. If we create unhealthy contexts (e.g., we get excited about or give meaningful rewards to winners or we place a great deal of emphasis on the outcome as important) we create confusing messages and undermine results.

Second, help students be aware of their competitive feelings in low stakes contexts.

Third, help students test their ability to stay conscious and intentional in higher stakes competitive situations”1.

This analysis recognizes that competition can create anxiety, and shift focus from the intrinsic qualities of a skill to the extrinsic concerns of winning and status (potentially even diminishing performance), but that competition can also energize and support growth and build resilience.

Instead of teaching reactive “Coping Skills”, let’s empower students with proactive Resilience Resilience should be of particular interest. Learning to thrive or survive under adverse conditions is a skill life will try to teach us in one way or another, but better to develop it in the benign context of a school. A useful distinction identifies resilience seperately from coping skills, the former involving the perception, engagement, management and integration of stressful events, and the latter simply the process of dealing with stress after the fact. Resilience is a powerful stance, while coping is a reaction.

To promote resilience, school can offer the following: 1.

2.

3.

setting appropriate levels of assignments/work for young people providing them with challenges that allow them to use and develop their problem-solving skills and give them an important sense of achievement providing them with a sense of belonging and opportunities for communication and cooperation by encouraging individual participation in a larger group context2

As a regular loser in competitive endeavors, and the occasional victim of bullying and intimidation, I fully endorse the possibility of a cooperative and mutually nurturing and supportive atmosphere. It seems the ideal environment, in fact, for an occasional dose of competition. Like art, competition and cooperation feel more poignant, visceral, and emotionally engaging in the presence of the other. I crave the excitement of a good game, but if I’m going to lose a duel, then let it be in an environment where I’m appreciated nonetheless, honored for trying and helped to overcome my missteps.

1 2

http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/jshindl/cm/Chapter18competition-final.htm http://www.kidshelp.com.au/grownups/news-research/hot-topics/being-resilient.php

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Inviting students to be an: Actor Artist Athlete Clown Diva/Divo Guide Magician Mentor Sage Shaman Teacher Warrior Witch Wizard

4. the bullfight 30

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When do we see a master at work?

How often do we see passion and excellence, joy and concentration, nervousness and risk ...and pride?

Perhaps every day... (because that teacher approaches his work like a virtuoso performer)?

How often do we ask our students to confront a big, even threatening problem, and face it down in public?

Possibly never.

How often do we then send students out into the world with not even the slightest idea of what is truly meant by “excellence”?

Too often.

Schools are charged with preparing students for life, a life filled with danger and risk, and demanding excellence. Teachers should prepare them for, and model for them and demand of them some kind of metaphoric bullfight. Our students can’t be spectators in the game of life: they need to be put in the driver’s seat.

The intention is not to raise the level of expectation too high, but to raise it enough that there is visceral, emotional engagement with the exercise.

David Perkins writes of a course at Harvard entitled “Thinking about Thinking”, in which three professors addressed a problem of the week in lecture, debate and discussion.

The spectacle of three intellectuals wrestling publicly with poignant issues of the day sounds very much like a bullfight. Rather than presenting polished position papers, it seemed the process involved real inquiry and hypothesis, an evolving and engaging debate1. The events were apparently spectacularly successful, suggesting significant emotional impact.

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What can we learn from virtuoso performances?

Quality. Watching experts engaged in their expertise sets the bar for excellence.

Understanding the breadth of knowledge those experts embody, as well as the depth of their understanding, defines a zone of operation and a level of expertise to aspire to.

Authenticity. Experts bring both their knowledge and their personality to bear can demonstrate what it means to fully bring yourself to your thoughts and activities. It can demonstrate that excellence blossoms, not despite personal idiosynchrosies, but often because of them. Virtuosos invite students to be themselves.

Resilience. The ebb and flow of an argument, the sharing of both failures and of triumphs, the honest depiction of struggle and uncertainty, these all teach or at least demonstrate resilience. Seeing struggle and doubt and error play out in the hands of an expert begins to create a context for the student.

Creativity. All fields of endeavor do not so obviously demonstrate the potential for creativity, but seeing it in action can be a powerful revelation. Had I more fully envisioned the creative potential of engineering, then I might have borne the immense drudgery of the learning path better, and I might not have flunked out of Cornell Engineering. That failure of imagination dramatically altered the course of my life (though I will admit for the better, looking back).

Courage. A virtuoso stands apart from the pack. While this looks appealing from the bleachers, it in fact requires strength and courage. Especially in those examples where the virtuoso performance is competitive or involves risk, seeing experts face fear or loss can be an invigorating experience.

What then of actually fighting the bull instead of just watching the spectacle? It would seem quite reasonable to protest that bullfights are for the masters, not the students still finding their way, but Perkins would argue otherwise. If we are asking students to play whole games, albeit “junior games”, then we are making them junior masters who should be capable of fighting junior bullfights. The intention here is not to raise the level of expectation too high, but to raise it enough that there is a visceral, emotional engagement with the exercise.

Even the real bullfight has it’s clowns and picadors to manage the proceedings, and mediate the risks and rewards.

1

Perkins, David, Making Learning Whole (2009, Jossey-Bass), p.146

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5. the swim Inviting students to be an: Athlete Coward Fool Guide Lover Mentor Pioneer Priest/Priestess Rescuer Sage Samaritan Seeker Shaman Student Teacher Trickster Warrior Wanderer Wizard Zombie

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Swimming lessons....

The swim is falling from a cruise ship into the ocean, without a life preserver.

It is engaging the reptilian brain, confronting that moment of panic, and surviving.

Surviving! Survival may not be elegant, it may not be planned, it may not even be taught, but it is surely learned when it is required. Survival is learning when nothing else matters, an experience of the present that allows for no past or future. It focuses the attention.

I wish I had learned French this way in school. No choice, escape, or excuse: within this environment, we speak only French. This would have helped a lot later, when I finally did land in France and later West Africa. At least in West Africa everyone spoke bad French, so I felt pretty much at home with just past and present tense, even if it limited the discussions.

This is not an idea limited to learning a language.

Immersion is common when you pursue something you love. You can choose to swim, you can fling ourselves into an ocean, or you can immerse yourself slowly. We only need assurance that the water is fine, sometimes, and the enduring faith that those are not sirens calling from the rocks.

Immersion is also a promise.

These waters are transformational! We will be changed. Submerge fully in this mikvah and emerge renewed. Behold these waters and know, when you are ready, that your transformation awaits. The ocean is inspiring even if you are not ready to swim. It is a possible future, a promise to our future self.

The truth is, there isn’t really anything to lose, except your old sense of self.

What is the difference between immersing yourself in a topic for 50 or 90 minutes a day, and really taking a swim?

The difference is the environment. In the ocean, you don’t daydream about your past and your future. Your every iota of being is engaged, heart, head and body, in the now.

The environment is overwhelming, all-encompassing, an assault on your senses. All the rules have changed. Up is down, down is up. On land, climbing can get you killed, at sea it’s sinking. Everything around you invites you, requires you, to think differently.

Bewilderment and awe is a great mindset from which to begin learning.

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It may not be learning itself, but it is a powerful invitation to engage with the material and the teachers, and to start asking questions.

Creating an environment this engaging takes a lot of commitment.

How do you appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel? With language, anyway, culture offers a powerful strategy. Music, food, literature, film: these should be constants in a foreign language department. Isn’t this what people talk about anyway?

Let students talk about it in a new language, even as beginners. Then, have them make those foods, write that story, make that film and cook that food. Don’t teach about the culture, let students participate in it.

Cooking an omelet won’t teach you French, but its a great environment to learn both the language and an appreciation for it and the culture from which it stems.

What does a math environment look like? If math is about abstracting and modelling the universe, then surely we can juxtapose the two powerfully. As a student, I often failed to viscerally equate abstraction with reality. My somewhat intense father, for example, would occasionally point to a device emitting a signal, and then point to an oscilloscope showing a sine wave, and unfortunately assume no further explanation was required. Unequivocally, I can tell you this student did not quite understand the connection. I could not visualize what the abstraction had to do with the signal itself, when the signal to my ears was constant and the sine wave to my eyes assuredly not.

To be honest, I did not even know how to articulate the disconnect, though I was very motivated to make my dad proud with my ability to understand. Yet another example: fractals. I have seen countless beautifully descriptive graphics of fractals in which the the same complex pattern repeats itself at different scales, but I cannot for the life of me connect that graphic to the real world. What on earth, what profound question or new observation, led to the discovery of fractals? Connecting abstraction to real life: that would be a powerful way to use a math environment.

Environment isn’t the only important aspect to a swim. Autonomy, partners, a patient swimming instructor: all useful. Drowning is a risk, of course: there’s nothing more dispiriting then that. A swimming instructor once failed to notice I was sinking until well after I was exhausted and submerged, and it was another 4 years before I successfully learned to swim thereafter. The resulting emotion was not so much fear as extreme aversion, an aversion that I have not completely conquered to this day.

Yes, you can lead a fish to water and you can’t make him drink, but let them start to drown and you will surely make a land creature of them.

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Inviting students to be an: Alchemist Artist Athlete Clown Companion Coward Dilettante Fool Gambler Magician Martyr Mentor Pioneer Rescuer Saboteur Sage Samaritan Seeker Teacher Trickster Warrior Wanderer 38

6. the climb

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Finding your own path The difference between a climb and any difficult task lies in the clarity of the goal, the complete mental and physical commitment required to achieve it, the challenge of finding your own path, the accomplishment felt by executing the steps along the way, and the sense of mastery felt at reaching the top.

Climbing is a whole game: demanding, engaging, frustrating and yes, creative. There is a profoundly visceral quality to it missing from a lot of academic pursuits. A climb is not merely following the recipe or instructions to execute an activity, as for example a science “experiment” as it is sometimes taught. A climb requires the climber to find his own path, to break a tough climb into viable stages, to exercise creativity and free will, to make decisions and to take risks.

A climb need not be a solo affair. Climbers help each other, showing each other the way, alternately taking the lead, teaching each other moves. 35 years after a high school jaunt to the Shawangunk Ridge in New York (the “Gunks”), for example, I can still remember with awe a particularly daring set of moves one of my friends used to overcome an impossible passage, moving far off the proscribed route, a tremendous lesson in divergent thinking that inspires me still. This is situated learning exactly, organized around an authentic social endeavor, all of us “Learning from the Team”.

While I refer to literal climbing here, the lesson applies as well to the metaphoric kind.

Motivation and execution are interesting issues with climbs. Climbing a mountain requires innumerable little moves and sometimes a big one, many little risks and sometimes a big one. It is cumulative, with a small flash of satisfaction with every successful maneuver, leading to an immense sense of triumph at the top. The joy, however is less in getting to the top and more in those little moves: finding a way forward, making the move, repeating it if it fails, feeling your strength and your ability. You don’t climb the mountain to reach the top: you climb the mountain to climb the mountain.

One particularly poignant facet of a climb is sustaining hope. Tough summits challenge the mental fortitude of the climber: it builds mental toughness. The ability to surmount doubt and fear relies on a powerful capacity to sustain hope in tough circumstances.

The study of hope in the 1990s yielded an approach known as “hope theory”, defining hope as “the perceived capacity to find routes to desired goals (pathways thinking), in conjunction with the motivations to use those routes (agency thinking). Hopeful thinking does not appear to be based on genetic inheritance, but instead reflects learning over the course of childhood.”1 C.R.Snyder at the University of Kansas posits: hope is a way of thinking and a key component of resilience. It builds a capacity to set realistic goals, creativity and flexibility in achieving goals, and a deep-seated belief in yourself.

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How then to imagine an academic climb?

1. The goal must be absolutely clear, and worthwhile, and realistic.

If the game is math, then it must take math into the world where it empowers the student: helps him to solve a useful problem or model actual phenomena. If it is language, then it is language in the real world, or at least a rich facsimile of the real world, where it empowers the student to navigate successfully. If it is science, then it is both theoretical and practical, and with a clear notion of what is sought and what is gained.

2. Students exercise agency and creativity in defining and executing a path.

Disparate skill levels mean students should decide for themselves their entry points.

Brainstorming a promising route forward, alone or as a team, is a form of “preparing to learn”, a way to get vested in the exercise. Teams offer a learning community, but also invite comparison. Seeing teammates scamper blithely ahead can be terribly deflating, especially if you’re stuck and they’re impatient. It may fall to the teacher to disentangle emotional impediments, to demystify spectacular performances, to expose hidden tricks of the trade, and to teach appreciation for both those quick teammates and yourself. I know in my own schooling that this rarely got the attention it deserved.

3. The goal is always to find flow.

To stretch your knowledge just enough to present a challenge and annihilate boredom, but not enough to stymie and frustrate to a standstill: that is what Perkins would qualify as “Making the Game Worth Playing”, and “Learning to Learn”, or what Vygotsky termed the “zone of proximal development”. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the word “flow” to represent a state of mind required for optimal performance, positioned ideally between challenge and capability. This is truly where a coach or teacher can be helpful, tuning the climb to the climber. No climb will suit all capabilities, so designing it to offer numerous entry and exit points is essential.

4. The summit is choreographed.

Summits require self-reflection, self-congratulations and a few minutes to savor the view from the top. Learning is hard: reliving the important moves helps to make the learning stick. The difference between a mountain and school is that climbing the former is usually optional and attending the latter is usually not. I can leave Mt. Blanc short of the top, reasonably at peace with the fact that the avalanche danger was too great to succeed, my self-esteem intact even if the failure still niggles at me occasionally; this is not an option in school. It helps perhaps to keep this aphorism at hand: “It is not the mountains we conquer but ourselves.” ~Sir Edmund Hillary

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7. the apprenticeship Inviting students to be an: Alchemist Artist Child Clown Companion Dilettante Engineer Inventor Magician Midas Networker Seeker Servant Slave Student Trickster

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child | labor Directly addressed by effective internships and apprenticeships are six of the Ten Principles of Effective Learning, identified by Halpern, Heckman, and Larson in their study “Realizing the Potential of Learning in Middle Adolescence” : 1. It is In-Depth and Immersive…

Good learning ensures youth gain the capacity to sustain interest in question-driven inquiry. In depth learning gives youth the opportunity to gain mastery in the discipline – and they want to be good at things.

2. It is Rooted in a Community of Practice…

Good learning takes place when less experienced learners can work alongside more experienced peers as well as skilled adult mentors. Here there is joint effort and distributed responsibility and speeds up learning.

4. Attends to Motivation…

Good learning recognizes young people are intrinsically motivated to learn at deeper levels – not by external rewards but by personally meaningful experiences – when it is worth learning, and when it connects to other people, to their peers and to adults.

6. Gives Opportunity to Apply Knowledge and Make Meaning of Learning Experience…

Good learning creates a sense of purposefulness for the learner, and taps into young people’s desire to use, apply, make sense, and make connections. It allows them to work on tasks and create products that have meaning and value to self and others.

9. Is Diverse as a Whole…

Good learning provides opportunities for young people to learn about (and more selectively to experience) a range of adult roles, the kinds of tasks adults devote themselves to.

10. Is Supported by a Rich/Multi-Dimensional Adult Role…

Good learning recognizes strong relationships are knowledge pathways – mentors must work alongside youth, and exemplify how professionals see and experience the world.

Mentors encourage youth to learn, and help young people trust themselves as learners.

Understanding learning as a cultural phenomenon emerging from children participating in a “Community of Practice” was developed by Prof. Barbara Rostoff through her study of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. She terms the process “Intent Community Participation”, whereby students contribute to the activities of the community, gradually learning skills through “participation in” rather than “learning about”. Rostoff conceives school as a potential community of practice in her book “Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community”. This approach demands a new relationship between teacher and student, repositioning both as fellow students, the teacher simply more skilled in the practice and eager to share their expertise. Thus school itself can be an apprenticeship as long as the job of learning is legitimately seen as a collective endeavor. Rostoff emphasizes a number of characteristics of a Community of Practice:

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Of note is the collaborative nature of the enterprise, the desire students have to belong to the community and therefore to contribute, the expectation and feedback students receive from the community, and the role of non-verbal communication in supporting the student: they are shown what to do and not simply told. There is a profound focus on practicality over theory.

The magic of a charismatic teacher is often their ability to invite us into their world, to make us feel that we are a part of their community of practice and a fellow learner eager to contribute to the common enterprise. The subtle shift in status from mere student to esteemed peer is surely powerful.

What of the traditional apprenticeship however? Does the medieval paradigm focused on a particular trade demonstrated by an experienced master have a place in modern schooling? A short anecdote may illuminate the terrain: I worked every summer of my high school career for my father, an engineer at that time focused on computerizing the retail transaction, speciďŹ cally for fast-food restaurants.

My job was to write computer programs to manipulate and make reports of the data

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that arrived every night from the various franchises, I commuted 29 miles every morning with my dad to a windowless warehouse in Nashua, New Hampshire, and worked alone until he was ready to go home, often after midnight. If I had difficulties, I sought his advice or assistance, but this was relatively rare since I had a good grasp of programming languages and the practice of preparing flowcharts in advance to think through and plan the programming logic.

I gained a little bit of self-esteem on that job, knowing that I was contributing to an adult enterprise. I appreciated the money, and the long drives home listening to radio stations from far away somehow bouncing down to us from the ether. I learned that I hated working in windowless warehouses, and came to dread the isolation and strange sunless emptiness of that life. I learned that I cared about my immediate environment, though I could not have articulated that at the time. Most impactfully, I learned from seeing my father at work what absolutely relentless pursuit of a goal looked like. It was pretty intimidating, and I have never forgotten it.

How often does public school teach relentlessness? Shouldn’t it?

Leaving school and “Playing out of Town” in Perkins’ parlance: investigating different communities of learning, is another way to think about apprenticeships. These modern apprenticeships outside of school will need to be inverted, however. The purpose of an apprenticeship used to be to capitalize on the relationship between master and student and teach a whole practice from the ground up: from the simplest of tasks over a long period of years to the refined skills and hidden games of the master. The modern apprenticeship will still capitalize on a personal relationship to a master, but it must reveal the whole game from the start even if the skills to play the game are not yet in place.

Students are not committing their lives to this particular game, they are unlikely to build all of the necessary skills, and in any case, that particular job itself will have changed or even disappeared by the time they they leave school: the point of this apprenticeship is not to slowly build a master, but to teach general concepts within a particular context.

What can it teach? A modern apprenticeship teaches three aspects of work. First, it teaches character. Responsibility, precision, quality, service, endurance, imagination, honesty, failure, creativity all take on a poignancy when the game is real life, consequences are more than a grade, and expectations are community based, and not teacher imposed. Second, it teaches context: what it means to work in an office, factory, shop, outdoors. A student begins to envision how it actually feels to do this work, and can test whether it suits him. Third, it teaches transference: the skills and habits of mind taught in school are no longer ends in themselves, but now tethered to actual outcomes in service to actual goals.

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Practicality is the pitfall that dooms so many initiatives like apprenticeships. The difficulties are obvious: access to diverse and meaningful jobs outside of school, especially in more rural or suburban locations, developing meaningful activities that introduce whole games and total context instead of isolated skills, and effective and developmentally appropriate evaluation useful to the participants are but three.

How then to make internships work?

As a bridge between individual children and the community at large, between fertile imagination and actual productivity, School needs to build navigable pathways to the outside world. This requires opening the work of school to the students as an example, or it requires building actual relationships within the community, or it requires automating that function through, for example, constructing a website supported by robust marketing. Requiring students to construct resumes for such a website is already a great introduction to work.

