Jumping back in with both feet – Who needs rules?

“Kids only get in trouble when they’re bored,” an educator from an elementary school in Auckland, New Zealand says, and kids don’t have time to be bored when they are fully engaged.

“Engagement” and “engaged” are two words we hear a lot in U.S. education reform and practice. But what do they really mean? Whose version of the words do we intend when we use them?

I’m jumping back into the blog after months of wiggling my way into a new research site that is in a community where most kids of all ages have the run of the neighborhood. They run through backyards, crawl in ditches, shoot hoops in the road, jump fences, chase the occasional chicken, run from and with dogs, play soccer in the red clay dirt, and swing as high as they can so their jump off will be more exciting.

The kids in this neighborhood don’t need plastic or wood playgrounds, their whole neighborhood is their playscape, and their imaginations are wide and impressive. Old picnic tables become stages where songs and dances are performed, which may be an activity that “educators” can find some value in. But what about jumping from swings sailing way above our heads?

A research study is underway in New Zealand that challenges the assumptions that guide so many of the “rules” governing children’s and youth’s playtime at schools. Four schools agreed to abandon their rules for the playground and the initial findings are simultaneously fascinating and predictable.

Watch a news report and read an article here about the research and its impact on one school.

Is it possible that adults’ rules create harsher social conditions for kids?

Is it possible that adults’ rules create barriers to full physical and cognitive engagement?

Is it possible that adults’ rules restrict kids’ creativity, imagination, motivation, and – dare I say it – “engagement”?

Sitting outside in the community where I am doing work, I watch a four-year-old boy climb to the top of the wood-and-plastic playground apparatus and I predict that he will slide down the cylinder-shaped slide.

But he doesn’t. And I can see how one adult expectation of how the playground equipment is “supposed” to be used could restrict play – and therefore development. Come to think of it, how fun is it really to continuously, day in and day out, climb up the steps in the same way and slide down the slide in the same way? Even a four-year-old masters the expected use of the playground equipment and boredom starts to set in.

Instead of sliding down, he struggles to pull himself up on top of the cylinder shaped slide, grunting and pushing his small arms to their limit until he manages to get one foot in place and finally the other.

Standing on top of the cylinder slide, arms stretched out to his sides, this young boy has achieved something. He is standing on top of the world looking out over the playground, the swings, the picnic tables, the tree trunk seats, and even the one-story homes that surround the playground.

He smiles.

Then jumps.

I have to admit that my heart skipped a beat and I’m pretty sure my eyes tripled in size and my mouth fell open. Yes, I am questioning and challenging the ways adults restrict children’s bodies (and therefore minds), but I am not immune to the assumptions circulating in a society that is saturated with “safety” mindedness and rules. What if he gets hurt? Should I intervene and stop him? Should I talk to the kids and create a rule about not jumping off the top of the playground equipment?

He lands, hard, and jumps up laughing and smiling and runs to the other side of the playground.

Achievement.

Engagement?

He struggled to make his body do something new, do something he didn’t know for sure he was capable of doing but confident enough to give it a try, and he did it. It wasn’t pretty or graceful or effortless, but it was evidence of motivation, perseverance, risk-taking toward the outer range of ability (determined by him), and success.

Is this not what educators wish children and youth would consistently do?

Being engaged in something isn’t just going through the motions of what was already planned ahead of time. For this young boy, continuing to climb up the steps and slide down the same slide in the same fashion day in and day out and well beyond the time within which he has mastered the activity does not produce “engagement.” When he is faced with having mastered the expected use of the equipment, he makes decisions about whether to abandon the equipment altogether or innovate a use of the equipment that will be more challenging (cognitively and physically – though I don’t see those as separate). Indeed, he figures out a way to challenge himself without the help of well-intended adults who may create a new activity for him that isn’t appropriately engaging. Part of the attraction and motivation of this new task that he has decided to take on may, in fact, be the unpredictability of it, the fact that the outcome isn’t already determined and every step between the beginning and ending laid out in a predictable fashion. He has to depend on himself and his creative use of the materials available to him, not someone else’s plan.

