In this episode, Zac talks with José Vilson about how he shapes his practice in the math classroom, why he hates “wrong answers,” and how education became his life. You can find José at www.thejosevilson.com.
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Enclosure occurs when content industries try to turn the Internet into a pay-per-use vending machine; when sports teams commodify the folk culture of fans by auctioning off the naming rights to sports arenas; and when companies disrupt the openness and collegiality within scientific disciplines by privatizing research and imposing non-disclosure agreements.
A few weeks ago, a link came through the P2PU listserv. It led me to this list from the Open Knowledge Forum providing a great initial collection of resources for thinking about open and its implications. In conjunction with the video below from a 2007 interview with Howard Rheingold for Steal This Film 2, it’s got me thinking.
A classroom strikes me as the optimum commons. Upward of 20 individuals from diverse backgrounds meet daily with the goal learning about themselves, the world and their place in it.
Each of these people comes equipped with knowledge, skills, and experiences not shared by the other people in the room.
The questions each has about the world might intersect in overarching ways, but would likely be as unique as the individuals in other ways.
Attached to each group is at least one adult who has been trained in the general theories and practices around helping others to learn, to seek out the answers to their questions and develop deeper questions.
The classroom, considered this way, becomes laboratory, testing ground, focus group, intellectual locker room and support group. It becomes the commons ground.
The teacher need prepare very little, but should stand ready to adapt to most any eventuality. Anything can and will happen if curiosity is unhindered and unhampered.
This isn’t the case. Not enough.
If curiosity is referenced in the modern classroom, it is in the implied statement, “You should be curious about this.” If not, then we, will make you become curious about this, or at least get you to fake curiosity.
Allowing student curiosity is frightening. I means a lack of control. It means abandoning the plan and abdicating control. In most contemporary schools, even the teachers whose inclinations pull them to such abandon and abdication have no model for curiosity-driven learning in their own lives. Professional development is decided at the institutional level. Teachers are told what they are curious about. Here, again, we cannot lay blame on the shoulders of administrators. Their learning, too, is absent a model of curiosity-based learning. What they must care about is directed by the policies and directives of those above them.
This externally-directed curiosity continues up the hierarchy of formal education until those making the directives become so diluted in their understandings of the power of natural curiosity and the potential of the commons that they make decisions apparently absent any faith in an individual’s propensity to wonder.
This can shift in several ways. Those within the hierarchy at various levels can wait for the directives to change, for the strictures to be reduced and for curiosity to be the guiding principle of education. Additionally, they can move themselves from one level of the hierarchy to another and attempt to cling to their ideals while using those ideals to shift the strictures.
Perhaps most immediately effective, though less impactful on the entire system until critical mass is reached, is ignoring of the directives and belief that learning led by curiosity will be sufficient.
This means embracing the commons of the classroom. More importantly and difficult, it means teaching in the face of scholastic inheritance and trusting the sufficiency of students’ curiosity.
In cleaning out my box.net contents I found a folder containing my slidedecks from the first day of school of my fourth year of teaching. All was well and good until I found the class rules slide below.
Who wrote those two rules? When was I Severus Snape? The thing is, I had a decent idea what I was doing when I made this slide. I’d been in the classroom 3 years and came out of a decent teacher prep experience. The kids I’d taught the year before had taken the school from 47 to 81 percent passing the state writing exam. I had strong relationships with my colleagues, kids and their families. I’d headed up a partner student screenwriting program between our school and the local film festival.
Yet, there I was declaring war on cell phones and gum as though it somehow secured my power as teacher overlord.
Not only that, these were the first two rules I posted. Somehow gum chewing and the sight of a cell phone presented clear and present danger in relation to learning.
This list shows me what I told my students I valued on that first day of school, and it reminds me of how much what I said I believed stood in contrast with the beliefs I enacted as a teacher.
We do that, we get better at what we do, at being people with kids. If I had to guess, I’d say this authoritarian stance was a remnant of teaching students who were quite close to me in age and appearance. It was a stab at drawing a line between who I was and who they were. While I needed that line then, in the years that followed, I worked hard to erase it. I realized the way to teach was to connect, to become a person who mattered that asked students to do work that mattered.
It was a difficult lesson.
One I’m still learning. I’m grateful to younger me for sticking this slidedeck in the cloud time capsule to remind me how I’ve grown.