Great internships require students to play the whole game, not train to be a cog. The experience must be framed in advance by intention (character, transference, context), and it must be followed by an evaluation to help the student understand what it meant to them. Helping them to ask the right questions will make the experience meaningful instead of merely useful.

Here’s what I did to myself through lack of counselling, despite success in high school and those summers of computer programming: I turned down Dartmouth and MIT in favor of Cornell University School of Engineering, took far too many courses out of a delusional confidence in my abilities, bombed a job with computer services because, despite years of computer programming, I didn’t know a thing about operating systems, and finally, exhausted and despairing, I flunked out of school. I had no idea what I was doing, or why: only that I had to succeed but couldn’t. It had never even occurred to me to reflect on my future and allow myself to seriously pursue the things that actually gave me joy. Joy itself was rather suspicious: the sure sign of a lightweight endeavor.

My Catholic upbringing may also have had something to do with it.

The point is that reflection didn’t come naturally to me, and I doubt that I’m so unique.

Apprenticeships offer the opportunity to get off the beaten track, but they also require guided reflection to make the most of the experience. It requires an inquiry into feelings, intuitions, and ideas about the future. It requires good Counselling, and pointed questions: What did you think of the work? What did you think of the people? What did you think of the context? Do you think it was typical of that kind of work? Can you imagine doing that with your life?

LearningTogether: Children and Adults in a School Community,

by Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis,& Bartlett, (Oxford, 2001)

1

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Inviting students to be an: Alchemist Bully Child Clown Engineer Inventor Rebel Seeker Student Trickster

8. demolition 48

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Creativity Demolition is a creative act. There’s a tired cliche: true, worn, ready for reformulation.

Nonetheless, all you defenders of the status quo, conservative legions resting on your laurels, champions of don’t change a thing and believers of, at best, incremental adjustments take note: sometimes it’s already broken, and sometimes it just needs to be broken, if only to understand how the damn thing works. The important thing is to demolish barriers of thought, constructs of understanding, rituals of mind and body, so that a situation can be understood anew.

Every monarch needs his jester, every solution seeks its problem, every position wilts without detractors. Creativity demands it’s opposite as well.

As a child, dismantling mechanical devices became an occasional hobby. Carefully tearing apart vaccuum cleaners and radios and motors and watches after they stopped working was intriguing work, (and reassembling them less so). In fact, I’m pretty sure I never succeeded in fixing anything, never mind creating something vital and new. What I did learn, upon finishing a reconstruction only to find leftover parts, was to diagram my explorations and keep screws and bolts in a container so that they didn’t get lost.

A more precocious child might have learned something more from the exercise. As it is, this child grew to appreciate taking apart preconceptions and cliches in order to see the world or his problems or his projects differently.

The point of demolition is to transcend cliches. In our architectural practice we have a convoluted but dearly held process, the first 5 steps of which go like this:

1. Understand

2. Investigate

3. Brainstorm

4. Explode

5. Document

Our Client.

Their Problems.

Opportunities Constraints.

Possibilities.

Solutions.

Preconceptions.

Cliches.

Delineate.

Describe.

See. Reach Out, Poke, Question, Prod, Challenge, Cajole, Compare, Tease, Document.

Financial, Legal, Circumstantial Constraints.

Ways to leap boundaries.

Borrow, Invent, Improvise, Isolate Organize, Imagine, Assemble, Devise, Repeat.

Challenge, Break, Re-interpret, Fix, Celebrate, Syncopate, Validate.

Refine, Detail, Coordinate, Synchronize, Check. Check, Check again.

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What we found over the course of our career, (“we” includes my wife and partner, Polly Dithmer) was that our first ideas about a project inevitably...(sucked). They responded to the problems we needed to solve, but usually did so in rather uninspiring ways. Our early solutions repeated what we knew, and usually failed to advance the solution beyond this rather limited perspective. We came to understand that the only solution to our timidity and dissatisfaction was to blow up whatever we first imagined.

How do we do this?

We don’t plant explosives, or take a hammer to anything or even so much as crumple a sheet of paper. Instead, we ask questions, hurl insults, plant big smudgy X marks over stuff we despise, decry what bores us, and finally after we’ve gotten all that out of our system, begin to imagine what would be better. The demolition makes space for a new and more profound conception. In essence, having solved the problem originally posed by our clients, we throw a tantrum and define for ourselves the problems we want to solve in addition and for ourselves. We are seeking an elusive satisfaction without which we will not inspire our clients but that first demands jumping the rails of mind.

We’ve found that our clients too seek to transcend their problems and find something inspiring in the results. Solving their problems is never really the issue at all: it is just where the conversation, and the questions, really begin.

Asking questions: this is the job of demolition. Question after question, the endless “why” of the young, until something gives way and a new perspective opens, a different angle of attack. How many teachers have the patience to encourage that? Certainly few parents do.

I took a sculpture class at Cornell University once, in which we were asked to take a single sheet of plywood and create something from it. When I took a sledge hammer to the plywood instead of a saw, when I understood the rules but subverted them to find some kind of visceral expression, that was when I first understood the beauty and possibility of demolition.

Let’s figure out how to encourage subversion instead of sending it to the principal’s office. Here’s another cliche: you can’t break the rules until you understand them first. I think this is an excuse to maintain order and keep school’s tidy. Perkins tells us: “Play the whole game”. I’m here to tell you that the game requires subversion. It invites an attitude of playfulness, it requires dismantling the status quo, it demands new perspectives. Problems and possibilities both emerge from a concerted effort to break the rules. Let’s get students to break the rules, and then help them understand how to do so constructively.

This is how we teach creativity.

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9. storytelling Inviting students to be an: Actor Advocate Child Clown Companion Dilettante Diplomat Don Juan Evangelist Fool Gossip Guide Mentor Mystic Poet Politician Priest/Priestess Rebel/Revolutionary Sage Seeker Shaman Storyteller Teacher Trickster Visionary

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A POET’S ADVICE (By EE Cummings) A real human is somebody who feels and who expresses his or her feelings.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know what they feel--but that’s thinking or believing or knowing: not feeling.

And being real is feeling--not just knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but it’s very difficult to learn to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody - but - yourself.

To be nobody - but -yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for communicating nobody-but-yourself to others, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t real can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as just being just like somebody else.

We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it, we are not real.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve loved just once with a nobody-but-yourself heart, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become real is: do something easy, like dreaming of freedom-unless you’re ready to commit yourself to feel and work and fight till you die.

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So much of life is telling stories.

How else to make meaning of what you experienced: from your past? How else to feel your life amounted to something? How else even to decide what to do next, except to imagine your future as a story? In contemplating our life, past, present, future, we can choose to dwell on the positive or the negative, but inevitably we imagine a story and what we decide can be the shape of it: the structure.

These are the stories we tell ourselves, but what of stories we tell others? Sharing our stories is like having children: there is some hope that something of ourselves will continue to live and inspire after we are gone, our lives and lies become myths for the ages. It is a way to teach what we have learned, and it is a way to feed our egos a bit: to feel we have lived a life of some consequence.

Thinking in stories is not just about meaning, it too is a tool for remembering.

Families and cultures both depend on stories to sustain themselves, to pass on the collective identity, to honor past accomplishments & departed heroes. Books come and go, but good stories get passed on for generations, each generation reinventing the narrative to serve itself, a game of telephone in which the message gets mangled, but so what? None of it was ever strictly true anyway: it was simply meaningful.

Good stories also make good arguments. Sharing your personal story builds authority, and oers an authentic platform from which to make an argument. I saw this, I survived this, I know this to be true from personal experience: no politician could dispense with stories like this and successfully make a case. Logic has power, but stories tug at the emotions, giving logic a toehold.

Stories are grounding. Abstractions dance in the mind loosely, tied too often to other abstractions but free from foundations. Stories are a powerful way to tie abstractions to the real world, to augment them with values and clear the path to actual wisdom.

Here again, logic and data fail to engage and inspire quite like a powerful story.

Stories too can be a device. Feats of memory and recall usually attach information to stories, a testament to the power of narrative. We remember causally linked events far better than columns of data, but attaching data to events allows us to remember both.

For all of these reasons and probably many more, schools should use stories more often, and they should teach their students to employ them powerfully. The temptation will always be to simply stick to facts, but this will usually miss the point of a convincing presentation entirely: making a point powerfully almost always demands that the facts be presented as or with a story.

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Social Studies is all stories: situations, decisions, consequences. If only it was taught as such. Imagine a course devoted to some of the most consequential decisions in history, taught in such a manner that students are viscerally placed in the position of decision-makers. To weigh opportunity and constraint, to confront risk and reward, to face dissent and understand strategy: that would be an experience with lasting impact.

Science is replete with stories and characters and amazing questions and overcoming tremendous odds. How better to engage in the game of Science, but to understand the personal struggles and motivations and triumphs of scientists? What were the questions that intrigued them, and why? Why did they care about what they cared about?

Can we put students in the shoes of a scientist, and show them a more complete picture of what that is like?

Languages could be about students telling their own stories in a foreign tongue. They can be lies or jokes or theories or diatribes, it wouldn’t matter. As long as it got them talking in a strange language, however badly.

Math is fascinating when we begin to hear about the actual problems that led to its invention. When the abstract is made personal and concrete, that’s when many students listen, and when they find a scaffold for remembering.

English, traditionally, is where story making is taught. The stakes are rarely viscerally conveyed however. It is too easy to recoil from Dickens or Shakespeare, the claustrophobia of their stories oppressive, the characters too sharply or poignantly drawn to imagine analogues in modern life at that age. Show me an advertisement that plays with the archtypes in my head and show me I’ve been manipulated however, and I am more prepared to learn how those archtypes also find a home in literature, and also more eager to learn how to employ them for my own purposes. Challenge me not just to write a little story but to get up in front of my peers and argue for something I believe in, and then you have my complete and undivided attention.

Students need powerful storytelling skills The point is this: every subject can be oriented around stories, and there is no more engaging way to approach a topic. The key is a riveting riveting tale, and this is an acquired skill. Teachers need to be masters of storytelling, and students need to learn it as a basic life skill. To learn it, students have to employ it, take it for a test drive, fine tune the moving parts and learn from their missteps. They need to tell all kinds of stories, and figure out the structures and rhythms that work for them. They need to walk out into the real world with an immense arsenal of narrative strategies and secret weapons, adept at defending themselves, slaying enemies and wooing constituencies.

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10. conversation 56

inviting students to be an: Actor Advocate Bully Clown Companion Critic Crone Damsel Diva/Divo Diplomat Don Juan Dreamer Evangelist Fool Gossip Guide Judge Mentor Networker Politician Sage Samaritan Shaman Storyteller Student Teacher Trickster Visionary

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All talk need not be stories...

Much of modern schooling involves conversation, but the power and potential of these interactions may not always be fully understood or exploited. These conversations can not only build understanding of the coursework but they also build powerful human beings: done right, they “teach” the coursework, but also “teach” empowerment and self-esteem.

Foundations for this perspective lie in the work of Carl Rogers and his pursuasive “Person-Centered Psychotherapy Approach”. In explaining the relationship between therapist and client, Rogers requires congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding from the therapist. Congruence means the therapist is open, transparent, genuine and authentic. There is no mask or reserve, no sense of impenetrability, no dispassionate pretence or protective veneer. Unconditional positive regard requires the therapist to honestly, authentically hold the client in high esteem, no matter what is said or done by the client. Empathic understanding requires therapists to put themselves in the position of their client: to appreciate their perspective.

Rogers asserts: “... as persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude toward themselves. As persons are empathetically heard, it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of inner experiencings. But as a person understands and prizes self, the self becomes more congruent with the experiencings. The person thus becomes more real, more genuine. These tendencies, the reciprocal of the therapist’s attitudes, enable the person to be a more effective growth-enhancer for himself or herself. There is a greater freedom to be the true, whole person. “1

Rogers highlights the similarity between education and therapy. In his view, the aims of education and psychotherapy coincide in that they both intend to produce people who are independent and creative. The relationship between therapist and client thus finds analogue in the relationship between teacher and student. This relationship is constructed on foundations of congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding, and built through conversation.

Conversation is built using Reflective or Empathic Listening. These types of listening are variously described, but all assign an active stance to the listener, who must reconstruct in their own words what is said, and verify it with the speaker to validate understanding before contributing further to the conversation. In this way, every contribution to the conversation is validated, as is the person making the contribution. This latter result, personal validation, too easily disappears from such a transaction as subtle or Rogers, C. R., A Way of Being (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1980) John Stewart and Milt Thomas, “Dialogic Listening: Sculpting Mutual Meanings,” in Bridges Not Walls, ed. John Stewart, 6th edition, (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1995), pp. 184-201.

1 2

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even overt shaming accompanies any incorrect assertions. Everyone in the conversation students and teacher, holds responsibility for the success of the effort. Nothing shuts down inquiry or discussion like shame.

The importance of understanding and validating the contribution of the speaker so crucial to Empathic Listening, puts some focus and effort on the speakers instead of the concept. Dialogic Listening, an approach described by Stewart and Thomas, tries to keep the focus squarely on the concept. This approach emphasizes conversation as a shared activity, presumably among equals. It requires participants to attend to all views presented in the conversation, their own and others, but does not focus on the person offering their perspective. Everyone at the table keeps their attention on the construction of a shared understanding, not on the sensibilities of the individual builders.2 This type of conversation, using Dialogic Listening, does not attend to the individual participants, missing an opportunity to reinforce a sense of empowerment and self-esteem. It assumes no responsibility for the participants as both emotional and intellectual creatures actively seeking to define themselves and their place in the world. It abrogates completely the responsibility to build “whole” people. The distinction however, may be academic: most conversations are fluid and both Dialogic and Empathic Listening may be employed. Aware of the emotional state of the students, a teacher can choose to reinforce empathically those students needing the support, while leaving the conversation otherwise to proceed with a more dialogic approach.

Practically, how many people can realistically and productively engage in a conversation? At Phillips Exeter, the Harkness methodology recommends 8 students around an oval table. In a 2010 paper on conversation dynamics, Mastrangeli et al propose a mathematical model to predict at what number of speakers a conversation will schism into two conversations. In addition, they test their model against a survey seeking anecdotal preference for group size. The results suggest that 4 people is the optimum group size for satisfying conversation, with any larger circles leading to dissatisfaction on the part of some participants (they wait too long for the opportunity to contribute to be satisfied or fully engaged). The study models democratic roundtable discussions, not conversations guided by a strong leader, and so the implications for classroom teaching remain somewhat obscure. The popularity of discussion based learning however, may argue for more attention to discussion group size, no matter the actual size of the class. Groups of 4 students will have everyone engaged, with the participation and level of interest diminishing thereafter.

Massimo Mastrangeli, Martin Schmidt and Lucas Lacasa (2010) The Roundtable: An Abstract Model of Conversation Dynamics, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 13 (4) 2 <http://jasss. soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/2.html> 3

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11. the safari Inviting students to be a: Clown Companion Coward Guide Rescuer Saboteur Sage Samaritan Scribe Seeker Student Trickster Wanderer

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Let’s rethink the field trip.

There is nothing like a safari to open the mind and flood the senses: to break out of the box of the classroom. Rather than cloistering students in classrooms, we should be introducing them to the mysteries of what lies just outside.

It is, after all, real life we are preparing them for.

A safari introduces you to the “other”. This is not a token field trip, though it could fit the definition. This is as often as possible, and closer to home. This is as strange and far away as you can possibly go. This is about escaping from the hermetic and often lifeless confines of the school to discover something new. This is about introducing a renewed sense of discovery into the experience of learning.

How do other people live, and work and think? How do they risk, and try and fail or succeed? What do they care about? How do they celebrate? Apprenticeships can be difficult to arrange sometimes, but visiting adults at work is at least a start in getting the flavor of work. What does it feel like to sit in an office all day? What kind of jobs get you outside? Not just what people think and do, but the environment they do it in can be very informative.

Rather than talk about it, let our students experience it. Be their guide on a quest for true surprise and discovery. Perkins warns about “about-itis”: a safari is one powerful cure. For a safari to approach a “whole game” however, requires a completely new conception of the “field trip”, one reason I avoid the term. One useful counterexample involves my most memorable field trip, a bus ride to the Franklin Park Zoo in the 6th grade. What I remember, unfortunately, is what we sang on the bus, not what we might have learned at the zoo. The trip represented a welcome respite from the confines of school, but staring at animals was not informative. Had we instead been welcomed into the mind of the zookeeper, into the hidden games of their ideas and dilemmas, into the ethics of storing animals for our amusement, or offering them safety from poaching, or breeding them for the survival of their species, then I feel we might have left there having played a more visceral, a more thoughtful, and a more inspiring game.

This brings up an important point: a safari is simply entertainment without an informed guide. Reading the placards at the zoo is even more boring than a lecture: at least a speaker can interact with the audience and draw them into their world. Placards are about things, they are not the game itself.

Too often, students are not prepared to ask the interesting questions that move an experience from being about a topic to actually sharing the mindset of the host. A safari deserves preparation, just like a meeting or a presentation. Here are the key steps:

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First, accept that a well planned safari is as valuable as yet another 6 hours of content.

Every safari is an exercise in preparation and imagination. Opening up Google Earth and tracing a route to understanding the context of your journey is a great way of entering the mindset for travel. Packing for the trip is another way to enter the mindset.

What will you need, what are the limitations on what you can carry, how will you get there: these are all questions to start a trip with. Especially in high school, field trips should be organized by the students, not the teachers.

Second, imagining in advance what the safari will encounter at its destination will prepare the students to learn more profoundly from the experience. Here, the work of John Bransford and Daniel Schwartz seems particularly germane. As described by Perkins1, their learning paradigm, “Inventing to Prepare for Learning”, encourages students to address some of the problems or issues they will be learning about before the actual lesson. They found that students who “prepared to learn” in this fashion actually retained far more of the actual lesson later, as long as that lesson addresses directly the issues they grappled with in advance. Brainstorming questions with students, letting them imagine what the safari will be like in advance, encouraging them to “prepare to learn”, will make the trip more meaningful and the lessons more enduring.

Third, a safari will be most effective if it helps students to “play the whole game”. Thus, questions prepared in advance might address the personal (what is there to know about the host personally, about their life, their passions, their background, their upbringing), they might address the emotional (what the host hopes to accomplish in their work, how this has this changed since they started, what do they struggle with, how is the job meaningful to them), they might address the vocational (what is the job like, what do they actually do all day, is it what they expected when they started, what bores them and what excites them about the day to day aspects of their job), they might address the context (what are the big issues they grapple with, what kind of difference are they making, what impedes their work), and they might address the invisible game behind their work (politics, strategies, pressures, rules of thumb, rules of conduct, the role of measurement).

Fourth, interviewing a guide is not an experience. Rather than just talk about the game, the students need to play it. This means to some measure, being put in the role of the guide and seeing the world through their eyes.

Finally, a safari deserves reflection and discussion to fully hit home. Journals must be mandatory, and conversations comparing preconceptions with the actual experience, exploring ramifications of what was learned, and sharing personal thoughts will make the safari indelible. Action without reflection is a wasted opportunity.

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12. the adventure Inviting students to be a: Clown Companion Coward Dilettante Dreamer Fool Guide Knight Mentor Mystic Pioneer Pirate Poet Scribe Seeker Student Trickster Visionary Warrior Wanderer

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“...cultivating a Wholehearted life is not like trying to reach a destination.