The Auckland school hasn’t entirely abandoned all rules for the playground, but the rules they do create are created in conversation with kids as issues arise. To too many adults such an approach is way too inefficient. Isn’t it easier to just have the rules ahead of time, teach the rules to kids, and then have adults around to surveil the kids and ensure rules are followed?

My response would be that efficiency in the eyes of adults is not equal to a commitment to the development and growth of children and youth. Educators are not supposed to be aiming for efficiency, but for something much more complex and beautiful: the cultivation of young people who are comfortable in their own bodies, confident enough to take risks, imaginative enough to grow beyond themselves, and content with who they are.

This young boy’s accomplishment was met with his own laughter and smiles and running off to continue his journey of mastering new things. He didn’t look to adults or peers for approval, and I’m pretty sure that powerful feeling that so many of us have had throughout our lives of “I can do that” planted a seed of certainty in him that wouldn’t have been possible had there been rules about not jumping off the playground equipment.

My witnessing his work/play also planted a seed of certainty in me that offers a little more comfort in standing back and letting children play in the ways that make them feel good by pushing themselves physically and cognitively. The Auckland school has found that “no rules” on the playground has resulted in a significant decrease in bullying behavior, a significant decrease in kids being in “trouble,” and a significant decrease in the need for adults to be supervising the playground.

“No rules” actually seems like it could be an “efficient” way to rid playgrounds of unbearable taunting and bad behavior.

Perhaps efficiency and engagement could find  a way to live among one another after all.

 

**Thanks to JT for passing along the no rules article and to the Browns for inspiring me to jump back in after a long hiatus from blogging.

Reggio Wish #2 – Ateliers and Aesthetics

Ateliers and Aesthetics

 “When we speak of aesthetics we speak of our bodies. From this point of view we can have a better understanding of what is meant by art. The work of art is to create antennae. Antennae which perceive all that is intolerable, discomforting, hateful and repugnant in the universe that we ourselves have created.” (Vecchi, 2010)

Vecchi writes about the radical move Loris Malaguzzi made when he positioning the atelier – and the atelierista – in Reggio schools. The atelier’s central location also positions it as the lifeblood of a school, a space where all things flow out and flow in. This conception of aesthetics as central to human life and necessary for children’s daily experiences is so different to see in person than the way the arts sometimes get integrated into projects even in some Reggio-inspired schooling and writing in the U.S. Arts-integration is sometimes reduced to making things, painting, drawing, or even a dramatic performance. Rarely do I hear educators articulating the fundamental purpose of aesthetics (or “art” as we usually call it) in education as “creating antennae” for our full bodies to perceive the beautiful and mundane and unjust in the world.

Inviting a non-educator artist to play a central role in curriculum and pedagogy is brilliant. Too often in educator preparation programs, the focus is so narrowly aimed at all the wrong things – controlling bodies (aka classroom management), controlling minds (aka disciplinary knowledge), and controlling futures (aka assessment, labeling, and tracking). A serious commitment to aesthetics and its role in life would mean not only inviting non-educator artists to the table and school, but also immersing future educators in antennae-making through deep and full-bodied engagement with aesthetics.

I wish for children, youth, and teachers to live their daily lives in schools saturated with the sensibilities of artists to make sense of the world, and surrounded by massive amounts of diverse materials through which to make that sense. This would no doubt create problems in the fundamental ideology of U.S. schooling and society, however, where most people believe there is one right answer and one right way – or at least “best practices” – and the ambiguity that comes along with art-making and living through aesthetics would challenge that ideology to its core.

Vecchi writes, “An aesthetic sense is fed by empathy, an intense relationship with things; it does not put things in rigid categories and might, therefore, constitute a problem where excessive certainty and cultural simplification is concerned” (Vecchi, p. 9). We are certainly in a time and place where “excessive certainty” and “cultural simplification” are highly valued, and ambiguity and aesthetics are deeply suspect. How might we individually begin to make ourselves more pliable? If I settle into a body/mind/way of being that embraces ambiguity, uncertainty, and a creative sensibility that cultivates my antennae of the world, what impact would that have on the people with whom I interact every day? What impact will it have on me? On the world? What if children and youth and teachers were encouraged to cultivate such uncertainty? I wish for the collective courage to take such a worthwhile risk.

