Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, Kirsten Olson and I will start a conversation called “Permission to Speak” on Saturday, January 28th, 2012, from 1:00 to 2:30 PM ET.

Mennoo Rami and I will host a hack jam on Sunday, January 29th, from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM ET.

At each event, I will broadcast on UStream, as well as host a Google+ hangout so that people can join the session from afar as virtual participants. (In fact, Paul Oh will be facilitating from afar, as well).

The F2F conversation will be captured (hopefully) by my “place” in the hangout, and thus be broadcast as part of the hangout captured from my desktop.

I will send out hangout invites via Google+. Be sure to connect with me there if you’d like the chance to join in a hangout. You can connect from a computer or mobile device with a Google+ app installed.

You can watch the sessions on UStream at the Coöp channel if you have a PC.

If you have a Mac, use the link below to open a pop-up video to each session. Use the play control at the bottom of the window to begin streaming.

http://www.ustream.tv/embed/10249588
Live video from your iPhone using Ustream

Just remember to mute the video if you join the hangout

Please join in the fun, Coöp community and friends! More on what to expect can be found here.

Image courtesy of soot+chalk via Creative Commons

I wanted to share a recent post I wrote for Care2.com, an online community for people passionate about creating a better world. Here’s an excerpt from “The Power of Humane Education”:

“It really doesn’t take much to ignite a passion for good among youth and adults alike. A week of [teaching humane education] classes turned an eighth grade that, on Monday, did not feel particularly moved to action or responsible for helping to create a more just and humane world, into a deeply caring group that eagerly embraced a project to make a difference by Friday. I witnessed this transformation as each day brought out even more of the compassion and kindness they had identified on day one as qualities that were most important to them.

“What is harder than sparking concern, care, and commitment is sustaining and nurturing this energy; providing the breadth and depth of accurate information about entrenched and pervasive challenges; and teaching them critical and creative thinking skills so that they remain the bedrock of each individual’s approach to healthy, positive, wise changemaking for all.

“The issues that humane education addresses are complex, covering human rights, animal protection and environmental preservation. The solutions to the interconnected – and sometimes conflicting – problems in the world aren’t easy to determine or implement. A week-long humane education course may seem life-changing, but for many that change may fade unless it is fostered and nourished.”

Read the complete post.

For a humane world,

Zoe

Broken pencils and bitten rubbers scattered on my wooden desk while books sat quietly in my bag. The sound of flipping pages, falling rulers and sharpening pencils never seemed to abandon my ear. It’s another school day where the first row students actually paid attention and wrote down notes, students in the middle mostly observe the landscape as they look through the window curiously, and last but not least are students at the back seats carelessly take naps. It’s another school day.

Another school day literally translates to another failing education system. For decades now, presidents have stood up and gave speeches, suggested ideas and claimed money will fix the problem, but they were wrong. For decades now, students’ voices have not been heard because, quite simply, the adults are covering their ears. Here we are again attempting to start a learning revolution that would hopefully change this failing system that lets every student down.

It’s an ugly fact to think about schools as prisons with killing teaching methods. They became test preparation factories that test the process of memorization. Overcrowded classrooms, underperforming teachers and many more obstacles stand in the way, but it is no reason to give up.

Not only schools have let students down and failed them, but also it has taken away their passions, their desire to learn, and destroyed it. We made documentaries about this failing education system, we passed  acts like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, but there is one thing we didn’t do… We didn’t solve the problem. Yes, we know there are bad teachers, bad schools, bad system… then what?

Children are the future, if we hope to solve the world’s major problems, like it or not, we must provide successful educational opportunities for them. But ask yourself: How are we supposed to provide that when education is falling in the wrong hands?

How are you supposed to make a product better if you don’t receive a feedback from the customer? The same thing applies to education. We are missing a crucial voice, and it’s the voice of the customer… the student’s voice. How are teachers supposed to improve their teaching methods if they don’t sit down and talk to their students? The ugliest act you can do is leave students out of the debate.