It’s like walking toward a star in the sky. We never really arrive, but we certainly know that we’re heading in the right direction.”

Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection (Hazeldon, 2010), p. xiv

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Uncertainty Daily life can be unbearably regulated and prescribed. Wake up early, despite the research showing students do better waking up later. Make it to the bus stop on time or end up riding your bike to school. Make it to homeroom on time or get a detention.

Make it to class on time or argue for a hall pass. Get your homework done or get a bad grade. Get to bed on time or suffer tomorrow. Plan for your future or end up a bum.

Consider always your obligations. Civilization conspires to reduce chance, to minimize uncertainty, to mitigate insecurity, to insulate experience. As we collectively address pain and discomfort, however, we also seem to drain the life out of...life.

In this essay, I want to argue for uncertainty. I want us collectively, actively, to seek out and embrace it. I want schools to teach the resilience required, and accustom their students to the exact mindsets necessary to make peace with and come to love “not knowing”. The search for uncertainty, that mindset, is teachable.

It is a thirst for Adventure.

It is common to extol the virtues of risk-taking, especially in this entrepreneurial every man for himself culture, but I rarely hear anyone take joy in its companion, uncertainty.

The philosopher Alan Watts is one exception. In his 1951 essay “The Wisdom of Uncertainty”, he points out that change and uncertainty are at the very essence of being, and that our efforts to categorize and constrain our world are symptoms of our collective and futile effort to catch and preserve wind in a box. The cost is that we lose our experience of the moment and trap ourselves in a destructive and ultimately hopeless cycle of remembering our interpretations of the past and girding our loins for the future.

We stop living in the moment, that point where life actually happens. His prescription is to lose your sense of self as something apart from the world by losing yourself in your experience of the present, and by opening yourself fully to everything and everyone outside of yourself. To stop describing and begin experiencing.

This sounds exactly like Adventure.

When your every action already has a prescribed result, then those actions have lost their ability to engage you emotionally. We say that our actions have become mechanical, and we begin to feel like a machine. We say we are “simply going through the motions”. This is the opposite of creativity. A Safari is not an adventure for this very reason: it eliminates all risk, all uncertainty, and all creativity. This doesn’t disqualify the Safari as a potentially powerful experience, but does distinguish it from real Adventure.

To reimagine school as a place for adventure, I fall back on adventures of my own.

Some unfolded with planning and met with obstacles and detours, others started in an ad hoc manner and pretty much stayed that way to the end, but all are guided by some

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vision that lends direction and purpose. There was always “intent”. Intention is mysterious, and for me, often inexplicable. “I want to go to Africa” and “I want to cross the Sahara Desert by bicycle”, and “I want to be an architect” have been three statements of intent for me, but I cannot explain with any certainty why these particular goals held me in their thrall. Yet without that deeply emotional connection, those adventures would not have come to fruition.

Every adventure had a period of incubation, in which I imagined how the enterprise might unfold, and in which I planned for exigencies I can imagine. This is a delicate phase, because it is easy to talk yourself out of adventure. In bicycling across the Sahara, I literally plotted every single route on Google Earth, met people in the Sahara on-line, and spent a year planning, procuring, and packing for the trip. Despite all the preparation, the trip unfolded very, very differently than expected. In my view, it made the trip even better than imagined.

Every adventure requires a launch. Sitting in your ergonomic chair thinking about it is not an adventure. Launching requires, in fact it teaches, faith: faith in your resiliency, faith in your preparations, faith that the world is a reasonably benign place, faith that you will find the resources you need along the way if you don’t have them already. Alan Watts contrasts “Faith” with “Belief”, the former requiring a resilient, receptive mindset and the latter clinging rigidly to preconceptions. Adventures require Faith.

In going to Africa the forst time, for example, I had neither resources nor notion of how to refine my lofty mission statement into a manageable goal. I borrowed $300 from my dad, hopped a cheap flight to Amsterdam, borrowed a bike from my uncle, sold it in Paris to keep going, and winged it from there. In that case, it was crucial simply to set off, without hope, but secure that the trip would be worth it no matter the outcome. I had faith at least in the value of the effort.

Every adventure worthy of the name goes differently than expected. Becoming an architect took me 13 years, and spanned 3 colleges, 3 continents, 5 jobs and a marriage.

There’s no planning for everything: you need resilience. Accepting that condition, and the possibility that you will not achieve your precise goal but will nonetheless, inevitably, achieve something important is what I mean by teaching Adventure.

Finally, every adventure deserves a mythology: a condensation of the entire affair into coherent stories with relatable characters and an arc and a climax and denoument.

What was learned, what was accomplished, why should we care, what happened to you and how did you deal with it: all of this requires contemplation and refinement.

Reflection is what turns Adventure into experience, experience into learning.

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How could school incorporate Adventure? It has to start with students asking themselves: “what would be cool”? It must start with an emotional investment. Second, there must be planning (intention, schedule, budget) as well as some imagining: what Perkins called “Preparing to Learn”. Questions from the teacher would be OK, sufficient engagement to insure progress is good, but trust is vital. The value of an adventure is in navigating the voyage more than achieving the preconcieved outcome. When roadblocks arise, it will be important to reassure the student that the problem is outside of themselves and not reflective of them: it is navigable. Finally, there must be taking stock and mythologizing: this is what I did and what I overcame. Adventures should make both Homer and Odysseus of all of us.

How do we apply these thoughts specifically? How do we embrace uncertainty in the subject matter? Uncertainty in Science is well-established and inherent to the scientific method, yet knowledge seems rarely conveyed as tentative or as a crude approximation of experience.

“The scope and purposes of science are woefullt misunderstood when the universe which it describes is confused with the universe in which man lives. Science is talking about a symbol of the real universe, and this symbol has much the same use as money. It is a convenient timesaver for making practical arrangements. But when money and wealth, reality and science are confused, the symbol becomes a burden.”1

This statement is unremarkable to me, except at the end, where symbol becomes burden. Science should be about seeking out new experiences first and foremost. If it is only about explanation, then there is no risk, no adventure there: no sense of exploration. As Perkins might suggest, we are not playing the whole game. We are not embracing an experience first, before grappling with our uncertainty and considering hypotheses, designing experiments and testing our preconceptions: too often, we are following recipes.

When is writing ever presented as an adventure? Surely it requires plunging into the unknown and experiencing it before we codify and organize and present?

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” Winston Churchill

What is it that we write about? For Nietzsche, it was all about Morality.

“The object is to explore the huge, distant and thoroughly hidden country of morality, morality as it has actually existed and actually been lived, with new questions in mind and with fresh eyes. Is this not tantamount to saying that that country must be discovered anew?”2

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Mathematics constantly risks losing touch with actual experience, though modelling experience is often the point. The more we abstract the effort, the more we ought to juxtapose it with actual experience. The juice in math lies in the world of experience... but even as I write that I have to admit that there is also “juice” in making abstract connections. Nonetheless, I am confronted with a moment at Cornell University, in a class on mathematics which I assumed would build on my success with calculus, when I no longer understood what the whole delicate enterprise was about. In a week of visceral panic still poignant after 35 years, the entire edifice of mathematics collapsed in my mind, so completely that I was unable to continue the class. I could no longer connect the words and symbols presented by the teaching assistant to anything real or tangible, and the result for me was psychologically ruinous. Had I kept just one toe on the ground, it might have ended differently.

Foreign language is a tough one. I learned more Spanish in the year I lived in the Amazon Jungle then I learned French in 8 years of school. That strikes me as a terrible indictment of the school I attended, or at least of that French department. I had already learned Dutch and English, but learning French was absolute agony. I never made it to “Conversational French”, the semester that possibly might have brought it all together for me. When I made it to France and Morocco and the Sahara Desert, I sadly had to make due with past and present tense. It seems to me that there was no “Preparing to Learn” here, no emotional investment. More trips to France from the start, or trips to French bakeries and festivals, or comic books like Asterix and Obelisk, or real, live people engaging in unrehearsed conversation might have made this more about the moment and less another abstract edifice of verb forms, of imperfects and subjunctives that I still don’t know. As an aside, I once took a class in Italian hoping to meet girls, but ended up learning a little Italian instead. That too was an adventure.

The examples are endless, but here’s the point: the skyscrapers of learning we call math and science and social studies and language are a truly daunting climb. If each step isn’t an experience that takes you out of yourself, if it isn’t a little adventure in itself, a visceral interaction with the universe at large, then the climb becomes about the past or the future, a hollow, abstract exercise that only refocuses us on ourselves: our boredom, our patience, our struggle to understand, our other plans, the university this gets me into, the grade this will deliver. We learn to accept these hollow symbols of life in expectation of something better in the future, only to discover that these symbols have prepared us not at all to live a deeply meaningful life. In adventure, in the embrace of uncertainty, lies the hope for a visceral, emotional, physical experience of life independant of symbol or abstraction. Adventure teaches us not just to think, but to fully experience each moment. If we say we are preparing our students for life, then surely we should teach them this: not just the symbol, but the thing itself.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), p50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: An Attack , trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), pp. 155-156 (Preface, VII)

1 2

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environment(s) Why are classrooms so...boring?

We imagine that the child who revelled in the visceral and imaginative environment of the kindergarten becomes a teenager happily engaged by neutrality, abstraction, theory, talk. This despite studies that repeatedly demonstrate the exact opposite: that learning happens best when it involves relationships, community, action and agency.

For anyone with a choice, classrooms are not usually where we learn.

Furthermore, the places where we do learn oďŹ&#x20AC;ers important clues to what the classroom should become. Spaces oďŹ&#x20AC;er an opportunity to shape action, to ennoble activities, to facilitate interactions, to engage the senses, to play archtypal roles, and to provoke a response. All of that is abdicated by the standard 850 square foot classroom. When given a choice, we do not choose blandness or neutrality or nothingness: we choose the opposite.

We choose spaces with juice.

This chapter looks to other spaces for new ideas about learning environment, for a very diďŹ&#x20AC;erent approach.

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spaces

a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. k. l. m. n. o. p. q. r. s. t. u. v. w. x.

arena big map campďŹ re digital environment labyrinth situation room garden speakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corner sandbox media booth kiosk library cafe media array nest cave park bench attic bar restaurant shrine tent table workshop wilderness trail classroom

(not to give up on it entirely)

s with juice

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a. arena 72

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harnassing the energy of groups If our schools are to focus on visceral learning activities like bullfights, storytelling and duels, then we might consider building arenas. Not a Roman Colliseum, impressive as it is, but a round room with raised seating and great sightlines to the middle, seating 50 or 60 kids. This size allows a couple of classes to share activities, but doesn’t reduce utility of the room to that rare event coordinating an entire grade or school.

I want to contrast this space with the auditoriums so ubiquitous in American schools, especially high schools. Auditoriums focus all attention on the stage, and reduce the audience to anonymous actors invisible to the stage and to each other. It inflates the traditional classroom, 25 desks and chairs focused on that sage on the stage, to a much larger scale, maintaining exactly the social dynamics. Arenas work differently.

The traditional auditorium suffers additionally from the need for sound amplification, elaborate lighting systems, often intricate acoustic controls, and a disconcerting lack of utility that seriously impugns the rationale for spending so much money to build it.

To improve utility many auditoriums are designed with operable walls that can break the room down in scale, in other words, by adding yet another expensive system that unfortunately requires a lot of also expensive maintenance (The walls suffer mightily from untrained operators). The resulting “partial auditorium” feels like an uncomfortable compromise, neither satisfying as a classroom nor as a venue for presentations. Lacking daylight it is soulless, and as a partial room, it feels tentative. The resulting message, of “making do”, depreciates the value of the activity that brought everyone there.

An arena, in contrast, is smaller, low tech, daylit and democratic. It has a center, but everyone is able to check everyone else out. Everyone can speak, everyone shares their experience with everyone else, and there is a profound sense of community that is completely absent from a dark auditorium. Because the space is small, it requires no special systems: no amplification, no extraordinary acoustics, perhaps one spotlight, and no dividing walls. Mechanical systems might still be integrated into the risers, but this is not rocket science, and if the space is outdoors, not even necessary.

What happens in arenas? Contests sure, but also collaborations and much more.

Duels: Spelling bees and math contests and debates and anything that can pit two classrooms against each other in a spirit of play. The venue is shaped and sized so that everyone can participate either from their seats or from the center ring, everyone equal when the center is empty but all eyes on the center if that’s where the action is.

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Bullfights: Science demonstrations, roundtable conversations, speeches, any kind of individual presentation, any event where an individual or small group wrestles with a problem or concern or possibility for edification or even for entertainment: this is where the arena excels.

Collaborations: Sitting together to brainstorm a problem is greatly empowered by an arena. When noone can hide, but there is also a sense of community and a common enterprise, and where there is some leadership from the center, there collaboration can flourish. An arena is effective in creating a sense of teamwork. Of course, only half the circle is useful where the work requires a whiteboard, but a portable whiteboard is easily accomodated and the venue still flourishes half filled.

Conversations: Spontaneously as, for example, a place to eat your lunch or have a cup of coffee, the ability to sit next to someone or feel together as a group creates conversations. If a kiosk offers food for thought, a problem of the day, or a proposition or quote worth a few minutes of consideration, then so much the better.

Greg Lewis, in his essay “Teaching and Learning in Circle”,1 notes that working effectively in circles is much more than an advantage of geometry: 1. There is true equality of opportunity in a circle. There is no back row, no alphabetical order, no strategic placement. Responsibility is shared.

2. All of the participants bear responsibility for and to the Circle.

3. Circles encourage storytelling. The stories build connection among the learners – setting up a self-reinforcing loop.

4. Traditionally the center of the circle marks the space as sacred. What is put in the center of the circle should have meaning for the class.

5. The Talking Piece is essential to any circle process. It may be a feather, stick or anything that has particular meaning for a community. The talking piece is passed to facilitate and share speaking time. The talking piece always moves clockwise – in the direction of the sun. No one speaks without the talking piece. When one has the talking piece she may speak, or pass it without speaking...The talking piece goes around and around until all have had their say.

Can’t a regular classroom circle the wagons and create a temprary circle without the need for an arena? Surely, and this is common, though much more difficult when the class size approaches 30. For 2 classes to do this on a flat floor is extremely difficult to manage so that everyone feels included. An arena, in other words enables bigger teamwork. It also ennobles it however, establishing a sense of importance and intentionality that temporary accomodation fails to inspire.

1. Lewis, Greg, “Teaching and Learning in Circle”, Conflict Management in Higher Learning Report, Volume 3, Number 2, February 2003

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b. big map

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safari They say the world is getting smaller, and in many respects this is true: we come into contact with more people from diverse countries, we travel more than ever, and we are all tied virtually through the internet.

Why then is there so little understanding of the world?

The National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study interviewed 510 Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 to ascertain their knowledge of Geography. Half of the participants could not locate Ohio or New York, never mind Iraq or Indonesia. Three quarters of the respondents thought English the most commonly spoken language in the world instead of Mandarin Chinese. Most did not know that the US is the largest exporter of goods and services in the world. Overall, the respondents answered only 54% of the questions on the survey correctly. The only good news was that internet users who got there news on-line performed marginally better than those who still relied on newspapers and magazines.1 Is it only through war that we can discover the differences between Arab and Persian, between Sunni and Shia? Is it only through travel that we can open our eyes to the amazing similarities among people: to the universal importance of family and fulfilling work and love and freedom? How do we inspire curiosity about the world, and prepare our students to embrace it? The Big Map. Unlike a smaller scale map hung on the wall, this one lays on the ground and is experienced as the earth. The map is big enough that students literally travel from place to place. The map is big enough to annotate with discoveries, with photos, with artifacts of different places. The map could be a parking lot or a gymnasium or an entire school campus. The map could be built by students as they explore the globe, an exercise in scale and perhaps in gardening or drawing.

A big map too, offers discussion on the subtle racism and distortion of the Mercator Projection, the compromises of the Peter Projection, and the geometric problems of flattening spheres. Most importantly, it is an invitation to dream of distant places. It is an invitation to be curious.

Does curiosity really matter? Why not just tell students what we need them to know? Researchers at the Dynamic Memory Lab at UC Davis found that: “in both immediate and one-day-delayed memory tests, participants showed improved memory for information that they were curious about and for incidental material learned during states of high curiosity”2.

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In other words, we learn and remember material better when our curiosity is aroused, even when the material itself is not what we are curious about. Stimulating curiosity, in other words, is a great way of “Preparing to Learn” as Perkins would put it.

Can we teach curiosity? It is understood to be an innate response intended to reduce environmental uncertainty, reinforce safety and promote innovation. Studies show however, that it is very easily encouraged or discouraged in children. Stifling the natural tendency for exploration in children teaches them to prefer the familiar, while modelling curiosity and encouraging children to pursue discovery teaches them to be curious and seek the unfamiliar.3 Also, building self-esteem in children fosters curiosity as well. Kids who feel secure are less risk-averse and more inclined to exploratory behavior.4 What conditions stimulate curiosity? Berlyne showed that “exploratory behavior is instigated by ‘collative variables’ of physical and mental objects, like novelty, ambiguity, complexity, and the objective uncertainty created by such objects in the subject.”5 In other words, mystery and intrigue make us curious. Not very surprising, until you ask how often a school truly makes an effort to create mystery and intrigue. Subjects are usually more passively approached.

A Big Map stimulates curiosity. National Geographic actually rents them out for around $300/week (2 week minimum).

“National Geographic’s Giant Traveling Maps, produced by National Geographic Live, tour the country’s schools, bringing hands- and feet-on geography education to hundreds of thousands students each year. Designed to promote geographic literacy by igniting interest in geography, the maps and accompanying activities incorporate physical movement and games to teach students place names, physical geography, and cultural geography as well as map reading skills.

These floor maps of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and the Pacific Ocean are available for rent, each accompanied by a complete teacher guide, activities, game props, and educational resources.”6

...but students can build a map instead, and probably learn a lot more. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2006GeogLitsurvey.pdf States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit, Matthias J. Grubercorrespondenceemail, Bernard D. Gelman, Charan Ranganath Neuron, Volume 84, Issue 2, p486–496, 22 October 2014, © 2014 Elsevier Inc 3 Hunter, M.A., Ross, H.S. and Ames, E.W. (1982). Preferences of Familiar or Novel Toys: Effect of Familiarization Time in 1-Year Olds. Developmental Psychology, 18:519-529 4 Keller, J.A. (1987). Motivational Aspects of Exploratory Behavior. Curiosity, Imagination and Play.

London, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 5 Berlyne, D.E. (1960). Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity. New York, McGraw-Hill 6 http://events.nationalgeographic.com/special-events/giant-traveling-maps/ 1 2

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i. campďŹ re 80

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Learning by telling stories The best stories I ever heard were told to me by my aunt when I was five. She would sit next to my bed, and tell me all about the most magical things as I slowly fell asleep, and though I no longer remember the stories exactly, I will never forget that feeling, losing myself completely in her voice, the shadows of the bats that congregated at the streetlight outside fluttering on the ceiling, my eyes finally closed, drifting, drifting away.

The second best stories happened around a campfire. It’s not that the stories were actually so great, but the experience and the setting were unforgettable.