Reggio Wish #1 – Slow Schooling

Slow Schooling

Five minutes pass, then ten minutes, then twenty.

Thirty.

Forty-five.

Has it really been an hour?

A young girl and boy wander around the schoolyard taking turns experimenting with a camera that offers new and unusual ways of looking and seeing and living in the world.

A close-up of grass, part of a tree, a swing, and a friend provide material for curiosity and wonder and laughter and play.

The two children spend at least an hour on their own. No adult checking on them wondering about their task and whether they’re on it, no expectation that some kind of share out will hold them responsible for an adult mandated lesson they were to put into practice, no interruptions or calls to the carpet or lights flipping on and off or shushes or claps or public celebrations of other children who are doing a different task.

To be in a place of such peace where  children and adults work/play for long periods of uninterrupted times pulled me into the slowness of being, the rhythm of the present, and the quiet of curiosity. To be in a place where time is supplanted as the governor of activity by the meaningful movements of people is really stunning given that I spend so much of my time in educational spaces that are marked by the minute.

When a society (or any sub-culture of a society) becomes so compelled by narratives of efficiency and accountability, it is inevitable that measures of time will begin to rule human lives. And if measures of time begin ruling adult lives, it is inevitable that the same restrictions will soon be forced upon children – perhaps with even more force given the assumptions from most perspectives that children are to be controlled in their stage of only partial humanity.

I am struck by the ease with which children and adults populate the spaces of the Reggio schools. Bodies seemed natural and relaxed. Talk flowed without a sense of urgency. Conversation happened. Wondering, wandering, play, work, and smiles interacted fluidly as if everyone was in a time machine. A time-standing-still machine.

What long-term effect would a commitment to a slow school movement have on the quality of children’s, youth’s, and adults’ lives? If a school is not governed by time passing, but instead governed by the present and tending to our joys, curiosities, needs, and togetherness, what would happen in that school? How would we recognize it?

With the U.S. policymakers and education reformers persuaded by “time on task” and “preparation” for a hypothetical future of “career and college,” most schools become spaces where fluidity is outside the lexicon. Where present is only here to prepare for the future. Like the grassroots slow food movement that challenges all the efficiencies and speed of fast corporate food and the culture-changing impact it has had on nearly everyone, I wish for a slow school movement that parallels in commitment to the local and present.

I wish for a school movement where two children can wander around for an hour taking photographs of objects and people they find curious, and their explorations won’t be disrupted by clapping hands, flipping lightswitches, teachers calling out, or threats of losing their 10-minute recess for not being on task.

How and why do we learn to write?

Now that the Common Core Standards includes writing, people all over the country are scurrying around to knock down the cobwebs of good writing instruction from years past in an effort to be in compliance with new requirements. Of course we should have been focusing on writing in schools all along during the torturous decade when phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (sponsored by The National Reading Panel and No Child Left Behind) high-jacked literacy in every school across America.

All good educators knew the policies of NCLB and the practices of the NRP were too narrow and potentially disastrous. But it is the rare school (and school leader) where one can find a persistent push through the BS mandates passed by legislators and accompanied by pendulum swings and money-making products. Writing instruction managed to maintain a central role in some schools, hanging on by a thread and endangered by any drop in test scores, but in others it was pushed aside without another thought.

The good news is that writing has been deemed important again by the all powerful legislators. The bad news is that educators, children, and youth all over the country are caught up in another swirling whirlwind of curricular and instructional changes as the Common Core is “rolled out” across states, districts, and individual schools.

What I’m most worried about, however, is that old debates about how and why writing should be taught will re-emerge and distract us from the important work of figuring out what kids already do and know, and build on that foundation to make them the most capable writers possible who can shift between critical essays, engaging fiction, compelling expository texts, persuasive pieces, and writing that is used for many different personal purposes.

I’m worried that writing “to” the standards will result in standardized writing – the boring formulaic, disengaged writing that no one wants to read. Enough to meet the minimum requirements, and not enough to compel anyone to read.