Before purposing any solutions, or passing any acts that aren’t making any difference, let us think about what is important. Standardized testing, assignments and homework aren’t what we are looking for, we as students, are looking for something more valuable, something that from the moment we open our eyes, it fuels our existence, we are looking to pursue our passion and our curiosity.  We start as kids filled with dreams and high expectations, but unfortunately this excitement and spark of passion settles as the years go by. Instead of learning because we want to, we begin learning because we have to. We begin learning for the test.

This learning revolution shouldn’t be about spending more money to solve the problem, it’s about changing this education system to help us push every student to discover their passion and be brave enough to chase it, let us reawaken the slumbering curiosity in every student and help them to be the best version of themselves.

Our schools should produce students who can’t stop questioning the world around them.

My TEDxAjman Talk about learning:

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Line Dalile, 14 years old home-schooled student. A passionate writer, published author, blogger and poet. Interested in education reform and learning. Also a Tedx Speaker.

Website: www.writingisfun-linedalile.weebly.com

Is it surprising that we do not care about what we are taught in our classes? Is it surprising that we are not interested in learning? When someone has been forced to do something against their will for so many years there is bound to be some resentment. More than that, there is bound to be some resistance. The disengagement from school and learning is not some inherent quality of the adolescent; it is a very natural defense mechanism against control. Can you imagine someone saying, “I know I have no real choice in how I spend the majority of my time, and I couldn’t be more happy or grateful!” Disengagement is the only way to stay sane under a system of compulsory education. When most of our daily lives are controlled by others, the only way we can still be free is by not granting them respect or legitimacy. If we are able to say to ourselves, “None of this really matters. I may have to go to school, but at least I am free to hate it,” then the constant condescension from teachers can be shrugged off, and the lack of respect from school officials can be ignored.

The idea that human beings are naturally apathetic and have to be forcibly educated in order to be informed about the world around them is absolutely ludicrous. Were Plato’s ideas the product of an education system? Even Albert Einstein felt that schooling was hindering rather than helping his education. His younger sister said that during his adolescence “the style of teaching in most subjects was repugnant to him.” he also rebelled against “the systematic training in the worship of authority.” (Qtd. in “Einstein as a Student” by Dudley Herschbach). Of course, this is very clear to these so called “naturally apathetic” adolescents. If we were able to determine what we wanted to learn and asked people with more experience to help us learn it, we would be able to pursue our natural curiosity and desire to learn. An example of just such an education in practice was described in a March 14 story in the New York Times:

I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project….they were responsible for monitoring one another’s work and giving one another feedback. There were no grades. (find full article here)

The experiment was highly successful. The students were able to rekindle their love of learning and worked on several projects in academic areas that they were interested in. Of course, it is incredible that I am even having to cite evidence to prove this point, we are well aware that we are not apathetic zombies. We are free thinking human beings who aspire to freedom just as much as any adult under an undemocratic system. The real result of compulsory education seems to be to accustom young people from early childhood to arbitrary authority and a fundamental lack of democratic ideals. Not only that, it is also highly selective about what it chooses to teach. As Carol Black says in her essay Occupy Your Brain:

While your kids are very busy toiling over algebra and chemistry, international trade agreements are being forged and currencies are being manipulated by entities that most Americans don’t even know the names of, much less the inner workings of.  Kids are compelled to solve quadratic equations and write essays on Shakespeare, and they graduate without understanding how to calculate the interest on credit card debt or decode a mortgage agreement.  They learn an old fable called “How a Bill Becomes Law,” while corporate lobbyists draft legislation that will pollute their air and water, deny them health care and unemployment benefits, and put barely tested drugs on the market and genetically modified organisms in their food system. (Find full article here)

The public education system not only hinders our ability to be members of a democracy by accustoming us to unjustified authority, it also seeks to mask the undemocratic nature of society at large through the education which it forces us to ingest.  The public education system is part and parcel to many of the unjust systems criticized by the occupy movement.