Fire is fascinating of course, especially to children. As a kid I once sat with my sister on the floor of our kitchen and methodically lit a box of matches, one match at a time, blowing each one out as we went, our parents fast asleep upstairs. Imagine, parents, waking up to that one fine morning. Ethnographers reveal that societies still using fire as a household tool teach their children to control it by age 7, after which these children lose their fascination with it. Only in western culture, where children are not taught to manage and control fire, does a fascination with fire continue even into adulthood.1 We sit around our campfires then, or perhaps just we westerners, and we relax into a communal meditation and we share our stories. The setting elicits a profound sense of community, trust and ease. The circle eliminates hierarchy, so everyone is responsible for the success of the interaction. The fire hypnotizes us into suspending, just for a little while, our hyper-critical mindset, to make stories even possible.

Schools however, don’t have campfires...fire codes and all...Students write papers, they might even write stories, but how often do they tell stories? The desk chairs get pulled into a circle, with nothing to seduce or mesmerise or elicit discussion. It is common to have conversations about a lesson, to intellectualize, to critique, to argue and to theorize. Something emotional is missing however, that experience too often coldly intellectual. The distinction lies between discussion and storytelling. Stories are a way to add soul and heart to a discussion: to enhance the pursuasive power.

Is there a way to learn from campfires, and teach the power of storytelling in arguing and offering a perspective? Can we possibly imagine the campfire as classroom? Can we think of that fire metaphorically to give us ideas about a reconception?

It’s this kind of thinking that led to the “touch table”. By putting high-powered touch screen computing on a tabletop, campfire classrooms find their fire. Students can tell illustrated stories. Now a circle of classmates can focus on an interactive display and

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use it to visually support their perspectives. The multiuser capacity of these tables allows for fluid transfers between many stories. Not only that, but project collaboration and teamwork become easier as a group can simultaneously work both together and individually on a problem. In this respect the multitouch table becomes a sandbox. The multitouch table is great for creating stories, not just for telling them.

The digital campfire There are any number of companies who make them, but I’m particularly drawn to the possibility of students building them. When I imagine a Fab Lab or modern workshop, this is exactly the kind of project I imagine emerging.The instructions to get the project started and get the students to imagine their own variations and hacks are at: http://www.instructables.com/id/Multi-touch-Table-1/ A Burning Desire: Steps Toward an Evolutionary Psychology of Fire Learning, Daniel M. T. Fessler © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Journal of Cognition and Culture 6.3-4

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d. digital environment

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This isn’t a computer screen.

This is SMALLab, a complete environment in which students interact kinesthetically with information. It is information made visceral. Instead of disappearing into the simulacra of a tiny computer screen, this larger conception of a digital environment engages us physically, socially and intellectually: it is multi-modal embodied learning.

Embodied Learning recognizes that our activity can serve our understanding: that we can learn through action. The research suggests, in fact, that we learn better and faster when we physically engage with the material instead of just hearing and seeing it. In a paper surveying the developments in embodied learning theory, Kontra et al trace its origins to the experiential learning work of David Kolb (1984), building on the concepts of John Dewey (1938).

Kolb described all learning as a cycle originating in experience, and proceeding through reflection on the experience, abstraction of the concept, and experimentation with the new-found knowledge. He identified learners along two continuums: between watching and doing, and between feeling and thinking, suggesting that while learning requires all four functions, learners will tend to situate in one of the four quadrants defined by this diagram: This work places experience firmly in the path of learning, showing that learning is experiential,, but doesn’t address whether active involvement with a subject can actually improve learning over a more passive interaction. Kontra et al show work in embodied cognition that suggests all learning independent of student learning preference benefits from action. “...we argue that action experience begins to shape our perception of the world around us during infancy and that its influence does not end there. Theories of embodiment provide a structure within which we can investigate the mechanisms underlying action’s impact on cognitive changes occurring throughout the lifetime. These theories shed light on the role of action experience in early learning contexts and developmental milestones, and further hold promise for directing the use of action to scaffold learning in more formal educational settings later in development. Simply put, the processes we use to act can subsequently subserve the processes we use to understand.”2

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Kontra et all demonstrate convincingly that direct and active interaction with a subject leads to improved learning over passive encounters. Using a physics lesson on angular momentum and torque, in which some students manipulate a set of bicycle wheels to supplement their understanding, and other students only watch these students, the students actively engaged with the wheels more accurately applied what they learned in subsequent tests. They experienced the physical forces studied, and so understood them better.

“The results confirm a long-standing belief that doing a relevant action leads to enhanced learning over passively viewing that action”2

What of more abstract topics, in which there is no manifestation to physically interact with? Goldin-Meadow, Cook, and Mitchell describe an experiment in which students who applied gestures to a mathematical equation, making a “V” with their fingers between two numbers when they sought to group them for example, more accurately solved similar equations after the lesson then students who had not made gestures.

Gesture improved their learning.3 Which brings us back to SMALLab. Building on this work on both interaction and gesture, they present the following guiding design principles: 1 – Gesture to Content Mapping: Learners’ physical actions have direct and causal impact in the simulated environment and the physical actions map to the content being learned (e.g. moving the hand in a clockwise motion makes a gear turn in a clockwise motion).

2 – Alignment: A learner’s gesture aligns with its function in the simulated environment (e.g., physical throwing gestures should align with throwing actions in the simulation).

3 – Human Scale: Computer interfaces should support movement on a human scale (e.g., degrees of freedom, size and speed of a gesture).

4 – Communicative Properties: The communicative and motivational aspects of human presence and gesture should be accounted for (e.g., the cultural meaning of a gesture, the formation conveyed).

5 – Socio-Collaborative Properties: Social presence should be accounted for in the design, affording multiple, coordinated opportunities for team learning. Mistakes are low stakes. All students get an opportunity to experience the environment – observational learning can be powerful, but it is not as strong as the kinesthetic learning the environment provides.

SMALLab specifically requires programming, a computer, ceiling mounted video projector, a motion capture system, trackable objects and a 25’ x 25’ x 10’ high blackbox theater or room. This ceiling height requirement means that a typical 850 sf classroom may be inadequate (unless removing ceiling tiles for example reveals sufficient interstitial space). Nonetheless, it offers a visceral embodied learning environment that scales to public education.

“Kolb - Learning Styles” by Saul McLeod in Simply Psychology (2010) “Embodied Learning across the Lifespan”, Kontra, Goldin-Meadow, Beilock http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3634974/pdf/nihms-461738.pdf 3 “Action’s influence on thought: The case of gesture”, Goldin-Meadow and Beilock 1 2

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e. labyrinth

“The unconscious is often symbolized by corridors, labyrinths, or mazes..”

Jung, Carl, Man and His Symbols, Chapter 3 88

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That isn’t a Labyrinth, its a Maze.

You got me. In my defense, the “Labyrinth” of Greek mythology, built by Daedelus for King Minos of Crete to hold the Minotaur: that had to have been a complicated Maze.

The terms in the past have been somewhat interchangable. How better to highlight the difference however? The Maze: frought with deadends, multiple choices and loops that confound and confuse. The Maze taxes memory, requires analysis, and for those who know the trick of keeping your hand on one wall no matter what, it is a mere trifle to contend with. The Labyrinth: one path, one outcome, no choices except whether to enter, and while the path may be convoluted it is never confusing or confounding. The Labyrinth offers a space for tranquility and inner peace and contemplation. The Maze is Puzzle, the Labyrinth is Ritual.

“So...you call this a classroom? You’re proposing a classroom without any access to content? How is this relevant to school“? My position: School should be teaching, first and foremost, how to think. Not Content. Content is useful, it makes the enterprise come alive, it recommends some possibilities for a young person’s future...but content is also more and more fleeting, and what remains, what is immutable and ultimately most useful, is knowing variously how to apply the mind. School must prioritize Thought over Content.

Why Labyrinths? Am I proposing to sacrifice time with Content to make way for some idle wandering? Here’s what Daniel H. Johnston has to say about it in his essay “101 Ways to use a Labyrinth”: “Where can you seek healing of the mind, body, and spirit? Where can you go to become centered and strengthened...? How do individuals look deeply into themselves and gain helpful insights? Where can you go to celebrate life? Where can you have a ritual of remembrance? Where can you find a needed peaceful moment?

Where can you learn about the journey of life and where you are in the process?

The answer is in a labyrinth. The process of mindfully walking a labyrinth can bring aid or answers to all these concerns”.1

Labyrinths teach a very particular state of mind and mode of thinking, and a very useful one. They honor meditation, contemplation, isolation, and revery. I was going to write “daydreaming” but the term has a distinctly pejorative connotation. Undeserved, I think.

Labyrinths also get people out of their chairs and get them to walk. In a study out of Stanford University, walking was shown to drastically improve divergent thinking .

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“Walking substantially enhanced creativity by two different measures. For the three alternate uses studies, 81%, 88%, and 100% of participants were more creative walking than sitting. For the BSE, 100% of those who walked outside generated at least one novel high-quality analogy compared with 50% of those seated inside...

Walking is an easy-to-implement strategy to increase appropriate novel idea generation. When there is a premium on generatingnew ideas in the workday, it should be beneficial to incorporate walks. In addition to providing performance benefits, it would address concerns regarding the physiological effects of inactivity (Hamilton, Healy, Dunstan, Zderic, & Owen, 2008;. Hamilton, Hamilton, & Zderic, 2007). While schools are cutting back on physical education in favor of seated academics, the neglect of the body in favor of the mind ignores their tight interdependence, as demonstrated here”.2

While Labyrinths come in all shapes, sizes and patterns, two types are in common use.

The first is the 3500 year old Cretan classical seven circuit style and the second is a style from 1225 A.D. found in the Chartres Cathedral in France.

1. Classical Style

2. Chartres Style

Back to the cover picture. Most labyrinths are two dimensional, stones or drawings on the earth, a kind of yellow brick road on the surface. They don’t create a powerful space seperate from your surroundings. I believe the power of these places would be dramatically magnified if they were conceived three dimensionally, much like a classic maze but without the anxiety. At such a labyrinth, entering becomes a momentous decision (there is no leaving once you start), the process is more inwardly focused, and I believe there would be a deeper sense of passage afterwards. Imagining such a labyrinth, perhaps in the larger context of a garden, I believe the emotional journey would be further enhanced.

1. Johnston, Daniel H. Phd, “101 Ways to use a Labyrinth”, Labyrinth Society Conference, Fayetteville, Arkansas - November, 2000 2. “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking” Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, Stanford University, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2014, Vol. 40, No. 4, 1142–1152, © 2014 American Psychological Association

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f. situation room

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Where do you Swim?

Imagine a space designed for immersion, accessing vast arrays of data presented graphically, viscerally. The room is designed for groups to easily interact with that data, and with each other. In an electronic room, they can even interact with data in flux. This is a profound manifestation of grappling with the real world and real group dynamics.

The Situation Room is comprehensive. When we imagine any class grappling with data: in science or math or economics for example, we imagine that experience brought to life in the Situation Room. Understanding, for example, the stock market, market trends, forecasting and portfolio management, requires visual data presentation of many types, as well as consideration of broader cultural trends, current events, company profiles and product research. This broad array of material comes alive in the Situation Room, inviting a broad spectrum of focus and insight, and the foundation for very rich investigation and discussion.

The Situation Room supports divergent thinking. In a fully wired room, the ability to poll students allows questions to be posed, divergent answers to be explored and a consensus to be built, without having to draw out students who might think differently but cringe at exposing their divergence. Starting to celebrate divergent ideas is a great step to building a culture of creativity. In a poll, students learn they are not the only ones to hold the opinions they have, and begin to feel the power of thinking differently.

The Situation Room is grounding. Abstract topics constantly risk losing touch with the real phenomena they often start with. A room that allows juxtaposition of those real phenomenon with its abstract derivatives supports students in keeping one foot on the ground, the other in the air. A room like this supports the multiple ways students retain and process information, giving them multiple perspectives and a range of entry points.

The Situation Room is useful for cross-pollination. Where a variety of perspectives are brought to bear on a problem, a venue prepared to display those points of view becomes very useful. A lesson on governance could, for example, pull in anything from Shakespeare to Marx to The French Revolution to the Declaration of Independence to newspaper accounts discussing Congressional gridlock.

The Situation Room supports complexity. When a complex issue is cracked open, and students are given small parts to explore and present, the Situation Room is an ideal venue to put the pieces back together in order to consider the big picture. In studying governance, for example, history offers an incredible diversity of systems.

Exploring them in a comparative fashion, each student preparing an electronic poster on a particular system and then verbally defending it, all of those systems juxtaposed, that would be an eye-opening experience. To seek some consensus, or to discover that there are many successful options and the American experiment is not uniquely better, or simply to crack open bias and preconception: these are all useful outcomes.

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Situation Rooms don’t need to be painfully expensive marvels of digital infrastructure: they need to be venues designed to display a broad range and scope of information. If that information is still paper based, or if the students are still working primarily off-line, or if the active learning yields projects of a real and not virtual nature, then a room less wired and more designed for a different kind of display is more likely to succeed.

Of course, the power of this space to communicate information and ideas makes it also very powerful for other activities: for Duels and Bullfights. In a room where anyone can stand and be seen and heard, presenting an argument or engaging in a debate is powerfully supported. We can imagine two students or student teams squaring off on a problem and arguing their perspectives. A safe space to express passion for a topic or position, to be theatrical even, in service to an idea, to teach students passion of this kind: this would be a fantastic development.

We can imagine stories unfolding in a space like this, supported by rich visual materials or supported simply by darkness. A Situation Room can become a campfire, a a place to share rather than argue. Telling stories supported by rich graphics: from a toddlers picture books to a corporate powerpoint presentation, this is how stories come alive.

Situation Rooms don’t need to be painfully expensive marvels of digital infrastructure: they need to be venues designed to display a broad range and scope of information.

A Situation Room truly comes into its own in support of big projects of longer duration, harnassing huge quantities of information. When corporations build their war rooms, this is what they use them for. The ability to bring people, information and process all together in one place is efficient, powerful and effective. When any one of these factors is diffused, people skyping in their thoughts, data residing elsewhere, or process led from elsewhere, then the power of the enterprise is diminished. Why not devote an entire semester to one topic, one project, one collective enterprise? This is playing Perkins’ “Whole Game”.

The Situation Room is great for total immersion in an issue: for a Swim. The important thing is to protect a Situation Room from losing its identity, from becoming yet another conference room or classroom. Creativity, Connection, Collaboration, Communication.

Everyone focused on the same problem or subject and working together. Electronic or not, this is the Situation Room.

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Management Cockpit

The quality of the data and the manner in which it is presented play a significant role in shaping how human beings interact to it. Jurgen Daum, in his detailed description of the “Cockpit”, explains how data organized in a question and answer format, formatted graphically and hierarchicly, and shown no more than 6 items at one time address the neurological limits of the human mind. These are important components of “Learning How to Learn”, from David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole

1. Daum, Jurgen, “Management Cockpit War Room: Objectives, Concept and Function, and Future Prospects of a (Still) Unusual But Highly Effective Management Tool”, Controlling - Zeitschrift fur die erfolgsorientierte Unternehmensfuhrung, Vol.18, June 2006, p.311-318

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War Room Google Ventures offers a prescriptive approach to what they call a “War Room”. They use these rooms to build projects, to make large quantities of digital information visible and manipulable, to extend the human limits to factual memory with spatial memory (we can remember where things are in space better than we remember what those things exactly are), to support brainstorming and to promote shared understanding. Google makes the point emphatically that ideas must be transferred from minds and computers to be made readily visible, shared and manipulable.

Their prescription: 1. Lightweight, stackable chairs to support rapid reconfiguration 2. Rolling tables, again to support rapid reconfiguration 3. Floor to ceiling whiteboards, or walls painted with Ideapaint or similar 4. Rolling whiteboard 5. Bookshelves for project specific references 6. Wifi for laptop access 7. UHU adhesive to temporarily mount stuff on walls, windows & doors 8. Clipboards for individual problem subsets and notation 9. A timer and a clock 10. Sticky flipcharts for posting lists and diagrams anywhere

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g. garden

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“There are actual antidepressant microbes in soil. Mycobacterium vaccae is found in soil, and activates the release of brain serotonin. Serotonin and dopamine are two chemicals that boost our immune system and keep us happy.”

Taljaard, Tanya, “Science finds Soil can Help Depression”, UPLIFT, July 17th, 2016 (Reporting on a paper by C. Lowry et al: IDENTIFICATION OF AN IMMUNE-RESPONSIVE MESOLIMBOCORTICAL SEROTONERGIC SYSTEM: POTENTIAL ROLE IN REGULATION OF EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR, Neuroscience 146 (2007) 756–772

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Let’s stop amputating meaningful As an architect and a writer, I am constantly bedevilled by lack of exercise. My work essentially offers me...none. I barely lift a finger. Worse, exercise machines drive me into a state of frustrated boredom. No video or book or magazine can make up for the fact that I am working at doing...nothing. No original thinking, no eureka moment, no physical product, not even a sense of accomplishment accompanies my exertion. I am attached to a machine like a 19th century textile worker, without anything to show for my effort and only the chimera of my future studly self to sustain my motivation. The fact that we assign machines to interact with us for exercise just as we assign them to interact with us for industrial production, and in both cases incidentally remove the requirement for thought...well it just offends me.

We can’t only blame the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Revolution for amputating meaningful work from physical effort (Hippocrates in the years before Christ discusses exercise as something independant of work), but surely the trend was hastened along.

The problem is not restricted to the workplace either. In fact, high school in particular almost perfectly amputates thought from physical activity. It’s how we got gym.

Gym fails too many students. The outlier, the non-team-player, the cynic, the loner, the handicapped, the uncoordinated...they all suffer when gym painfully highlights their inadequacies. As gym has shifted from a reliance on team sports to a greater focus on individual wellness, participation, gratification and success has improved. However, it continues to separate activity from cognition: to isolate doing from thinking.

The Garden is one alternative that connects knowing, thinking and actual physical work. The Garden requires vast amounts of physical labor, it requires knowledge about the natural world, it invokes planning and design and aesthetic judgement, and it offers enduring evidence of the effort. Unlike traditional gym, which relies on sports, games or repetitive exercise, the Garden links effort with a higher purpose, with meaningful work.

It offers students a sense of meaning, and a profound feeling of pride.

There are additional benefits: lessons in food, biology, teamwork, endurance, design, aesthetics, place-making, climate, chemistry, business, even politics. Gardens are farms, art galleries, works of art, animal habitats, event venues, educational spaces, experiments, and showcases. Even covered in snow, a Garden is a place to be managed, to be imagined, to be presented and to be enjoyed.

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work from physical effort.

A Garden can also be a terrific resource, offering a community both haven and venue.

Weddings, funerals, significant events: all benefit from a beautiful Garden. Meditation, escape, tranquility: a great Garden offers exactly that. A school with a Garden has a marketable revenue source. Communities concerned with budgets take note!

School, of course, became a part-time affair to keep kids useful on the farm, and it certainly saves on cooling costs to close the building when it gets too hot. Thus the most important months for a Garden, June to September, are when school is traditionally out. Communities are recognizing, however, that leaving multi-million dollar facilities empty for a quarter of the year makes no sense whatsoever. Year round schooling, summer school, or community use are all now standard. There is no reason why a Garden can’t be maintained over the summer.

The organization REAL School Gardens documents the benefits: Students: Testing: 15% Test Score Increases. Science scores saw the largest increases.

Engagement: 94% of teachers said REAL School Gardens Program got their students more engaged in learning.