I’m worried that we will forget why people want to write to begin with, and that motivation for grades or rubric scores will trump the real-life motivations for writing that students always have: teaching others what they know, telling others about their perspective, communicating with and about the broader world, and exploring their personal experiences and social analysis through creative modes that make living more fulfilling.

I’m worried that, once again, the “audience” for student writing will be the teacher with the rubric and the (not red) ink pen that gets the final word.

I’m worried that writing will be simplified: conventions over creativity; or creativity over conventions; or formulaic writing over free-writes; or, or, or, or.

Writing is broad and deep and complex and multilayered. Writing is about spelling and grammar and punctuation and creative selection of words and use of metaphor and analogy and symbolism; writing is about taking a stand, writing on the bias, research and inquiry, making things matter; writing is about personal exploration and political analysis and personal communication and crafting public policy; writing is all these things and more – and that cannot fit in a standard, in one approach, in one series of lessons, or in one program.

If we make students, their interests and their voices matter in schools, then we can open up the gates of motivation for writing. And we will have to teach them everything just as we will have to be willing to learn from them as they show us some tricks and techniques of their own.

If we make the desires of “future employers” the focus of our work rather than the students in front of us, we will fail from the beginning.

 

Great new discovery…

I love this blog and the whole idea of the Institute for Humane Education.

Check is out yourself!

The “Frantic Class,” Time, and another plea for Slow Schooling

I love the way Paul Thomas thinks and writes, and he has another great post at the Daily Kos called “Time as Capital: The Rise of the Frantic Class” that is worth the read, and it has inspired me to watch the film In Time. Paul’s right about a lot of things in the post, but one issue rises to the top of my list of concerns that I’ve been fretting over for years – the way time is connected to the earning potential of a working body (and how that earning potential is always regulated by people who have access to money). Simply put, if you are a painter who works for yourself, for a small business, or for lots of different people depending on who has the work, the money you are capable of earning is at most equal to the amount of money offered by someone else and the time your body can physically be present on the jobsite painting. Doing an outside job and it rains three days in a row? You’re screwed – and to add insult to injury the person who hired you is probably pissed because the job isn’t finished when you said it would be. Body too sore to climb on a ladder? Too bad, you can’t afford to miss even one hour of work much less a whole day.

I know workers who schedule themselves 7 days a week as many weeks in a row as they possibly can because they know the work won’t be there soon. Sore bodies, injuries, sicknesses, emergencies at home are all set aside so they can put in the physical hours to earn their wages. Leisure? Recreation? Healthcare? Not much of it – and when time is on their hands as a direct result of having no work, that time is filled with anxiety and worry about how to fill up time with wage-earning work.

This “frantic distraction of surviving” (as Paul puts it) is a deeply entrenched injustice in the United States, and one that is rarely known by privileged Americans. It is an unethical way to organize a society, an inhumane project aimed only at keeping wealth and power exactly where it already is.

Why might this matter in schools or in the greater idea of education writ large?

What if we taught that time is an important part of our human rights – integral to our dignity? That time equals not “money” but opportunities to be in the world in meaningful ways. Some of that time will be devoted to work to earn a living, other parts of that time devoted to being with nature and cultivating relationships with our family and friends. Some of that time will be committed to caring for ourselves, for playing, dancing, creating, for growing things, cooking, and cleaning.

Even for being silent – just being.

If educators believed this about time, we would organize school days differently – no bells marking “tardies” and rushing us from place to place. No rigid lines taking full groups of people to the restroom. No silent lunchrooms where everyone is forced to eat a lunch they don’t know anything about and forced to throw away uneaten food. Time would be cared for in gentle ways, and we would be generous with time. We would use time to teach that there are, indeed, a thousand paths to happiness and that it is within our rights to demand those paths be open to us. And we, as educators and parents and students and citizens, would demand that time take its rightful place in schooling – as a gift. Time would not be used as a “benchmark” or “restriction” or “retention” or “progress” or “development” or “advancement” or so many other ways we steal time from people and use it as punishment. Steal enough hours, days, weeks, months, semesters, and you have stolen a childhood. A lifetime. A life. We wouldn’t stand for that if we took time seriously.