Of course, against such a pervasive structure of oppression we are confronted with the problem of how to escape, how to be free. I believe the answer is simple–just leave, or better yet, take control of the school. Imagine a world where you can spend your time learning about what you love. Imagine a world where you invite adults to teach you. Imagine a world where you have the inalienable rights of a human being. This world can never be achieved as long as our education is dictated by a state hierarchy and their corporate partners. It is possible to drop out of school and teach yourself, in fact a realistic way that you can go about doing this can be found in books and magazines dedicated to the un-schooling movement such as The Teenage Liberation Handbook (pdf here). It is possible to determine your own education by dropping out and adopting an un-schooled or home schooled approach. However, more than just escaping the public school system we need to break it down. In the name of dignity, democracy, and real education high school students need a movement on the scale of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. We are free human beings; we should demand the right to teach ourselves.

Image courtesy of ralphunden via Creative Commons.

I wanted to share a recent post I wrote for Care2.com, an online community for people passionate about creating a better world. Here’s an excerpt from “An Eighth-Grader’s Letter to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook”:

This past week, I taught a humane education course to an eighth grade class in Blue Hill, Maine. The course focused on changemakers, people who work to transform unjust and inhumane systems into ones that are healthy, peaceful and compassionate.

On the first day of class, I had the students listen to an episode of This American Life, which aired an excerpt from Mike Daisey’s one-man show about the production of Apple products. Then I gave them a homework assignment to write to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, to share their thoughts, feelings and ideas. I wanted these students to have the opportunity to use their voice to help change this unjust and inhumane system, since they couldn’t use the power of their wallets to simply choose more humane electronics.

Below is just one of their letters. I hope it will inspire you to also use your voice to create change.

Read the complete post.

~ Zoe

We had 13 amazing posts this week including 4 great new ones on Sunday. I did not want any of them to get lost in the shuffle. I want to also highlight the work by some student voices, Jabreel, RadFAG and guest poster Adora Svitak. Please comment and join the conversation.

Thank you for a great week!

-David Loitz

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“Can we think like this everyday?” one student asked after a DFS lesson was co-taught with the classroom teacher and myself.

“I like this kind of learning.  There’s usually no connection between what we do in schools and the real world,” said another student.

“Man, this was fun!” shouted another student.

So, what got the students all excited to learn?  A simple debate protocol that has become a staple in some DFS classrooms.  We post a statement on the board and ask students to pick a position and self-facilitate a conversation between themselves.  The objective?  To reach a consensus based on seeking truth, not to be right.  The statement on the board during this lesson:

Everyone has equal access to the American Dream. 

The students had been reading Jubilee and starting a new novel, The Street.  The theme for this unit focuses on how the environment impacts the individual and vice versa.  The teacher had articulated some difficulty in getting the students to engage deeply and for an extended period of time.  It was after hearing this that we co-developed this lesson plan.

However, this wasn’t just any debate.  As I’ve written in past blog posts, what makes the difference during these debates is the live transcription of the student speech that we immediately use to evaluate the process of the student debates/discussions.  How were some students persuaded to change positions?  Who used strong arguments?  Was there any use of specific evidence?  How did we bring the world into the classroom?  What is the difference between opinion and fact?

Every time the live transcription of the debate happens (via projection if I’m typing it or using a document camera, like an ELMO, if I’m handwriting it), students, during the debate, will comment on the fact that their words are actually being documented.

“Oh, man!  She’s typing everything we’re saying!”

“Hey—will you type if I cuss?”

“Be quiet!  She’s writing down that we’re shouting!”

There is something that validates their words and actions by documenting it for all to see.  It’s not a memory and the data does not lie. Jake really jumped over the table.  Tiana was trying to speak but Mona interrupted her three times.  Mitch cussed three times during the debate and laughed about it with three of his friends in the back of the room.

In one classroom, when students were asked if they would like to have their transcript shared with the community (meaning printed and sent out to parents), the students collectively cringed and said no.

“That’s embarrassing.  We couldn’t even listen to each other.  If I read that—I wouldn’t send my kid here.”

This led to a conversation on how we could take our community in the classroom more seriously and students articulated clear action steps they could take to quickly improve their discussions.

Just like in life, sometimes all we need is someone to hold a mirror up to us which forces us to do some real thinking, learning and growing.

Casey K. Caronna

An education which denies the voices of youth can never benefit from their wisdom as to how to restructure it.