Teachers: Effectiveness: Looking across seven different measures, the REAL School Gardens Program almost doubles teacher effectiveness in partner schools.

Preparation: 90% of teachers reported that the REAL School Gardens Program made them better prepared to help their students succeed academically.

Satisfaction: After three years in the REAL School Gardens Program, teachers were almost twice as likely to report they were satisfied with their jobs.

More Time Teaching Outside: After completing just one year of the REAL School Gardens Program, our most recent group of partner schools saw 58% of their teachers using the garden regularly for academic instruction.

Additional Studies Show: Hands-on lessons get students learning more and working better in groups.

Students know more about nutrition, and choose healthier snacks.

Gardening reduces symptoms of ADD and ADHD. School gardens reduce student stress levels, and increase self-esteem, problem solving, motivation to learn, and interest in improving the environment.1

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http://www.realschoolgardens.org/who-we-are.aspx

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h. speaker’s corner “Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts” Blaise Pascal

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Schools once taught rhetoric: Rhetoric was refined and employed by the ancient Greeks, commonly taught until the subject withered in the 2oth Century. With a focus on ethos, pathos, and logos (the credibility of the speaker, an understanding of the audience, and the content of the argument), using 14 exercises of the progymnasmata, (Fable, Narrative, Chreia, Proverb, Refutation, Confirmation, Commonplace, Encomium, Vituperation, Comparison, Impersonation, Description, Thesis, Defend / Attack), after which students practiced more complete speeches or declamations, in this manner students learned how to effectively think, write and present their thoughts: to pursuade.

“Rhetoric is language at play; language plus. It is what pursuades and cajoles, inspires and bamboozles, thrills and misdirects. It causes criminals to be convicted and then frees those criminals on appeal. It causes governments to rise and fall, best men to be ever after shunned by their friends’ brides and perfectly sensible adults to march with steady purpose towards machine guns.”1

Lessons in pursuasion invite or even demand lessons in ethics. A tool this powerful must be deployed to do good. In his paper “The Ancient Greeks and Modern Realism: Ethics, Persuasion, and Power”, Richard Ned Lebow shows how the Greeks “distinguish persuasion brought about by deceit (dolos), false logic, coercion, and other forms of chicanery from persuasion (peitho) achieved by holding out the prospect of building or strengthening friendships, common identities, and mutually valued norms and practices”2. Lebow looks at the relationship between pursuasion, influence and power, showing how influence is most efficiently maintained through peitho, in that it is pursuasion premised on the equality of everyone involved, and predicated on fulfilling all of their self-interests, rather than subverting them. He notes too, the value of dolos, in empowering the weak against the mighty for example: a weapon in service to a righteous cause perhaps. Ethics are tricky.

Yet, what could be more basic, more crucial in life than the ability to stand up for your beliefs and argue courageously and effectively? When do we make this a focus for students anymore, and should we not? There can be no doubt, before you set out to convince others of an idea, that you must actually develop those ideas, but it is also true that an idea unexpressed, convincing noone, is truly of no use, another unheard and unseen log in the forest. In truth, Rhetoric teaches the structure, organization and expression of ideas.

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the art of argument.

“There is no shortage of critics who have observed and recorded the dissolution of public discourse in America and its conversion into the arts of show business. But most of them, I believe, have barely begun to tell the story of the origin and meaning of this descent into a vast triviality”3 Neil Postman writing in 1985 had not yet even witnessed the impact of the internet, the inundation of consciousness with unfiltered information, the triumph of the cat video as a cultural meme, and the modern day fulfillment of Aldous Huxley’s distopian vision, expressed in his 1935 book Brave New World, of a society reduced by too much information to passivity and egotism.

Writing a convincing paper or a compelling argument certainly remains an important part of a modern curriculum, but this eliminates all of the tension and emotion and power of the enterprise. Standing up in person, in front of an audience, to present an argument with passion and logic and a unique voice is the powerful, visceral, risky experience every student should be required to perform at least once in their career.

Rhetoric teaches the structure, organization and expression of ideas The Speaker’s Corner is a place to make speeches. Unlike an auditorium or lecture hall, The Corner is informal and democratic. In a school setting, it will almost certainly be scheduled or booked, though it will also serve as a platform for short announcements. The Speaker’s Corner may engage students as they eat lunch, perhaps only the senior class, one student per lunch period, presenting an argument there. What will it do for building a culture of respect to have every student know that they too will be up there one day? What will it do for sharpening student thinking to know that those thoughts must one day be articulated publicly? How better to encourage students to find their own voice, then by giving them a platform?

The Speaker’s Corner is a place for debates. Not just extra-curricular after school debates for students opting in out of interest, but debates required of everyone independent of skill or interest. To bring ideas out into view, to test them publicly, and to involve an audience, is to break the ever-strengthening relationship between computer screen presentation and the eye, the ever deepening schism between ideas and community, and the growing threat to Democracy of Huxley’s passivity and egotism. It is that important.

Sam Leith, You Talkin’ to Me?, Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Profile, London, 2011), introduction Richard Ned Lebow, The Ancient Greeks and Modern Realism: Ethics, Persuasion, and Power, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nedlebow/anc_gree_mod_real.pdf 3 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business 1 2

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i. sandbox 106

HoltzendorďŹ&#x20AC; Teaching With Technology Experimental Classroom, Clemson University

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Look closely at children playing in They engage in their own projects with the ample resources available, but they also fluidly engage each other in teamwork and easily disengage when their interests diverge.

This fluidity is what the corporate world attempts to capture with “scrums” and “team meetings” and “brainstorming sessions”, and it is a vital component of very big projects requiring both the individual contribution and the collective effort of many people in a team. The sandbox is a model for an entire ecosystem of collaboration methodologies.

It will likely be something other than a room filled with sand.

The resource is likely to be information, and the venue may include tools and materials to build things. This is what the students are surrounded by. The venue will facilitate both individual and collective effort, allowing students to fluidly engage and disengage with each other as they share activities and ideas.

Most important, the students will require a collective goal.

Ideally the goal is ambitious and even a bit open-ended, giving the students agency over the process and the result. Perhaps the students are posed a problem: a real problem without a predefined solution or recipe. Most crucial, however, is the process and not necessarily the product. The process must be discovered and finally understood for its power and possibility.

In a study of 38 companies designed to understand how they support collaboration, Knoll International identified 32 distinct types of collaborative spaces, including gyms, kitchenettes, scrum rooms, brainstorming roooms, and traditional conference rooms.

Across the most highly regarded and demanded spaces, the characteristics most critical to their success were: proximity, privacy, size, casual feel and most important of all, technology. The actual collaborative work performed in these spaces fell largely into four categories: brainstorming, ad-hoc interaction, project team work and mentoring/ learning space. The study also pointed out that over differentiation among collaborative venues resulted in confusion and under-utilization.

“Today, organizations lack a larger framework that connects group spaces as a meaningful whole, aligned with a broader purpose. Lack of clarity on how and when to use group spaces causes confusion with employees’ understanding and acceptance of new planning models.”1

A sandbox distinguishes itself by straddling all manners of collaboration. It doesn’t specialize in what Knoll calls “equal exchange” focused on process efficiency, or

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a sandbox. “diverse social exchange” focused on brainstorming, but serves both convergent thinking and divergent thinking, a distinction discussed in the chapter on meditation. Why is this so important? Learning and problem solving do not fit into neat thought patterns: they depend on various wholistic, creative and diverse approaches. We don’t expect teams to change venues simply because they changed their mode of thought or of communication.

What does a collaborative space require? Knoll diagrams it like this:

What distinguishes a Sandbox?

Flexibility: to work alone or together on some projects, in a variety of different ways.

Tools: the ability to manipulate your medium fluidly and easily, digitally or physically.

Purpose: access to your medium and a reason to play with it, some kind of project or problem definition to bind everyone there in loosely coordinated action.

Creating Collaborative Spaces that Work, Knoll Workplace Research https://www.knoll.com/media/315/283/CollaborativeWorkplace_wp.pdf 1

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j. media booth

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Let’s pull Media out of the closet.

It’s long past time for Media to emerge from the dark and hidden recesses of school: it deserves center stage. No longer a closet full of electronics serving the needs of lecturing teachers, creating, recording, and propagating have become everyone’s concern. The laptop and the internet have democratized media, a movement bolstered now by net-neutrality. Media isn’t just a service anymore: more than ever, it’s a powerful cultural driver.

In the same way that StoryCorp1 has infiltrated public venues with invitations to share your private story, so should schools be extending an invitation to its students: to share, to communicate, to participate. In the same way that the Civil Conversations project2 aims to ask important questions and document divergent perspectives, so should schools be asking their students important questions and sharing their unique perspectives.

Imagine a media booth in the lunchroom, a dj playing music in advance of the speech from the speaker’s corner. The speech is recorded from the booth, for review later by the speaker. Later, a Skype connection to a similar booth in a school in Paris will allow American students studying French to speak directly with kids across the Atlantic. Students also use the equipment to make films, edit music, or record stories, the quality unmatched by their laptop or video camera, for broadcast through social media, peer to peer, or simply for class. Position papers routinely become multi-media presentations.

All these things happen in ad hoc ways already, as play, as pastime, as gig, or hobby.

School kicks it up a few notches, taking its advantage as a large group of diverse people to create teams that can tackle bigger projects then individuals, and audiences that can offer more perspectives then otherwise might be available. School also offer an opportunity for students to critically examine their output, and to consider putting their efforts in service to bigger questions and bigger ideas. Furthermore, schools can attend to the quality of the production as well as the rigor of the thinking.

Connection, Communication, Collaboration,

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Media is more important then a simple tool however, and this is why it needs a more prominent place in school. Media is a battlefield of Ideas and Power.

We study Media “principally because of the nature and scope of the “mass media” itself, its influence as a powerful force for maintaining social cohesion, for constructing or reproducing social consciousness, as a mediator of values and beliefs, and as the major sources of information and means of information control within modern societies.”3

Media is a way into Ideology, into Capitalism, into Marxism, into Culture and into Society. Media is a way to ask why we believe in what we believe. It will require students to actually define what they believe in. It will empower them to ask why they believe those things. It will invite them to consider the forces that may be at work in defining or influencing their ideologies, forces that may include school itself. Is media simply an ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, as Louis Althusser would assert, or has the democratization of media and the removal of filters opened avenues for idealism and the disenfranchised?

When there is no hierarchy, when all voices are equal, does anyone even get heard?

Or is that exactly the environment in which the best ideas rise to the top on their merits? Do we now perhaps live in an age where financial power does not buy ideological influence, the billion dollar media buys of the modern political system notwithstanding, or do we remain sheep to the dogs of other people’s interests?

These questions aren’t new to school. The media landscape, however, has changed dramatically. A good idea, well articulated, elegantly presented, and disseminated with care can find a place in the culture. Media can empower students to find and raise their own voice. It isn’t enough to know that your thoughts may not be your own. Media in the service of ideas equals power. By giving students the tools to define, articulate, present and then to propagate their own views, we shift them from consumer and victim to critic and creator. The Media Booth in a critical, creative and supportive school environment, even more than a laptop plugged into the internet, is an instrument of empowerment.

Creativity, Critique: what Media Booths foster. http://storycorps.org/ http://www.civilconversationsproject.org/ 3 http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/rdover/MED-STUD/the_medi.htm 1 2

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k. kiosk

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an argument for free range, cage-free learning.

Too much of school happens behind closed doors. Younger students get no clue at all about what they might be working towards, older students get no opportunity to teach what they know, and adults are rarely experienced outside of strictly determined roles.

The Kiosk invites everyone into a problem, an idea or an issue, encouraging “grafitti”, and commentary and casual debate.

Kiosks should be at the heart of every department, or better yet, at the boundary between departments, in schools organized that way. They should be in Media Centers and Libraries and Cafeterias and corridors. Kiosks should be anywhere students congregate, offering posters, posing questions, inviting participation, bridging departmental boundaries.

Classes too, can sometimes occupy kiosks: they are perfect for brainstorming and collaborating. The key to kiosks is removing the shrouds around learning, airing it publicly, celebrating the accomplishments of older students and tantalizing the younger ones.

It takes the stress out of learning as well, linking it to lounging and relaxing.

Kiosks are for thinking freely.

This sounds a bit like “Classrooms without walls”, but there is an important distinction.

Kiosks attempt to engage students and squeeze meaning out of the time and place between formal learning efforts, or offer a singular more open format in an environment of more enclosed venues. “Open Classrooms” grew out of an “Informal Education” movement in England, which in its original conception still used enclosed rooms but broke them up into Centers of Interest. Thus students rotated through centers, they had agency, and the teaching was more student centered than teacher focused. In the United States, this educational approach was instead fed by anti-establishment politics and fanned by economic constraints to yield schools without walls. This artifact, open classes, proved acoustically disastrous.1 To repeat, Kiosks are not a substitute for enclosed learning venues but an option in a setting of many different types of spaces.

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In the sense that they drag teaching and learning out into the open, Kiosks might suggest bulletin boards. Bulletin boards certainly make learning visible, but static displays lose visibility with familiarity. Kiosks in contrast are intended to be dynamic, interactive and engaging. Instead of careful planning to create a display that may last weeks or months, the Kiosk invites ad hoc interactions that may appear and disappear within hours. The lessons it offers are perhaps more appetizer than meal, but bite-sized snacks are easily consumed and no less nutritious.

The key to kiosks is removing the shrouds around learning...

The Kiosk may learn something from Ray Oldenburg, his notion of “The Great Good Place” and his thesis that informal public life is a keystone to a healthy culture. Oldenburg suggests that those third places, those distinct locales that host public interactions outside the formality of work and the privacy of home, they serve a vital function by enabling informal public interaction. The Great Good Place makes meaningful those otherwise unfocused times and spaces that exist between programmed activities.

This is exactly the role of the Kiosk. The Kiosk seeks to make meaningful the time between classes and the space between classrooms. Oldenburg used Bistros and Cafes and Taverns to make his case, but the characteristics he focuses on are these: 1. the place is welcoming to all 2. people go there for no other purpose than “for the ‘joy, vivacity, and relief’ of engaging their personalities beyond the contexts of purpose, duty, or role”2 In other words, to hang out.

3. conversation is the point 4. there’s some assurance that you’ll meet your friends there 5. the atmosphere is comfortable and playful: a home away from home The Kiosk is a catalyst for interaction, for conversation.

1. Cuban, Larry, “The Open Classroom”, Education Next, SPRING 2004 / VOL. 4, NO. 2 2. Oldenburg, Ray, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Marlowe, 1999, p25

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l. library cafe

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Stop being precious about books!

They are probably headed for extinction anyway, but there’s no reason to panic.

What if we started thinking of books as seeds that need dispersment to be effective? If a student connects with a book: shouldn’t we nurture that tenuous relationship? Let’s give that book away, or at least encourage notes and graffiti and analysis and critique.

Books should be a conversation, just as the author’s website wants to be but probably isn’t. Should the book be electronic, then it becomes even easier to share.

Let’s also learn from Starbucks, and recognize that a quiet, collegial place with some good drinks and food makes a great place to read, research, study and converse.

Instead of a fortified library protecting the books with metal detectors, an isolated citadel to silence putting students to sleep, let’s offer food, beverages, conversation.

Alternatively, instead of a sanitary but vacuous cafeteria just serving lunch, let’s fill that venue with study resources, keep it open all day and call it a Library Cafe.

In fact, let’s move the entire library into the cafeteria and recognize that multi-modal learning requires multi-modal spaces. Then, let’s add a Speaker’s Corner, and a Media Booth, and maybe some projection screens and a kiosk. Then, taking it a step further, open it to the student lounge and the teacher’s lounge.

Now: think of the books. Let’s keep them, because even in this electronic age, knowledge must be made physical in order to grapple with it. What if, instead of filling blank notebooks with our thoughts, we added blank pages to real books and filled them instead? What if those books were not filed spine out so as to be practically invisible, but boldly face out and speaking to us: luring us with their cover art? Let’s dispense with “efficiency” and instead emphasize the possibilty of creating connections between browsers and authors.

Let’s engage all of our student’s senses. Let’s offer them more agency over their time and way of working, so different intelligences feel nourished and honored. Let’s take this a step further: Not only do we isolate libraries from the schools they inhabit, but we isolate this valuable resource from the community that bought and paid for it. Let’s reconnect the library and the community with the Library Cafe. I can already imagine the tidal wave of parental concern for safety and security, the great flush of anticipation from the legal and insurance industries, and the demand for liability waivers from school administrators fearful of being sued. There is another way to think about this however, and it isn’t revolutionary.

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Already, school design explicitely weighs the need for overt security measures against the desire for an environment of trust and respect for students. Often, school districts opt to minimize overt security measures in favor of passive surveillance and broader zones of protection. Cameras, after all, provide very little in terms of immediate safety and more in terms of future accountability. Metal detectors keep out the hardware, but obliterate trust and build walls between school and community.

Imagine, instead, a school firmly entrenched in an urbanized portion of the community, where hundreds of local eyes provide the safety without any of the separation. There is more safety in community than there is in isolation.

Instead of a fortified library protecting the books with metal detectors, an isolated citadel to silence putting students to sleep, let’s offer food, beverages, conversation.

Nonetheless, whether offering connection to a broader community or only to the school itself, the Library Cafe, in it’s free-flowing, people-connecting, cerebellum and stomach integrating, semi-social, semi-private way, provides energizing opportunities for some nourishment of all kinds. The concept gains strength by blending traditionally siloed venues: cafeteria and library. This is not just a coffee shop/juice bar dropped into a high school: there are lots of models for this and some of them are quite successful.

We are suggesting that in searching for meaningful, visceral learning experiences, it is in combining work and food that we find the most meaning and utility. A cafeteria alone is a barren experience and an opportunity wasted.

Finally, let’s go one step further in recognizing that students require a full spectrum of spaces, from very private to very public. Let’s take that library cafeteria and modulate the edges and break it into pieces, so that individuals and small groups and even entire classes find a comfortable home sized to their needs. Now our Cafeteria Library feels less like a singularity and more like a community of spaces. Now we are thinking in terms of people, their needs and their activities rather than just number of seatings and square feet per person. These last parameters are important, but they too are insufficient. Let fractals suggest a strategy: similar structures at different scales defining the boundaries.

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m. media array

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kis·met

[kizmit -met] 1. Destiny; fate Receiving a visceral blast of international slices of life, or a broad array of data about a single topic, or multiple perspectives on a particular issue, like a magazine appealing to diverse interests, a curated museum of digital information, the Media Array is a place to dally and windowshop, a place to discover something unexpected, a place for news but also for opinion, a virtual smorgasboard, kismet.

In some respects, the Media Array shares the qualities of a library bookshelf, albeit with all the covers facing out. It assembles a wide variety of topics in one place, it facilitates browsing and discovery, and it is curated to present legitimate, interesting, informative nutritious materials. In truth, a wall of books with all the covers visible is a Media Array.

Unlike a library, the Media Array presents fewer materials, offers ephemera in lieu of archives, stays absolutely current, appeals forcefully to the visual and auditory senses, and precludes “study”. There is no annotating a video feed. There is no sense cataloguing a Media Array. The purpose is not to support study: it is to blow open the insular mindset of the average person and offer a sampling of the “other”. The purpose is engagement, an opportunity to formulate tentative questions or piquing curiosity.

It is, in other words, a good medium for visceral involvements with episodic experience, but not a way to support research or critique. It is an excellent medium for creating interest or for capturing attention, but it defers to other means for in-depth understanding. A better analogy might be a magazine rack, albeit more alluring and engaging, and carefully curated to present more substantial stuff.