Parents – including myself – have been crying out for a more humane use of schooltime and the time of our children’s lives.  We live with the disastrous results of a frantic-paced schooling that literally pushes kids to the edge of their sanity, taking their families along for the hellish ride that sometimes never stops. Schools are, indeed, catapulting kids into a “race to nowhere” that creates time as capital – but without human rewards.

Another plea for slow schooling

I have written before about what I see as some of the basic rewards of a school school movement, though it’s far from being fleshed out in any kind of productive way. This notion of time, though, and the life-changing decision about how to “teach” time in schools, how to “use” time in schools, and how to “expect” time to play out across one’s life is a provocative way of exploring a slow school movement. The word slow, alone, signifies a use of time that is in contrast to something else already in place – something fast. And the notion of bodies, too, should be a central part of moving this idea forward. How do we teach, use, and what do we expect of bodies in schools and across one’s life? How do bodies and time come together to create meaningful living and learning and being?

These questions are beyond the scope of a blog post, but I will continue my work on them both in my academic writing and in my personal life.

 

 

Occupy EDU – The Education version of Occupy Wall Street

Excellent piece here about how Wall Street and trends in corporate America impact public schools, teachers, children, and the institution of public education.

Take a read!

Teaching “Occupy Wall Street” and Being Class-Sensitive Pedagogues

An important way to be class-sensitive in our teaching is to pay attention to current events around issues of social class and poverty and bring them into the classroom.

If you haven’t already started teaching about the movement of Occupy Wall Street – the protest against economic inequality that started in New York City a month ago and has spread across the world – this is an exciting time to be doing so.

This is also a terrific time to reconsider how things such as “Stock Market” and “Monopoly” games are taught and why they have become such a staple in schools over the past thirty years promoting investment in Wall Street and a focus on “profits” without necessarily considering the consequences of high profits on people, community, and natural resources.

Check out “Anti-Monopoly” game here.

Check out “Socially Responsible” Companies here.

Like all things, there are no simple answers to the issues being illuminated in OWS, but they create amazing material for conversation and continued research in schools and classrooms.

Teaching OWS can integrate reading, writing, history, economics, geography, math, citizens’ rights, politics and the influence of money in political races, community rules, etc. and could be used at any grade level with varying levels of sophistication. (For example, early elementary classrooms might roleplay a “General Assembly” from OWS in their classroom to see its benefits and disadvantages in making decisions for the whole group, or PK and Kindergarteners might like to see how OWS is using the “human microphone” and try it during their outdoor activities).

A wikipedia entry for OWS is live and being revised constantly and offers some fun facts about the movement up to this point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

Happy Teaching!

The end of Corporations in the Classroom? Not quite, but some movement…

Check out this story on Scholastic’s decision  to end most of their corporate partnerships for distributing curriculum materials in schools after receiving sustained critique from organizations such as Rethinking Schools and Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. 

Some fabulous inquiries for K-12 classrooms might include:

In what ways do corporations influence children and youth directly through schools?

Study the history of advertising to better understand the strategies used to influence children/youth. In what ways have these marketing approaches been criticized or ended? What other measures could be taken toward a “commercial-free” childhood?

Are there curricular materials in your classroom/school that position you to buy/consume certain products/services?

Are there curricular materials in your classroom/school that position you to believe certain things that might benefit corporations?

What kinds of analytical tools can provide all children and youth with the ability to deconstruct texts of all kinds?

What role do testing corporations have in determining what is and is not taught/learned in schools? What can students and educators do about that?

Have fun!

“Guys like me…” a story for educators and policy makers

A tear glistened in the corner of his eye.

I looked away for a moment and he wiped under his glasses, erasing the physical evidence of an emotional history that just won’t go away.

“I might have had a hard time reading, but I could do so much,” he told me.

“They just decided I wouldn’t amount to anything so I was de-celerated. They thought my friend was good in math, so he was ac-celerated. I mean – that’s that. They just decided then and there that he was going to be something and I wasn’t.”

He hasn’t been in elementary school for at least forty years, but here he is giving a detailed recounting of a young boy in school and all going terribly wrong.

“I mean, I am really good at so many things. I build engines. I work really well with people. I am a dedicated worker. One-hundred ten percent. That’s what they say about me – no matter what it is, I give one hundred and ten percent.”