In many of the educational and teacher training programs I have been a part of, I’ve been frustrated by the intense focus given to preparing students for their academic futures (meaning standardized testing and ultimately college) while virtually none has been placed on creativity, question asking and critical thought. Indeed, if I were to take the training I had received from these programs at face value, I would understand my only duties as a teacher to be familiarizing myself with the state’s set curriculum, leading my students through each part of it in increments, and then assuring that they could correctly recall all the information therein when required to do so. In these same programs, when have I asked where students’ voices and ideas came into the curriculum, where their ability to process their own experiences and shape their own learning environment could take place, I was told there wasn’t time. There was an achievement gap to close, and our students were behind. We needed to prepare them to test well, enter into good schools, and succeed at the same levels as their wealthy, white counterparts. And besides, once they had cleared all the necessary hurtles, they would go on to college where they could engage in big picture, critical thinking. Our job was to get them there.

On the first day of school this past year, the sixth grade teacher in whose classroom I am interning sat all his students down in a circle to discuss what the goals of the year were going to be. “I don’t want anyone to ask me what they are going to need to know for seventh grade, or what they are going to need to know for high school,” he said. “My job is not to prepare you for seventh grade. My job is to help you be the best sixth graders you can be.” He went on to describe all the ways in which he hoped to build a community within his classroom, and that more than grades, more than achievement, creating a space which incorporated and supported everyone in their own learning processes was the students’ primary charge. The statement struck me as powerful at the time, but it wasn’t until very recently that I began to understand how radical it was. For imagining learning as something which is about empowering our communities in the present, not preparing individuals for the future, counters the swing of current reforms, acknowledges that critical thought should be a part of any education, and values the needs, ideas and voices of youth in the process.

In the past week alone, I have supported students as they’ve faced deportation, domestic violence, and poverty. I’ve watched them struggle with body image, racism, and drug addiction in their families. Posing questions to them over the course of my time as an intern, I have been floored on countless occasions by their insights on gender, class, language, culture, and the educational system itself. Yet in much of my training, when I have inquired as to how we as educators can not only support students as they wrestle with these systems, but engage their insights as a means of challenging them, I have been told that youth are not ready to grapple with such heavy issues. As a young educator, but also as a young person, it perplexes me that such astronomical expectations are placed on children outside of the classroom–namely, that they single-handedly navigate the world of injustice and inequity that we have created for them–yet they are coddled and belittled in spaces dedicated to learning. Why do we think students who live in public housing are not ready to talk about class? Why do we believe students who are already working multiple jobs are not mature enough to discuss global economy, and the redistribution of its resources?

When we pretend that children are just adults in hatching, waiting to become real participants in the world, we don’t merely take away their agency and lose out on their wisdom; we deny that they are already full participants in the world, on the front lines of the most critical struggles in modern history. Moreover, we rob them of global legacies of radical activism and community organizing which have been catalyzed and led by youth, with adults following their example. Traditional education is a hierarchy, and like all such systems, it is often those placed at the bottom who have the most knowledge of how that structure denies justice, and the most insights into what is to be done to change it. A radical education seeks to give youth a real voice, the ability to critique the systems of which they are a part, and the space to teach their communities what they already know of the world, and what visions they have to bring justice to it. It imagines youth as fully-realized global citizens, and as the present–not just the future–of our struggles for equity, peace and liberation.

At this point I’m willing to call this experiment a success with a  few provisos. First, the good. The writing I received from most students was far, far, FAR greater and more profound than I’ve seen from them… well, ever. (I teach in a small K-12 school and have the same students year after year.) This isn’t the difference between a grade 9 student and a grade 10 student, but leaps and bounds more sophisticated and more interesting than a simple year’s difference would indicate. One student chose to write a quasi-Lovecraftian story about a story that Christopher Columbus neglected to share with anybody else; another wrote a profound piece comparing Icarus’ arrogance to the behaviour of a teenager stealing his father’s truck and taking it for a joyride. I’ll admit that I never thought of Icarus’ and Daedalus’ relationship in this manner, and I learned something this semester. I love it when I learn something from a student!