Why pander to short attention spans, superficial experiences, and all of the well documented shortcomings of entertainment culture? Why not let our students cruise the magazine racks of the internet on their own time rather than “waste” the limited available at school? There are a number of reasons.

The first reason is content. We’ve achieved the distopia of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, so inundated with data and imagery that we are often helpless to understand it, or glean wisdom of it. As a culture, we suffer from complacency. Never has the need to curate, to focus attention on the essential or important, been more important than now.

Directing our students to powerful and useful content is an indispensable function of school. Showing students ways to follow up serves the mission even better.

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The second reason addresses a problem now widely accepted but not often elegantly addressed. Americans know very little of other cultures or places. In fact, our culture appears to sink ever deeper into a morass of us against them, a fear of the “other”. “...students still receive instruction geared more to the industrial society of the 20th century than the information age of the 21st. They are being fitted with the blinders of educational isolationism, which will hinder their success in today’s interconnected world”.1

A story to illustrate the difficulties: I devoted 3 months once to crossing the Sahara, and a year in advance to research the areas I would be travelling through. I terrified my family, and will admit to some concern myself, with the newspaper articles I found about Algeria and Niger in particular, articles that offered only despair, hunger, revolt, terrorism, kidnapping, murder, and anger. It was with relief and complete surprise that I encountered only kindness, curiosity, and stories of the exact same concerns everyone faces: family, work, security, the future. Despite all my research, I knew nothing of these countries and people.

The Media Array is one way to build a bridge. Let us introduce video of every day modern life, of issues of actual concern to everyday human beings in other countries.

Let us investigate not just the superlative, but also the quotidian of other cultures. Let us celebrate not just cultural differences, but also human universalities.

The third reason is depth. A great array won’t restrict itself to foreign culture. It will cast a gaze at every conceivable topic of possible interest, and maintain diversity as its guiding principal. The Array can be convergently programmed as well however: presenting a problem focus and programmed to look at a single topic from a myriad of perspectives. Thus climate change, for example, can be plumbed for scientific as well as social and cultural ramifications, and presented in a vast if not fully comprehensive manner. A very wide array of students can be “hooked” with this multiplicity of perspectives. The Array is flexible, variable, diverse and engaging: the point is to feed Curiosity.

Any public place could host the Media Array: any corridor, a waiting room, a lobby, a lunchroom, a study hall. It requires students to stop for a few minutes, to allow themselves a few moments to engage, and it requires the freedom to be engaged. An environment more devoted to student agency and somewhat less defined by schedules and bells will be well served by a Media Array.

Asia in the Schools, Preparing Young Americans for Today’s Interconnected World, (Asia Society, http://asiasociety.org/files/asiaintheschools.pdf) p.15

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n. nest

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solace Why dwell on the emotional experiences of students, in the end to imagine nests? Is it because school has always held more than a frisson of danger? Knuckle-rapping nuns, fears of embarrassment or social ostracism, to gangs, test anxiety, over-loaded backpacks, predatory drug dealers, bullying and now suicide-provoking cyber-bullying, the latest school shooting: there clings to school a narrative of peril.

While the source may vary by neighborhood or income-bracket, the end result is very similar: students grapple with an inordinate amount of chronic stress. “School cultures reflect the greatest competitive environment of global capitalism,” this according to Dr. Bo Paulle at the University of Amsterdam.1 A study done at the University of South Florida opens with this salvo of horrifying statistics: “Stress is a clear risk factor for mental health disorders, which have been estimated to affect approximately one in five children ages 9 to 17 years (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). Adolescence is a developmental period when children may be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of stress. Data from the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey indicate that 8.5% of teens had attempted suicide, 29% had felt sad or hopeless, 45% had used alcohol in the last month, and 22% had used marijuana (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2004). These symptoms of mental disorders have been linked to the negative effects of stress (Chassin, Ritter,Trim, & King, 2003; Compas, Orosan, & Grant, 1993; Little & Garber, 2004; Schmeelk-Cone & Zimmerman, 2003).

If these problems are not addressed, adolescents are at risk for compromised physical and mental health as adults (Loeber & Farrington, 2000)”. 2

It seems unremarkable, in light of these characterizations, to then imagine how the school and the school environment might offer support to its students. By ennabling and ennobling solitary or small group activity, nests offers a counter-narrative to, or at least, a valuable respite from chronic and debilitating stress. It offers support for the possibility that students might be nurtured at school, that school might offer some psychological safety, and that students as individuals might be fully seen and heard and cared for and about in a school setting.

“The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. We cannot break away from it without hoping to return. For the beloved curve has nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved “corner,” inhabited geometry. Here we have attained a minimum of refuge, corners in the highly simplified pattern of a daydream of repose. But only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, understands these simple joys of delineated repose”.3

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Here that great poet of space, Gaston Bachelard, grapples with the power of corners and nests to offer refuge, psychological repose. If these monumental tools of teaching, these fantastically expensive levers of learning, our schools, would be anything more than blunt hammers of culture, then we might learn something from this perspective.

As a teaching space, the nest offers the benefit of an attentive teacher affording the intensity of individual attention. It offers direct communication and trust building. Unlike the traditional classroom, a nest makes it impossible to feel unseen or to disappear. In a nest, interaction is direct, emotional and meaningful.

A mechanistic perspective on school might characterize nests simply as “breakout space”, because this is what a nest accomplishes programmatically. Thus descriptions or prescriptions for school design might focus on the number of students accomodated, the tools to be installed, the amount of privacy to be afforded and the type of work to be facilitated. In his article about designing collaborative spaces for schools, for example, Peter Lippman offers evocative names but prosaic descriptions for breakout “Niches” and Hollows” and “Rooms” and “Nodes”. 4 It reads as if we are serving emotionless vessels requiring a proper “topping off”.

Instead, I want to suggest with nests that emotion is central to the issue of education and that our very expensive facilities have a powerful role to play. If we look more carefully at the qualities of a real nest, we might recognize some of the teachings of Defensible Space,5 the classic text from Oscar Newman focusing on safety and space.

In it, Newman argues for specific strategies to enhance a sense of security, including boundaries and portals that allow occupants to feel a sense of territoriality, as well as the ability to surveil the immediate area.

We might also learn from nests in nature: that they offer a hiding place, and that they are near food. What is food to a student but resources: books and internet and that sympathetic teacher and a friendly ear and yes, juice or coffee or even a snack.

I do not believe there is a design prescription for a nest, no panacea for creating a space that feels safe or comforting. I only know that we recognize them when we see them, and that they enclose and insulate and protect and offer solace. I believe our children deserve those spaces in school, and I believe education will be better for it.

1. Ossola, Alexandra, “High-Stress High School, What’s the balance between preparing students for college and ensuring they aren’t killing themselves in the process”? The Atlantic Monthly, Oct 9, 2015 2. Suldo, Shannon et al, “Relationships among stress, coping, and Mental Health in High-Achieving High School Students”, Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 45(4), 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 3. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, First published in French under the title La poetique de l’espace, © 1958, Presses Universitaires de France, Translation © 1964, The Orion Press, Inc. p146 4. Lippman, Peter C., “Thoughtfully designed learning environments can help students work together more effectively”. T|H|E Journal, Learning Environments, January 2013 Digital Edition, 5. Newman, Oscar, Defensible Space, New York: MacMillan. 1970

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o. cave

â&#x20AC;&#x153;...rock caves may be symbols of the womb of Mother Earth, appearing as mysterious caverns in which transformation and rebirth can come aboutâ&#x20AC;?.

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Chapter 5

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“A cat who doesn’t have choices is the cat who feels stressed and backed in a corner.

The cat who has the choice whether to be seen or remain hidden, whether to sit on his cat perch or on the arm of the sofa, or whether to engage or just observe, is the cat who will feel less anxious.

Offering a hiding place or two is just one aspect of creating a secure, comfortable and safe environment for a cat, but for a fearful cat, it can make a huge difference”. 1

Students, occasionally, need to (hide)

Introverts especially need a place to re-group, de-stress, compose and re-compose.

In her article “The Rise of the New Groupthink”, Susan Cain argues that we ignore the preferences and value of introverts in our rush toward working collaboratively:

on

creativity:

“Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption...

And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted,according to studies by psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist... They’re not joiners by nature”.3

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on

solitude:

“...introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation.

As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, & preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work”.3

A study of the brain’s default mode, when we are not reacting to external stimuli, suggests that:

on

learning:

“Solitude can even help us learn.

According to research on expert performance by psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. ...Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time”.3

on

wellbeing:

“inadequate opportunity for children to play and for adolescents to quietly reflect and to daydream may have negative consequences— both for social emotional well-being and for their ability to attend well to tasks”.6

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The Cave is not uncommon as a symbol or metaphor. Plato offered the allegory of an “underground den” in Book VII of his Republic4, that cave representing ignorance. To Jung, the Cave represented the Animus or the mysterious unconscious mind5. Plato may warn us of the dangers of isolation, and Jung inspire us to plumb the darkness, but let us not be dissuaded by the basic utility of sometimes simply hiding.

In our essay on Meditation, we note the positive effects experienced by introducing some form of meditative practice into the schools: another “way of thinking” with the potential to offer students practical skills for the future. In imagining Caves, we are simply expanding on this possibility: that quiet contemplation might find a home in quiet places.

As we trumpet the values of 21st Century teaching: Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Community and Critical Thinking, let us not be lulled into Complacency and imagine that these are the only ways of thinking we can teach or forget that some of those goals are as likely attained alone or in small groups as they are in large group endeavors. Especially as we strive for increased individualization in educational plans, as we become more and more student centered and less teacher focused, let’s admit that the variety in ways of thinking we need to introduce our students to and make them adept at, may require a tremendous range of experiences. And perhaps a Cave.

1

It’s different.

It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the space and offers a needed break.

2

It’s immovable.

The furniture in the room is fixed to the floor and walls. There’s nothing to arrange but your own posture.

3

It’s beyond low-tech— it’s no tech.

Outlets, switches, and data jacks are hidden from view.

4

It’s tiny: 8’ x 8’.

Small scale encourages feelings of coziness & security.

1. Pam Johnson-Bennett, http://www.catbehaviorassociates.com/why-every-cat-needs-hiding-places/ 2. Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, Making Space, How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration, (John Wiley & Sons, 2012), p132,133 3. Cain, Susan, The Rise of the New Groupthink”, The New York Times Sunday Review, Jan 13, 2012 4. Plato, The Republic, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm

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Caves as we imagine them have these 8 qualities of

“hiding places” described by Witthoft and Doorley in Make Space: 2

5

it’s dark, yet warm. It’s devoid of the bright colors that streak walls in other spaces.

6

It’s laid back.

A large bench encourages even requires - reclining and relaxing.

7

It’s hidden. It’s tucked away in a corner on the ground floor.

The only reason to go there is to go there; it’s not on the way to anywhere else.

8

It requires a ritual to enter.

A sign on the door handle asks visitors to remove their shoes.

5. Jung, Carl, Man and His Symbols, Chapter 5, file:///C:/Users/Roel’s%20MacBook/Dropbox/[Carl_Gustav_ Jung,_Carl_Gustav_Jung]_Man_and_His_S(BookZZ.org)/OEBPS/Jung_9780307800558_epub_c05_r1.htm 6. Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education Mary Helen Immordino-Yang1, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and Vanessa Singh Association for Psychological Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(4) 352 –364

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136

p. park bench

6 minutes to switch classrooms

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The University of Texas at San Antonio Health Science Center website1 counsels students focused on improving retention to, among other strategies, “talk with a friend”, and “take a break”.

We asked: “is there any science behind this?

Is there a specific rhythm of work and rest that could replace the stressful 6 minute frenzy of classroom changes and haphazard study periods and lunch breaks, and give us more fully engaged students?

1. (45/15) Do breaks improve learning? Anecdotal accounts from primary schools in Finland confirm the efficacy of a school schedule of 45 minute classes separated by 15 minute breaks for free play. Younger children required to work any longer than 45 minutes ceased to work productively, and attention was restored after the break2. Anthony Pellegrini in his book Recess: Its Role in Education and Development3 notes a similar experience in East Asia where 40 minute classes alternate with 10 minute breaks.

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What if we were to formalize the

pause ?

Would learning actually improve?

2. (90/20) Humans have 24 hour Circadian rhythm that corresponds to sleep/wake cycles, but also it turns out, Ultradian rhythms in which energy ebbs and ďŹ&#x201A;ows throughout the morning in 90-100 minute cycles instigated by awakening, with periodicity stretching to 4-5 hours in the afternoon and evening. Researchers at the Department of Behavioral Biology of the Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, found that motor performance appears most closely aďŹ&#x20AC;ected, though perception less so4. As a result of this research, performance coaches have popularized a cyclic approach to scheduling tasks using a 90 minute on task/20 minute rest rule:

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3. (20/10/20/10/20) Researchers have discovered that massive amounts of material can be encoded to long term memory (LTM) in very short time periods: minutes.

“Currently most standard teaching of courses can be characterized as massed instruction of 45 min or more (lessons) within courses studied over long time scales (months to years). In contrast, there has been compelling evidence demonstrating humans and other species create LTM in very short time scales, and LTP/LTM encoding has consistently shown repetitions spaced with short intervals of minutes duration are effective and even required in some species for LTP/LTM”.5

“Spaced Learning” is a teaching methodology developed at Monkseaton High School in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, England to take advantage of these findings. Concise data is presented very quickly in a short burst of 20 minutes or so, followed by 10 minutes of distractor activity which deliberately avoids stimulating the neural pathways under construction for the lesson. The same material is then presented again in a new manner that allows students to recall it, followed by another programmed 10 minute break and a final presentation in a third way to insure understanding.

Studies prove this method in just a few sessions develops LTM competitive with typical semester long courses, a few hours of intense work replacing months of effort. Spaced Learning can also be a powerful companion to Enquiry or Project Based Learning: “By running Spaced Learning sessions in conjunction with extended, student-led enquiries, teachers can ensure that students gain relevant content knowledge without losing breadth of learning”.6

On-line courses like Knowledge Guru™ are structured in a similar manner: concise content delivered in short, intense bursts, with rest periods in between. With each of these programs, it is the 10 minute programmed pauses and what the student does and does not do in them that are of the essence.

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4. (Variable) An algorithm for precisely conducting optimal learning emerged from the research suggesting that “the optimum inter-repetition intervals used in learning are the longest intervals that do not result in forgetting”.7 In a system called SuperMemo, a lesson is scheduled to repeat when 5% of the lesson has been forgotten. Testing and self-evaluation at each repetition adjusts the interval to the subsequent lesson. The Optimum Interval to the next lesson is calculated in days, contrasting sharply with the Spaced Learning method. This method precisely calibrates lesson repetitions to insure 95% retention, a method that lends itself well to on-line education. SuperMemo 2004 is available as freeware at: http://www.freewarefiles.com/SuperMemo_program_13849.html.

What do we learn from this investigation into “Pause”? School is not all about focus and stress and getting stuff done, and we recognize with newfound respect that the “tissue in-between tasks” plays a vital role in enabling or facilitating learning. None of the pauses described here bear any relation at all to the traditional recess of American schools, 30 minutes of free time bracketed by hours of effort, nor do they look at all like the free periods that litter high school schedules. These pauses all recommend a very different approach to the school day, with breaks in the 10-20 minute range between 45 or 90 minute blocks depending on student age (Ultradian rhythms), or between 15-20 minute class components (Spaced Learning). 30 minute recess or 6 minute classroom changes do not comfortably fit into these parameters.

The parkbench is one way to give form to this unprogrammed time. If “Taking a Break” and “Talking with a Friend” are in fact important keys to maximizing retention, then the vision of a bench lined commons, whether indoors or out, with students playing music and engaging in conversation offers a compelling alternative to the sterile, locker-lined norm of American public schools. In any case, punctuating the school day with short, intense active learning and periods of real relaxation would be a great step forward.

1. http://som.uthscsa.edu/StudentAffairs/10Things.asp 2. Tim Walker, “How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play” The Atlantic, Jun 30, 2014 3. Anthony D.Pellegrini, The Role of Play in Human Development New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009 4. Peretz Lavie, Jacob Zomer, and Daniel Gopher “Ultradian Rhythms in Prolonged Human Performance” Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, February 1995 5. Paul Kelley and Terry Whatson, “Making long-term memories in minutes: a spaced learning pattern from memory research in education”, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2013; 7: 589.

Published online 2013 Sep 25. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00589, PMCID: PMC3782739 6. http://www.innovationunit.org/sites/default/files/Spaced_Learning-downloadable_1.pdf 7. “Optimization of repetition spacing in the practice of learning” Dr Piotr A. Wozniak, SuperMemo R&D, SuperMemo World, ul. R. Maya 1, 61-371 Poznan, Poland, Dr Edward J. Gorzelanczyk, Department of Histology and Embryology, Medical Academy of Poznan, 6 Święcicki St., 60-781 Poznan, Poland

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q. attic

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“The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day”.1

How does school feed curiosity? How does it connect students with problems? How does it connect them with the history of these problems? How does school invite its students to dig deeply into an issue, appreciate the many facets of it, and engage personally with its specific mysteries? Schools might take a lesson from the Attic.

The Attic engages mystery, and memory.

In this modern era we are likely to dispense with attics. Life feels lighter, easier without them. We have yard sales to sell our junk and recycling centers to strip the remains, and we have the internet to save our thoughts and photographs. Our houses are light and airy, shadow free and cheerful, unencumbered by memory. And yet...

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” 2

Do not imagine that a metaphoric Attic needs to look like an attic, but appreciate that domestic attic for the tremendous pregnancy of its qualities. It weighs on you, the attic, those gnawing mysteries and forgotten histories exercising their subtle, silent power.

When they speak to you of the weight of history, that attic is what they mean. You lower the folding ladder to poke your head above the ceiling, and the smell of wood and paper and dust makes your nostrils retract. The dust here, it is solid and liquid and gas at once, motes of it seething in the scant beams of sunlight. It covers everything lightly, that dust, all these burdensome things, each one of them stained with stories but all of them mute as talismen. These boxes, cases and chests, each one is a mystery, each one of them a story or an invitation to a story or a long list of questions.

You approach without specific questions, but with a sense of curiosity. There might be something interesting in here; and so you pull down the first case, perch it perhaps on that chair you pull into the solid/liquid/gas of light. The snaps give way, the lid hinges upward, you catch a glimpse of a journal, the yellowed shine of an old photograph, and then the questions begin to form, and the stories your uncle tells you about people and times you will never know, they become your stories. They achieve a poignancy no book could ever bestow upon them. That space, that darkness, that mystery, that sense of discovery as you open the trunk, that totem, that story finally your story.

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It is not a museum, this attic: nothing is collated or curated or labelled or explained.

The student is less visitor, more archeologist. Could it be a library? I think back on the stacks high in Sibley Hall at Cornell University’s School of Architecture school, which often yielded productive results to casual browsing: fascinating books I could not believe I’d found among the vast array of dross...A library like that, were it not only filled with books might be a start. Were there curious instruments and strange artifacts, were there mysterious sketchbooks, were there notes left in those volumes, were there hand-drawn maps with spidery veins tracing ancient voyages, hand-written diaries full of vile screeds and profanity and innuendo, then all this strange material, all these abstract stories, might become more personal. Rather than answers, let this place offer problems and mysteries however! Let whoever enters be infected with questions and not simply and mundanely innoculated with facts. Leave here annoyed, or flustered or bewildered, but do not leave satiated or gratified. Leave this place Curious.