He talks about his yard at home today, the careful manicuring of it, the careful planting of flowers, the pruning of bushes and trees, the miniature fish pond.

“Even my work at home – I give one hundred and ten percent. They had no right to say I was dumb.”

You’re right, I said, I consider that abuse.

“The truth is they should have accelerated me. If teachers think someone is struggling, that child should not be put in a slower class, they should be put in a class that speeds up their learning. Accelerate them.”

I just listened.

Always moved by the insight people have about institutions, specifically schools, and why they go so wrong.

Always wondering how and why they’re able to point to gaping holes and blatant problems when people on the inside can’t often see them.

“Guys like me aren’t bad. We aren’t stupid. We are smart, we’re just smart at different things. Good at different things. And I can read, I read all the time. Give me any book or manual about work or engines and I know exactly what it’s saying.”

I agree, I said. School should be the place where everyone can be good and everyone can be smart. Schools can change to make sure the conditions are right for everyone to be perceived as good and smart – at different things.

“You agree with me then?” he asked.

For the first time I realized that he had been preparing for a debate, preparing to convince me that he was right and that schools (including educators like me) were wrong. He sort of knew me as a family friend, knew I was a college professor in another state, knew I was friendly enough but assumed I was like every other teacher he had come across in his life – in line with the school way of categorizing and labeling and accelerating and decelerating and only caring about how fast someone learns to read and how well they do on tests.

Yes I agree with you.

“Is it changing then? I mean, are schools changing now and not doing those things?” he asked.

Unfortunately not most schools – but a lot of people are trying to make changes, I said.

“Are you teaching the new teachers to be different?” he asked.

I am trying. One thing I do is have my students read chapters and books about motorcycle repair, waitressing, plumbing, and carpentry.

The first hint of a smile spreads across his face, “You do?”

Yeah. Most teachers don’t understand the intelligence and creativity it takes to work on cars, build things, work in service industries. I hope that if they understand more about intelligence and creativity in these ways they might recognize every student’s amazing potential.

We smile silently for awhile and I look away unable to stare at the deep emotional scars this man has carried with him for all these years.

“The other day I was cleaning out my garage and found a sign my mom gave me when I was younger. It says, “God don’t make junk,” and it has a picture of a little boy on it. She gave that to me. She knew the teachers thought I was stupid and she didn’t want me to think I was stupid. That’s tough.”

More silence and a wave of guilt and shame washes over me. Why do I choose to be a part of an institution that inflicts just as much pain and damage as it does joy and optimism?

I often tell my undergraduates, “Just please don’t be the teacher that sends the forty-year-old to therapy.” It’s kind of a joke and kind of not – it’s a reminder that what we do and say to people today impacts their lives in ways that we will never fully understand, and at the very least, we should aim to do no damage.

But guys like him don’t go to therapists.

They’re tough guys. Working guys. Family guys. Hanging out with the buddies and a beer guys. Mowing the lawn on Saturday morning guys.

Guys like him don’t talk about a second grade teacher and a middle school teacher and everyone in between and how those school years damaged them in irreparable ways and about a poster their mother gave them in elementary school to combat the teachers at school and how that poster just happens to still be in the garage when they’re middle-aged guys.

Until they do.

Until he does.

Then a tear glistens and escapes and a strange specimen of a woman asks, “Can I write your story?” and he agrees, if I think it will help someone.

He nods his head, “Just one person, you know. If you can just help one person know that he is smart and can do anything he puts his mind to. Or just help one teacher who can then make a difference to so many people. Then that’s worth it.”

I sat there recalling the stories told by Native Americans who experienced the Indian Boarding Schools and how they cried, sobbed, and revealed so much pain and anxiety because of their experiences in those educational institutions.

I imagined what we might learn from a 2-hour special of guys like him looking straight into the camera and telling educators how they had them wrong all those years – had it all wrong – and how teachers’ perceptions drilled holes through their dignity and confidence and courage and potential.

Perhaps I’ll work on a bigger project sometime soon, but for now, maybe a glimpse of one guy’s story might just get someone’s attention.