Moreover, the short stories, poems, and essays that were written were almost error-free, and the students were excited about working – not every day, not every minute, but by and large they took the opportunity to write very seriously and produced risky, challenging, and engaging pieces that I enjoyed reading.

I can count on one hand the number of student-produced pieces that I personally enjoyed as a reader before this year.

Moreover, I received a higher level of engagement from the young men in my classes, the students who had been completely disengaged and almost completely unwilling to do anything in English last year. These guys worked harder than I had ever seen and produced pieces that were, again, much more advanced than last year, certainly more technically and qualitatively better than I would have expected.

There were a few drawbacks to this experiment. The first was my own frustration as a teacher while I was in class. I gave students most of the semester to work in-class, which gave me time to work one-on-one with students and help those who were struggling. At least, that was the plan. Very few students took the opportunity to conference with me during school, and I was left either sitting at my desk marking other assignments or futilely circling the classroom offering my services. They mostly chose to email me their questions, occasionally late at night after I had already gone to bed — and they needed answers NOW because they were working on an assignment and didn’t want to work for two hours and find out that they were doing it wrong!

Second drawback was classroom management issues. Gone were the frustrations of watching students interrupt me during a lecture, but in its place were students who were not using their class time wisely! They played games on their iPhones, talked, surfed the net, facebooked, and generally spent far too much time (in my opinion) goofing off instead of working. Every teacher instinct in my body cried out for me to correct this errant behaviour, but instead I pulled myself back and let them work it out themselves. Micromanaging students, although pleasant (ha!), doesn’t result in students learning how to motivate themselves. I saw this coming and mentioned it in my last post, but knowing and experiencing this are two profoundly different animals: one is meandering off in the distance, and I can just make them out playfully leaping and galloping out of the corner of my eye. The other, experiencing this occasional lack of motivation, is staring me in the face, breathing heavily right in front of my nose.

No, I didn’t just call my students “animals.” That was a metaphor.

These two drawbacks were minor. The final drawback, on the other end of the spectrum, was that a handful of students didn’t finish the course, and one student (sadly) turned in a portfolio consisting solely of work pulled from the internet. We’re a small school, and as a staff we’re able to catch problems early, rally around students, and pull them to the finishing line, sometimes with the students kicking and screaming. This time, there was no safety net, and some kids failed. I’m not happy about this, but I know that failing a course isn’t the end of the world. Moreover, most of these students knew that they hadn’t finished, and negotiated with me an extension into February, particularly those slated to graduate in June and wanted to walk across the stage with the students with whom they had schooled for the past twelve years. I don’t want to sweep away this drawback, but I’m cognizant as an educator that students do fail, that some students aren’t ready or willing to be intrinsically motivated. That’s okay. One of my students didn’t do any work last year when I taught her in a very traditional English classroom, and she didn’t do anything this semester, either. It’s the nature of the beast.

The whole experience was profoundly different than anything else I had done as an educator, and it’s made me realise that, particularly in senior high, students do not need a teacher in front of them to learn. What an obvious conclusion, and one that I had previously believed, but now I have the case studies to back up my belief. Imagine the ramifications: if students don’t need a teacher standing in front of them, lecturing at them for every minute of class time and then asking them to spit back the answers on a test, what could we do to schools to make them more efficient?

In my school division, we have fifteen schools. Six of those have senior high students, with populations ranging from 60 (that’s us!) to upwards of 400. If we were to expand this pilot project to the entire school division, we would only need perhaps three full-time senior high English teachers, down from ten or more. If all content was delivered electronically, and if these three teachers spent their time working one-on-one with students either locally or using telecommunications technologies (Skype, Facetime, telephone, email, instant messaging, even faxes), then this reduction would be completely possible.

It’s my belief that we could absolutely start designing schools and school divisions around the principle of drop-in centres of learning – the Netflix of education, if you will, as opposed to cable TV. (This is perhaps less offensive than the metaphor in my title, “the learning trough”, but then again I live in a rural community and a good percentage of my students do feed farm animals before they come to school in the morning…) Other schools are operating like this today. What will it take to start shifting education into the future, instead of clinging to ages-old models of learning that are ineffective, clunky, and not reflective of how people learn?