We might be dispensing with libraries soon enough anyway, since books are no longer preferred as a method of communication, but the notion that a department might build for itself a treasury does not seem so far-fetched. Could this be our attic: department center, storage room, library, treasure trove, archeological dig, workroom or study room, part incubator, part desert isle. Here we offer students buried treasure.

How wonderful if, dispensing with elaborate security, we recognized that books are reproducible and simply handed them out upon discovery! Surely in this era of 3D printing and manufacturing on-demand we could reprint a book that wanders off or finds a new home. Isn’t the job of educators to connect our students with content that inspires them?

How wonderful if, dispensing with abstraction, our attic becomes a venue for authentic story-telling. May it host some comfortable chairs so that like my uncle who shared just before his death his stories of escaping massacres and artillery to ride a Russian tank to safety with the Red Cross at the end of World War 2, our teachers might share their stories of not just their work but of their life. It is not only content we truly seek, but context and connection and comparison. We seek interaction. Let this attic offer insight into lives lived with abandon, adventures that overcame adversity, and dreams that remain unfulfilled but niggle not yet beyond the realm of possibilities.

1. Einstein, Albert, ”Old Man’s Advice to Youth: ‘Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.’”

LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64 2. Einstein, Albert, The World As I See It

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r. bar restaurant

The Apple Store

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Restaurant Eguzki, Barcelona, Spain

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Imagine a space

that invites students to work at their own pace, in groups or individually, on parts of a curriculum that they choose from a menu. that lets them get individual help from the bar as required.

Imagine teachers

circulating like waiters, pointing out nuances and particularly juicy bits, moving from table to table to make relevant po injecting some humor into the effort, and sharing their own stories or insights.

Rather than force marching students of different skill sets and learning preferences through a curriculum, it offers students the chance to go at their own pace, go deep when something interests them, or go long when it all seems too easy.

The Apple store is a lot like a bar restaurant: the Genius Bar offering individualized attention, while the tables let you explore at will, the staff circulating to help you and inspire you and share their knowledge.

I learned chemistry this way, from a curriculum written by my teachers and printed out in plastic binders, in an amphitheater on chairs with tablet arms. At the bottom of the room was a demonstration table, and here you could get individualized attention from the teachers. There were no windows, and yet I have fond memories of the experience.

I was not the fastest or most brilliant student, yet I learned some forever useful things and I felt some pride in my progress and the pace I set for myself. The teaching materials lacked photos and graphic design, but the concepts were presented succinctly and legibly. Despite all these limitations, the incredible feeling of freedom and autonomy left a very positive and enduring feeling. How much more engaging would the experience have been with daylight and coffee and a web connection for more inspiring visuals?

This same high school offered elective courses for English, offering teachers a chance to explore their own interests and to offer that with passion to the students. Choosing classes made a big difference to us, as did the obvious passion the teachers brought to their teaching efforts.

An accident of population growth opened one additional opportunity for agency. Expansion of the high school forced us into a split schedule, with half the school attending classes in the morning and the other half attending late. Though I doubt this was intended, the schedule allowed me to take an art class in the morning even though I took a full course load in the afternoon. I could follow a passion without sacrificing the honor roll track of conventional coursework. This slightly subversive act, taking advantage of an unguarded loophole, thoroughly enrolled me in the entire enterprise of school.

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oints,

imagine agency a space that offers students

Subversion is powerfully motivating!

The power of agency is well recognized, but the expression often centers on Individual Educational Plans, a planning device heavily encumbered by the need for preparation, validation, monitoring and evaluation. Instead of this grand planning gesture, I want to argue for dining a la carte or even free range learning. When offering a menu, as long as every meal meets certain criteria for sustenance, allowing students to choose on the fly would seem to offer greater freedom, allow students to fine-tune their choices to their immediate interests, and recognize that in many if not most instances, the role of education before college is as much to open new doorways as it is to develop some educational master plan. If education seeks to facilitate growth and change, then should we not eschew as much as possible mechanisms of control and stasis?

The hell with IEPs: let’s simply offer a rich and diverse menu of challenging coursework that meets the appropriate standards for educational achievement, and let each student choose the course and even the pathways within that course. Let’s teach that material in a way that gives students agency over their progress, and even their direction. Let’s create a community of learners that support each other and enjoy the trust and the wisdom of their teachers, teachers that work like tireless allies to overcome individual roadblocks.

Ultimately, doesn’t education feed off of passion?

A model that places passion and direction fully among the student’s responsibilities fails to take advantage of the charisma and experience of that fellow-but-further-along learner, the teacher. A model overly reliant on the teacher would make students passive receptors. In creating a community that unites teacher and student in sharing their passions, lies the possibility for more empowering, more engaging, more visceral and emotionally nourishing learning.

Surely, the forces of accountability wouldn’t object?

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s. shrine

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151

How do you communicate all of the am How do you inspire everyone around yo How do you invite the uninitiated to sa I’ve already shared my first grade encounter with the dense and bewitching fifth grade classroom a few doors down from my own in the Netherlands. Mystery and intrigue hooked me and held me and still haven’t let me go: I still remember that fascinating room all these decades later.

That experience informs this prototype: the Shrine. Imagine a school where what is shared is not just student projects on a rotating basis, but awesome subject matter on a permanent basis. The material may evolve or transform or even change wholesale on occasion, but a rich cornucopia of intriguing material is always in view. Inspiration is not private, or shared only in isolated classrooms or doled out parsimoniously in a library: it is lavishly highlighted and celebrated.

Walking the arid and lifeless halls of an average school, you would have no idea that the world is virtually brimming with wildly inspiring stuff. Where is it hiding? How did order so completely banish creative and engaging clutter, and neatness eliminate the random? Whose values and goals are these anyway? Can we imagine a slightly more equitable balance between these extremes?

That balance is what is so fascinating about Mexican shrines in particular. In these shrines we see an organizing theme or focus, often a deceased family member, and we see a discrete location, often a table or an apse. Everything else is more fluid and fascinating and meaningful and unrehearsed however. There may be candles and incense and lights and photos and random objects, sculptures and trinkets and even food. These shrines call out to all our senses, to our memory, to our hopes and our fears. They are beautiful, memorable and available for all to see: the private life of the departed exposed and celebrated, albeit curated and sometimes artfully arranged.

What is commonly displayed in schools is trophies, the remains essentially of a “kill” not all that different from a safari hunter’s stuffed and mounted lion’s head. While these trophies may give school spirit a collective boost, I’ve never found any inspiration in them. In general, I’m not motivated by other people’s successes, least of all someone from a generation ago. There’s nothing in these displays to think about: only appeals to nostalgia. I might have recommended melting them all down for the salvage money, but most of them are plastic anyway.

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mazing qualities of your concentration? ou with what you know and love? ample your field?

I’m actually not opposed to these monuments to some momentary glory, but I do find it curious to see these manicured displays in contrast to the lackluster material shown elsewhere. If teaching takes responsibility at all for lighting a fire or inspiring emotional involvement, then the evidence of our passions must improve. It may be that the Wiki recommends a way forward.The Wiki displaced the encyclopedia partly because crowd sourcing brought a tremendous amount of current information to the fore from experts in the topic. Some curating was and is required to keep the information accurate, but this too is partly relegated to the crowd.

The Science Poster is a kind of shrine, albeit a rarified one. It numerically, visually and in writing both explains and celebrates a scientific investigation, often striding beyond mere description to exuberently advertise the work.

When Perkins discusses “Preparing to Learn” as a way to improve learning outcomes, I imagine students digging into a topic and uncovering the issues that form the spine of the lesson they are about to wrestle with. That activity, the uncovering of issues, feels exactly like the makings of a shrine: a display of crowd-sourced questions and hypotheses that just might draw others into the lesson or debate or celebration. Far more interesting to pose tantalizing questions and ask for hypotheses from everyone, then to simply state the facts like a lecture. If this book does nothing else, let it diminish the ubiquity of lectures.

Using Shrines to pose tantalizing questions and hypotheses suggests the solution to another problem also posed by Perkins. Too often, we learn to find answers without ever learning to find the questions. Science, Art, Philosophy, Math, Language: they all offer questions. Let’s let students grapple with them instead of spooning them answers.

We might also learn a certain something from advertising. The pedagogical intent with Shrines is to tantalize and invite participation, not so different from every effort since the dawn of time to sell you something you never knew you wanted. Shrines are serious stuff: they take time and effort, and they have an important intent. This is simply to argue that the production values should match the seriousness of that intent. Those Mexican Shrines: they are never casually hurried together. They are a labor of dedication and celebration and respect. That seems exactly the right approach to the Shrine.

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t. tent

154

155

...just a chalkboard...

In Niger, school is often taught outside with nothing more than a chalkboard and a teacher. Interestingly, noone falls asleep. The sun, fresh air, the occasional distraction, the informal interactions with peers, all this adds up to an engaging experience that makes surprisingly great use of limited resources.

A tent attempts to capture the advantages of that outdoor classroom. Our new traditional classrooms actually aspire to being tents, as fresh air is now introduced in greater volumes, and as daylighting has become more and more a concern. But they are not tents. Tents are not so hermetically sealed and controlled. Tents actively engage their surroundings.

Literal tents are a terrific and fairly low-cost way to get minimal infrastructure out beyond the confines of a permanent building, with the flexibility to move it around. A bit of rain and wind protection, a whiteboard, seating: often this is all that a lesson requires.

All these elements are portable, inexpensive and fit into a minivan. They are one way for schools to break out of their confines and engage with the surrounding community.

Google “school tent”, however, and the result is schools for refugees dealing with war and and natural disasters, or outdoor adventure training. Bringing a curriculum out into the community or the natural world or even just the school grounds with portable tent classrooms hasn’t inspired a following. What has developed however, is mobile bus-based classrooms. A bus with whiteboards and electronics adds range, eliminates setup time and offers more destinations. It just costs more than a tent.

An issue for this kind of teaching, at least for high schools, is scheduling. Any kind of activity involving travel must justify the lost learning time, an issue busses address: drive time is class time. Schools prioritizing outdoor teaching off campus need block schedules of longer classes on alternate days instead of shorter classes everyday so students don’t sacrifice one class for another.

Another version of the tent is the more permanent outdoor classroom. Whatever the degree of exposure to the elements and permanence of structure, the point is to get students outside and interacting with their surroundings. An outdoor classroom or tent on the school grounds immediately invests the experience with a visceral quality missing from the more controlled environs of the typical classroom, and this is why we support it. For schools in snow besieged climes, the experience is limited some months of the year, but the investment is still worth it. Visceral experiences improve learning.1

1

“The Effects of Environment-Based Education on Students’ Achievement Motivation”, Athmen, Monroe, Journal of Interpretation Research, 2004, Vol 9, no. 1

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Outdoor Classroom Agadez, Niger

Atkinson Outdoor Learning Garden, Portland, Oregon

Cambodian Classroom

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u. round table

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cru·ci·ble [kroos b( )l] e

e

1 : a pot in which metals or other substances are heated to very high temperatures 2 : a difficult test or challenge 3 : a place or situation that forces people to change or make difficult decisions

Approaching a table is such a visceral experience. You come face to face with others, and look them in the eye to receive acknowledgment and acceptance into the circle, and you sit down, your relationship to everyone at the table mathematically proscribed: 30 degrees at a round table with 12 people, the width dependant on the radius. You trade solitude for your coordinates in the geometry. Compressed, condensed, personal space reduced, your sense of self is diminished and your sense of group enhanced.

In this way, a table becomes a crucible. Alchemy.

At a table, you cannot hide. The immediacy demands attention, highlights lack of preparation, and requires agile thinking. There is pressure to be present, to engage... and this makes it a powerful vehicle for visceral learning.

For many people, sitting at a table recalls the dinner table they grew up with. Those fortunate to inherit a benign familial structure might recall with sweet nostalgia the opportunity to be seen and heard in such an environment. To share your stories and receive the attention of your parents and siblings and offer that attention back: this is truly a powerful and life-affirming gift. They would understand the studies that identify a direct relationship between family dinners and adolescent mental health: “The frequency of family dinners negatively related to internalizing and externalizing symptoms and positively related to emotional well-being, prosocial behavior, and life satisfaction.”1

Those of us thrust into a more charged family situation inevitably struggle with more complex emotions. There, every disfunction was magnified, every emotion amplified, every comment or gesture scrutinized. For us, the metaphor of table as crucible strikes a more poignant and less benign chord.

Cinema finds the dinner table useful as a crucible, so that it has become a cliche for developing character and conflict. Cinema also highlights that while all may be seen and heard across a tabletop, what happens underneath may be far more interesting and clandestine and even illicit. There must be something powerfully important about

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passing notes back and forth beneath the table if that remains a memory of the ninth grade. For fostering those minorly subversive acts alone, solid tables will always be much more interesting than glass tops.

To sit at a table with your trusted peers: can anyone resist a reference to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? The round table offers equality of a sort, and insinuates some sense of shared mission. It is said the original table was made round to quiet infighting at the royal court, a baby step away from hierarchy and towards equality. The King, of course, was still the King.

That the mythology of the Round Table alludes directly to the Last Supper is lost on most, but it is interesting to note that there was always one seat empty, the seat of Judas, or the seat reserved for that knight who would find the Holy Grail: the “Siege Perilous”. All other seats as they emptied could only be claimed by a Knight more valorous than the last, Valor being that most appreciated of character traits3.

What to make of tables in an academic setting? To acknowledge that all are seated as equals in service to a worthy cause, and that Valor be held in esteem: this might be a good start. Of the limitless options, however, are there some particular shapes or configurations that serve better?

From Exeter Academy emerged the Harkness Method of teaching students through student led conversations around a table. A teacher sits elsewhere and documents the course of the discussion for the students’ own analysis and for grading. Quoting the philanthropist Edward Harkness in 1930: “What I have in mind is teaching boys in sections of about eight...where boys could sit around a table with a teacher who would talk with them and instruct them by a sort of tutorial or conference method, where the average or below average boy would feel encouraged to speak up, present his difficulties, and the teacher would know...what his difficulties were...This would be a real revolution in methods.”

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Harkness tables are oval, not round, in order to bring students closer together. Class sizes are more likely to be 10-12 students at Exeter these days and not on average 8.

Studies have shown that the most engaged conversations emerge from groups of 4, with larger groups leaving some members disengaged to some degree5. Presumably, the more focused type of conversation at a school table affords a larger cast. The spread of the Harkness methodology is certainly testament to its efficacy.

Oxford Brookes University offers many useful insights into effective groups, including a questionaire for determining optimum group size:6 What size of group is appropriate to the aims?

How many people can be fitted into the room and still have good eye contact?

Will the tutor take a leadership role or will students take responsibility for the process?

Does the tutor intend to split the group into subgroups?

Is the group large enough to avoid total dominance by the tutor?

Will the group still be large enough if one or two members are absent?

To note that larger groups might better keep the tutor in check, and to comment on classroom dynamics at all, is certainly noteworthy! Is there anything worse than an unrestrained tutor? Here too, the equalizing power of the round table finds a role.

Besides the social dynamics the round table engenders, is there anything more that the table itself might offer to make school more visceral and memorable? When I was thirteen I carved my name into the log wall of a cabin high above Innsbruck, Austria. I have never forgotten it, and received with strange delight a photograph some decades later showing my name still there among dozens of others. That simple act, of making your mark, holds a remarkable power.

Imagine a table inscribed with the names, the marks, of every student that has come before you. Imagine running your fingers over the evidence of their presence, knowing that your name too would eventually find a home there. We might start a new table every decade, and name our rooms for the decade inscribed within, a kind of managed graffiti, a way to honor every student to sit there no matter their talents or limitations if they but persevere, a small way to vest students in the process of school.

1. Journal of Adolescent Health, April 2013 Volume 52, Issue 4, Pages 433–438 Family Dinners, Communication, and Mental Health in Canadian Adolescents Frank J. Elgar, Ph.D, Wendy Craig, Ph.D., Stephen J. Trites, M.A. 2. Biddle, Martin, King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation, Boydell Press (2009) ISBN 0851156266 3. http://www.pbs.org/mythsandheroes/myths_four_arthur.html 4. http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/109_1220_11688.aspx 5. Massimo Mastrangeli, Martin Schmidt and Lucas Lacasa, The Roundtable: An Abstract Model of Conversation Dynamics, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 13 (4) 2 (2010) <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/2.html> 6. http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/small-group/sgt103.html

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1

The loneliest number that you’ll ever do.

4

Casual conversation size correlated with maximum satisfaction of all participants, after which conversation groups tend to schism.

5-7

http://www.metrolyrics.com/one-lyrics-harry-nilsson.html

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/2.html

Anecdotally, optimum group size for groups without leaders. https://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/small-group/sgt103.html

8

Number of students at the table originally envisioned for the Harkness method at Phillips Exeter Academy.

9

Anecdotally, optimum viable creative group.

Recommended Scrum size.

http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/109_1220_11688.aspx

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/07/agile_team_size

12

Actual number of students at the table at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Anecdotal optimum size for groups with leaders. Easily divisable.

13

Purported number of people at the Last Supper.

We know how that ended.

13-17

http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/109_1220.aspx

https://bible.org/seriespage/68-last-supper-luke-227-23

Class sizes in the STAR project in Tennessee, grades K-3. Poor and minority students benefited significantly from class size reduction. http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/05_02_08.pdf

24.2

2010-2011 Average class size, United States, high school, departmentalized instruction

25

Number of seats at the 18’ diameter Winchester Round Table, linked to the King Arthur mythology

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s_007.asp

http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/arthur/rtable.html

147.8

Dunbar’s Number: Projection of maximum human group size for communities with a very high incentive to remain together.

150

Number of Knights of the Round Table listed in Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur” (1470)

http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf

http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/arthur/knights.html

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v. workshop

164

165

How did making things become so ...

The wood shops and metal shops of past generations are now robotics labs and 3d printing spaces and engineering curriculums for millenials, but there remains a divide between those engaged in theoretical pursuits and those more practically oriented. If you like tinkering with cars or airplanes, or making practical things with wood, then you do that in a technical high school, not the academic one. Perhaps because it has no practical application, only Art remains in the realm of “thinking”.

This separation between lower and higher employment extends back to Colonial times: “The strangely-named “Old Deluder Satan Act” of the Massachusetts Bay Colony stated, ‘… all parents and masters do breed & bring up their children & apprentices in some honest lawful calling, labour or employment, either in husbandry, or some other trade profitable for themselves, and the Common-wealth if they will not or cannot train them up in learning to fit them for higher employments.” 1

The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 called for the creation of state-level vocational training boards and established vocational education as a federal program. Educational reformers in Congress believed America’s youth should be prepared for entry-level jobs by learning occupational skills in vocational and technical schools. The line between making and thinking, tacitly accepted before, was now institutionalized. Smart kids were taught to think, dumb kids were taught to do. The result was a profound cultural rift.

“We tend to talk about knowledge work as if it’s something different from and even incompatible with manual labor...but the distinction is a smug and largely frivolous one. All work is knowledge work. The carpenter’s mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary’s. The architect’s accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter’s do. What is true of other animals is true of us: the mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brains but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso.

And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well...To act is to think, and to think is to act.” 2

The Workshop aims to blow away these artificial delineations, proposing that making, doing, thinking and theorizing all support each other. It has all students developing manual dexterity, a facility with machinery, and the skills to be safe and confident in making stuff. The Workshop may have classic toolsets designed for fiberglass, wood, or metal, progressive toolsets focused on mechanics, electronics and programming, and cutting edge tools like 3D printers and computer driven cutters. The workshop will reclaim the “hobby” from that purgatory of the “frivolous”. What is a hobby anyway, but a practical pursuit approached in a spirit of play? A spirit of play is exactly what’s missing from many schools purporting to foster creativity. Let’s reclaim it!

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fraught with connotation?

The Workshop serves artist, scientist, and engineer, allowing them to rub elbows, and teach each other. The Workshop will serve various curriculums, but it will also support individual students as they explore on their own. It will support research, design and production. The Workshop will invite theoretical subjects to ask: So what? What can you do with that understanding? What real-life problem can you solve”? It will invite individuals to ask: what insane thing can I do with this tool? They can take these capabilities for a test drive, imagine possibilities even in the absence of a problem.

Creativity can be confused with problem solving: sometimes it is problem finding.

Already there are plenty of models for this kind of classroom. From MIT there are Fab Labs, a set of tools and capabilities including computer controlled cutters and millers and printers. The Fab Foundation offers tremendously detailed means and methods for creating these labs, including a full list of elements as well as recommended space layouts. Fab Labs have already proliferated all over the world.3 In San Antonio there is Geek Bus, “a mobile makerspace that travels to schools and other organizations to provide STEM educational experiences in their classrooms.”4 For $800-$1000/Day, schools can invite the experience without incurring the $75,000$100,000 capital cost of a Fab Lab. Such a short term experience will certainly inspire many students, but it will never allow them to fully explore the possibilities: to take agency and develop skills.4 Some schools have made making their entire curriculum. The Workshop school in Philadelphia started with these principles: Put the work first. Authentic problems define the curriculum, and dictate what specific knowledge and skills students need to develop.

Trust students to make decisions. It makes them responsible for their work and their ideas, and reinforces the idea that most real world problems do not have one right answer.

Make the most out of failure. Failure is an indispensable part of all innovation and problem solving...It is also how students learn to be resilient.5

When making becomes the entire curriculum, however, I wonder if we aren’t back to a new kind of vocational school, with all af the schisms this engenders. It is as a component of a broader mix of activities and venues that the Workshop offers a powerful reintegration of thinking, problem-solving, making and play. http://www.mccann.edu/blog/the-history-of-trade-schools Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage, Automation and Us (Norton, New York, 2014) p.148 3 http://www.fabfoundation.org/fab-labs/setting-up-a-fab-lab/ 4 http://www.geekbus.com/ 5 http://www.workshopschool.org/our-approach/design-principles/ 1 2

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w. wilderness trail 168

Why do schools teach almost nothing of the pattern which connects? Is it that teachers know that they carry the kiss of death which will turn to tastelessness whatever they touch or teach anything of real-life importance? Or is it that they carry the kiss of death because they dare not teach anything of real-life importance? What’s wrong with them?

What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me?

And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the backward schizophrenic in another?

I want to tell you why I have been a biologist all my life, what it is that I have been trying to study. What thoughts can I share regarding the total biological world in which we live and have our being? How is it put together?

What is the pattern which connects all the living creatures?

Gregory Bateson, MIND AND NATURE, A Necessary Unity

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

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I hate mosquitoes.

I hate that sticky feeling of waking up in a tent after a mediocre night’s sleep. Snakes scare the crap out of me in the desert, and its worse in the jungle...never mind every other creature out there trying to make it through the day without me stepping on it. I hate being drenched in sweat, with no prospect of a shower. Yet, for all these discomforts, I still seek out wild places. Why? When I am alone in the wild, I feel truly myself. I feel a sense of balance and wellbeing I lose in my daily life. All of the responsibilities and desires and perceived imperatives of living among other people drop away and I rediscover myself. Abstractions dissolve in the face of new imperatives of such specificity and with such immediate and physical consequences that I feel a new and powerful connection with reality. I feel real, and whole, and complete.

When I am alone in the wild, I feel truly integral to the universe: connected to earth and sea and sky.

All of the awkwardness of living among other people, the petty ostracizations, the insular tribalism, the hierarchies and expected deferences, the feelings of alienation, these all drop away. The complexity of society is revealed as brittle and simplistic. Out in the wild, cut loose from cultural entanglements, I feel this wonderful paradox: that I am free, but also that I belong.

When I am alone in the wild, I feel a sense of awe. This sense of the sublime, that I am in the unlikely presence of forces far greater than myself or of anyone for that matter is strangely comforting. I feel honored to have a place in this titanic tableaux. Yes, I feel small, but it is not connected to a feeling of worthlessness. Instead, when I am in the wild, I feel both priviledged and humble.

Why is it that we send our damaged youth to outdoor survival schools, but do not make it a point to send all children? Why are lessons on Endurance and Resilience and Confidence and Self-Reliance and Teamwork reserved for only some, or taught only abstractly in the hermetically sealed isolation of the classroom? Why are encounters with the Sublime, with Uncertainty, with natural Complexity, with the “Other”, with the Mystical, and with apparent Randomness not required fare? Shouldn’t every student have the opportunity to situate themselves within what the great explorer of the connections between the realm of mind and physical reality Gregory Bateson calls “The Pattern That Connects”?1 How do we give our students an appreciation for and quench their natural desire for Adventure, if not in the wild? How do we help our students to experience Freedom when the intrinsic nature of school demands containment? How do we offer them the experience of Wonder, if school offers only the deadly Familiar in packets of 25 or 30 students? How do we give our students an appreciation for life itself, if their well-being is conditional on abstract Performance?

Yes, the benefits of outdoor activity are well-documented and diverse. For instance, “outdoor activities can help strengthen children’s physical health (Maller, Townsend, Pryor, Brown, & St. Leger, 2006; Sallis, Prochaska, & Taylor, 2000), mental health (Burdette & Whitaker, 2005b; Taylor, Kuo, & Sullivan, 2001; Taylor & Kuo, 2009) conservation attitudes (Chawla, 2006; Wells & Lekies, 2006), academic achievement (Coyle, 2010) and social relationships (Ginsburg, 2007)”2. These benefits do legitimize time outdoors, but none require time in the wild. A playground paved in asphalt may deliver the same value. I am arguing for something entirely different however: time specifically in the wild.

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A striped basketball court is not freedom. A playground offers no hint of the Sublime. A sports field offers no connection to the “Pattern That Connects”. All of these compromised exteriors miss entirely the point of the Wilderness Trail. They are versions of the cultivated garden, not of the Wilderness.

We need to send our children out into the Wild.

We are adept at constructing teetering towers of knowledge. Algebra built on Arithmetic, Geometry built on Algebra, Trigonometry built on Geometry and Algebra, and so forth into the more complex equations, probability, calculus and matrices. Declarative statements are built on grammar, essays on declarative statements, increasingly complex reading enabled by and further expanding vocabulary, creative writing built on the reading, complex papers following thereafter, again all abstract and all too often self-referential. Why is the wilderness such a powerful weapon against delinquency? Because it is not abstract. It offers, quite possibly, the initially slow growth of an exponential learning curve instead of the steady but self limiting stairsteps of traditional learning.

I use the term “Wilderness” to stress the experience of “wildness” and to avoid the term “Nature”.

“Nature” in all probability no longer exists anyway, at least if it is understood as “untouched by man”.

(Anyone who has ever read Uncommon Ground, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature3, a book that will rock your unexamined views on Nature, understands that Nature is an elusive construct anyway, and more likely a myth based on a dream than an actual place based on facts). The focus here is on the contrast between intellectual work performed abstractly in climate controlled enclosures and an experience rooted in The Pattern That Connects.

I stress the space of the Trail because, of course, there is no experience of Wilderness unimpacted by man. Logistically, there is no other way of getting to the Wilderness short of serious bushwacking or a very expensive air drop. Psychologically, the Trail orders our experience of the Wilderness. It denotes a path “into” and the way “out”. It is a reassurance that you are not “lost”, and that many will have come before and will come after. Thus the Trail offers continuity and safety, however illusory.

Wilderness itself isn’t boundless, so that the edge condition defines your disconnection from “civilization”. The number of quotation marks alone attest to the contested language. When you stop to think what we mean by each of these terms, you realize definitions are elusive. Nonetheless, there is no “Nature” independent of man, until we go extinct, and no “Wilderness” either.

Why does this experience demand a place in school? Because no place and no pattern can be understood without a story, and stories demand their tellers. Our teachers are our storytellers. They can transform a hike into an adventure, an encounter into a lesson, and an experience into understanding.

They can bring values to bear on facts, and in this way offer our children wisdom. They can explain facts in terms of relationships so that our children begin to understand connections and Pattern.

I do not agree with David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature3 that impressions (direct experience) must precede idea since we know that an idea can change our lens and let us see anew, but I do believe that the bedrock of direct experience will prove a stronger foundation for our delicate towers of knowledge than merely talking about the world. Allow me to experience so that I may begin to love, to love so that I may begin to care, and to care so that I may begin to understand, even mosquitoes.

1. Bateson, Gregory, MIND AND NATURE, A Necessary Unity, Introduction 2. Larson, Lincoln et al, “Children’s Time Outdoors: Results and Implications of the National Kids Survey”, Journal of Park and Recreation Administration, Volume 29, Number 2. Summer 2011, pp1-20 3. Hume, David, Treatise of Human Nature, http://www.davidhume.org/texts/thn.html

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x. classroom

172

173

Why deny the utility and relevance Even as teaching and learning flees to the internet, still we crave the immediacy of personal interaction, the warm glow of attention from that inspiring teacher, the emotional support of our peers in ways less ethereal than texts and tweets. And the classroom obliges, with functional tools to efficiently transfer information from teacher to student.

The visual power of a smart board or white board, the utility of note-taking on a tablet arm to help us with recall, the emotional and intellectual power of engaging in real-time, emotional debate: all these experiences define the modern embodiment of the classic 19th century classroom.

A classroom is a blank slate, a relatively cheap and reproducible archtype recognizable anywhere in the world, modified perhaps by the demands of climate or class size, but otherwise a genetic duplicate of the original one-room schoolhouse. Anything can be taught in it because it is absolutely neutral in its demeanor. It exhibits no bias, offers no editorial conviction, champions in fact a classic scholastic neutrality. The classroom is exactly that neutral vessel we worry school systems view our children as being. Let us not diminish its utility (but let us not believe it is all our children require, anymore than we should imagine the internet will solve education).

We pillory the caricature of the modern office: 8’-6” high ceilings of endless ceiling tile, repetitive workstations, limited connection to the outdoors, neutral lighting albeit to exacting standards for visual discernment, acres of synthetic carpet to diminish the noise, and little to no privacy. With only minor embellishments, however, this is what we offer our children for 6 to 8 hours per day. It is a pathetic travesty, an impoverishment of their spirit, and a terrible indictment of our value system.

Nonetheless, let us here dwell on where classic classrooms do offer an emotionally powerful experience. I’ve noted elsewhere my experience as a child in Holland, of peeking into a 5th grade classroom festooned with models of the planets and feeling an intense excitement that one day I too could partake of this feast. In the hands of a capable and committed teacher, there is no doubt that this mute and flaccid vessel can be brought to life. A blank canvas becomes a virtue in the hands of an inspired artist.

When we attend a movie or a play or a musical performance, or any event where the activity itself is so completely engaging that we take no notice of the venue, so totally compelling in fact that any expression of the venue would be an unwelcome distraction, in those unique circumstances, a neutral container becomes a necessary condition for success. In a perfect world, every class every day is exactly that mesmerizing. In that world, or at least for those occasions, the neutral classroom is an indisputable asset.

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of classrooms?

In those situations where the class is occasional and not overly long, where students arrive from chaotic elsewheres and frenetic other-lives, in those very specific cases, the opportunity to spend some intellectually engaging time at peace in a container of calm is a blessing. Adult Education is that way, and I have spent many contented hours learning Italian or Web-based Marketing or a myriad of other interests-du-jour in otherwise unremarkable surroundings. It didn’t matter if the fluorescent lights flickered a bit, or if the carpet looked unsanitary, or if I felt completely removed from the natural world.

I wouldn’t be spending 2 hours in this box, never mind 6-8 hours in this and its cousins.

In those situations where class is an ever-changing tableaux of activities requiring the frequent rearrangement of tools and furnishings, it might be useful to have a neutral container. In this situation the container becomes an unremarkable and unimportant bystander to the experience. The energy and creativity required to keep this up is quite frankly unimaginable, but perhaps there are those rock-star teachers out there that turn every class into an adventure of both the body and the imagination sufficient to reduce the classroom to unimportance.

Finally there are those venues in which the activity it ennables is so specialized and so proscribed that the room itself has little to offer. Laboratories might defend themselves in this manner, by insisting that a hospital-like demeanor is required. Chemistry might insist on attention to the flask and not the wind in the trees outside. To this reasoning I will only suggest that safety and a compelling venue need not be mutually exclusive. In truth, whenever I think of the laboratory I would want to experiment in, I can’t escape the image of Victor Frankenstein creating his masterpiece: “In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation...” 1 That’s all I’ve got. As an architect I’m responsible for replicating far more than my share of exactly these neutral shoeboxes. In designing them we focused on daylighting and acoustic control and using healthy materials and providing the proper tools and of course, staying responsible to the construction budget. I think now that we completely missed the point. No amount of daylight would ever fully invest these corridors of classrooms with emotional content. The work involved to fully vest them with wonder would be insurmountable to all but the most prolific and inspired of teachers. In returning to these projects I would find repeated my feelings about my own scholastic career: a rather small and unremarkable satisfaction not at all commensurate with the immense resources involved in getting these schools built. As a society, I know we can do better.

1. Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Chapter 4.

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a new lexicon When a school system programs an auditorium, a cafeteria and a library, in addition to a set of 25 student classrooms, and some specialized spaces to support science, engineering and art perhaps...then that is exactly what they will get. The classrooms will likely be repetitive duplicates, the cafeteria will maximize sanitation and struggle with acoustics, the auditorium will often stand empty or struggle with moveable walls that suffer at the hands of untrained operators, and the library will stand as a well defended citadel of enforced silence. While all of these venues can and do host deep, meaningful interactions, they often and perhaps typically do so in banal, unsupportive ways. They host, but rarely contribute. They fail to nourish.

Imagine, instead, a school programming activities and interactions. Recognizing the value of subject matter concentration, a high school adopts a departmental structure.

Recognizing the immense power of collaboration, Social Studies, Foreign Language and English departments might program their space together, requesting climbing, storytelling, meditation, racing, adventure, swimming, and conversation. Bland, repetitive classrooms eschewed, the environment now hosts campfires, story booths, situation rooms, library cafes, bar restaurants, gardens, a big map, and a speaker’s corners.

In stark contrast with the traditional programming approach, the power and emotional impact of this alternate universe offers a far more moving school experience. A memorable cornucopia of interactions. The point is this: you get what you ask for, and so the lexicon is a key instrument in defining the result. The words you use to ask for what you want will define exactly what you get. For this reason, we need a new lexicon for school design: we need better descriptors.

To understand the potential relationship between experiences and spaces, a matrix may be helpful. If we ask for conversation. what are the spaces that might support that activity? If we ask for swimming, how does that translate into an actual facility? What do we program and build to support story-telling or meditation, or climbing? More questions arise: should we build with such specificity, do we then limit the future utility of our very expensive and difficult to modify facility? Furthermore, by building with such specificity, have we also improved the utility of the school building for community purposes or in fact impaired it? These exorbitantly expensive facility cannot stand idle.

This matrix acknowledges that the traditional classroom (Line X) can offer support for Races, Duels, Bullfights, Swims, Climbs, Demolition and Storytelling. This hypothetical classroom may not be the most nourishing, inspiring, visceral or memorable venue for hosting these activities, but there is no contesting its utility. The matrix also points out that a room full of fellow students would be unlikely to support a student in meditation, apprenticeship, safari or adventure. Conversation is perhaps debatable.

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We may also glean from the matrix that fears of over-specificity may be unwarranted.

There is no one-to-one relationship between activities and space, and different spaces in fact powerfully support a multiplicity of possible uses. In fact, the premise described at the start of this chapter, that departments might program spaces together, highlights the opportunity for diverse uses and subject matter.

Finally, regarding the issue of community utility, we suggest that powerful, visceral spaces attract use. A neutral classroom offers little but privacy, seats and a white board to the community. A garden carefully designed for safaris and exploring and meditating and storytelling on the other hand, offers everything from a classroom to an exhibit venue to a wedding location. A Situation Room offers powerful technology, but also powerful human interaction useful to life-long learning, to local government, to small business and to non-profits. The notion that a school might share a true Library Cafe with the community is particularly interesting because it violates the prevailing trend to separation of kids and community. The notion that schools really need to be urbanized, not suburbanized (even in the suburbs), and that they need to be fully open and accessible and integrated into the community rather than isolated and gated and monitored: this points the way to a truly useful, culturally enmeshed institution.

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conclusions Education focused for too long on the content instead of the experience of learning. For that reason alone, we are letting our young students down. Education siloed for too long that knowledge into subjects and departments, ignoring the fact that modern problems require multidisciplinary approaches. Education settled for too long on traditional approaches, traditional teaching materials and lesson plans, and traditional outcomes. Slowly, we’re move on.

This booklet argues for a visceral, sensual, active, multi-modal education. It urges our educators to think phenomenologically: to reconceive teaching based on the experience of learning. When learning becomes a whole body experience, when it becomes an unforgettable endeavor engaging all of our senses, when the students themselves begin to feel they are entrusted with a mythic purpose, at that point do we begin to fulfill the promise of education and the incredible potential of our diverse students.

The visceral experiences outlined here are only a start, a mere suggestion. It requires interpretation and new lesson plans and new environments to fully realize them. Every theory of learning recognizes however, that the most powerful learning occurs when we escape passive reception and adopt an active, multi-modal stance.

The environments discussed here are a direct reaction to the bland neutrality of the modern classroom. While we may add fresh air and daylight, and extoll its flexibility and relative economy to build and maintain, that classroom remains a lifeless vessel best suited to an archaic learning modality. Let’s offer richer, more engaging, multidimensional alternatives. Let’s blur boundaries, mashup subjects, explore real problems, collaborate and create.

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The provocations offered here recommend a very different school from the one now incommon use. At the heart of the inquiry might be the question of what a teaching room is even for anymore. With information ubiquitous on the internet, why do we need a place to hand students information? The concept of a flipped classroom came from this inquiry: suggesting that students ingest information on their own, but process it and reinforce it and question it at school. This conception is what opens the classroom itself to reinvention, and where this little booklet begins.

The school itself is much more than classrooms, and this will be our next enterprise: to reimagine the school in its entirety. Volume 2 will disect the entire program of the modern school, and begin to reimagine every component with an eye towards multi-modal learning and visceral experience.

I come to my views through a specific lens, fully recognizing the vast multiplicity of perspectives and numerous stakeholders with an interest in education. Your critique of this material is not only welcomed, but deeply appreciated.

Email me at roel@imagine-red.com, and I would be pleased to discuss these issues with you further.

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“Tell me, and I will forget.

Show me, and I will remember.

Involve me, and I will understand”

© 2016 Roel Krabbendam

Chinese Proverb