Star Wars Uncut & Schooling

Hardly an original observation I am about to make, yet it has slapped me afresh, so here we go!

Understanding the schooling paradigm-shift requires one to be a culture-watcher. It is the seismic changes in society which make the schooling system appear so anachronistic and functionally irrelevant. 

One such change: the rise in technologies facilitating collective action and intelligence.

The original technology that facilitated collective action and intelligence was money. Money sped up collective intelligence in a seismic fashion. 

Since I'm on clichés today let's mention Wikipedia. It runs itself. Hierarchies are artefacts that bubble-up from grassroots communities. Everyone chips in.

Money facilitated the 'division of labour'. I have an iPhone. No single person or business knows how an iPhone is made. Apple coordinated the design, but I doubt they know how to mine the materials or manufacture the plastics or silicon inside, and it's the army of poor at Foxconn that assembled it, in a factory assembled by other industries and experts. Every product or process in the modern world bubbles up out of a myriad of collective intelligences, forming meta-collectives, and meta-meta-collectives. 

I'm getting to Star Wars.

The mass media until the end of the 20th century consisted chiefly of one-to-many technologies. The printing press, radio, television, yadayadayada. 

The web has allowed the proliferation of many-to-many technologies. That is, collective intelligences. 

Endless funky web experiments have illustrated the phenomena. Check this fascinating investigation into Twitter rumours during the London riots and how the collective intelligence corrected misinformation.

I'm getting to Star Wars, ok?

Oh alright I'll cut to the chase.

The Star Wars Uncut project allowed anyone in the world to claim a 15 second excerpt from the Star Wars IV film and create their own version. The entire film has been sown back together again from these micro-remakes.

The result is bizarrely watchable and hilarious. Every 15 second cut has something unique and witty to bring to the party. Like so much of modern global-village life, it's a pot-luck lunch where everyone brings their best to the table. Contributing artists move between slapstick, irony, gravitas, intertextual references, and the absurd, so the resulting text has a density that is common and expected in the media nowadays. 

And it just made me think: our young people are growing up in an age where participation in collective intelligences is as natural as breathing. It wasn't so when I was a lad, but it is now.

Consider the 'technologies of schooling': classrooms, authority figures, timetables, reporting, yadayadayada. These are redundant technologies. They are the equivalent of a horse-and-cart, or a punch-card reader.

Schooling as we know it is an anachronistic technology.

It is only a matter of time before our collective intelligence puts in the bin in favour of a new process - a new sociological institution - that relies on emergent cooperation rather than hierarchical order.

And now for the show!  

Teaching is Traumatic

I'm sitting in a café with local colleagues Summer Charlesworth and Malyn Mawby. It's several days after the end of school term for 2011.

And I'm not sure how we got onto it, but I started expounding on my 'teaching is traumatic' theory. 

Summer recounts her reaction to this in a blog post, which I will quote at length here:

"When I first heard this statement, I had a physiological reaction. Maybe it was because I was tired, or maybe it struck a real chord as I’ve been working with pre-service and new teachers who I have watched struggle with fatigue and frustration, and I remember this  as I feel that I finally found my groove this year. Teaching is Traumatic in many ways, it’s true.  Our job is pretty high pressure and high stakes. Trauma reminds me of hospitals, and if you think about it school admin is much like the emergency ward. You can make a list of things to get done, but an incident may happen, or something needs you swiftly, and this means everything stops and all focus is on this unexpected event. It means lots of the creative, and the ‘to do’ work is done late into the night, into the weekends. We are dealing with raw human, heightened emotion every day."

How apt is that? That "school admin is much like the emergency ward"? There is a triage process where you decide which 5 out of the 100 things you wish to achieve will actually get done in your available 15 minutes.

The greatest layer of brutalisation, in my opinion, is the 'classroom management' paradigm, where 1 adult teacher is given 1 alotment of territory with 1 group of students, for 1 year at a time.

Tell me that doesn't sound like the premise for a Big Brother reality TV show? 

This scene from Summer Heights High sums it all up for me:

Teachers will recognise it as excruciatingly close to the bone. What does anyone expect will happen? It's the school machine that brutalises teachers and students alike. 

Many students emerge from the machine with subtle scarring that is still identifiable decades later. I've noticed it emerges at dinner parties when strangers discover I am a languages teacher. Invariably this triggers a reversion and they recount how they "Made their French teacher cry once." They've not re-processed this event properly since reaching adulthood. All they remember is the moment of triumph where they stuck it to THE MAN (or woman). 

It's human nature to kick against confinement. 

Teaching is traumatic. 

In their first and second years of teaching, teachers settle on coping mechanisms and classroom tactics that somehow WORK to allow them to survive. For some this means repeatedly nagging the kids into submission, reacting to nothing and tolerating very high levels of chaos, as if resigned to a perpetual tug of war over every little detail. Others climb and conquer Mount Classroom Management. Hardly a victory, to my mind, because order was never the litmus test for learning. (See www.anarchyinlearning.com for the counter-example... high disorder + high organic learning, but disorder does not equal chaos). 

So teachers find a way to cope. They define their own status quo. 

But they earned it at a cost. They survived their first years with tears. 

They cry at their desks. They go home and sleep 14 hours Friday evening and don't want to go out all weekend. They get grumpy at their loved ones and then feel like rats. I say they, and I mean me too, although for me, personally, it was a feeling like I had 'lost myself' somewhere in the day. It was all numbness.

Summer's blog post continues as an unfolding story of shifting from survival mode to thrive mode.

Her post deserves a close read to track the dynamics of the shift. Look at her vocabulary. It invokes the language of journey, of community, of connection, of meaning. 

I, too, found a path through, assisted greatly by online connections, wonderful, loving colleagues at my school, and a paradigm shift that has only intensified each year I have worked from 'school as a machine' to 'school as a village'.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic and your own journey.

Also, watch this space. I'm working very hard this very moment to put together an online mentoring program for 2012 designed to stare these issues directly in the eye. 

I am thinking it will:

- be spaced out over 6 months to allow slow, genuine growth.

- be accessible at multiple, flexible times via videoconferencing, and available worldwide.

- be modularised so people can dip in and out as suits the rhythm of their lives.

- mash up direct advice, and critical thinking, and small-group communities to share a journey together.

- confront all the faultlines we have to navigate, from school politics, to educational philosophy, to inner growth, to workflow and information management. 

- aim to nurture a savvy, resilient, leadership-orientated mindset that will stand colleagues in good stead for years to come, across multiple scenarios.  

I'll announce the details very soon. It will be a 'SCIL' thing, not something I am doing privately. I wonder if the idea appeals? I'd appreciate your thoughts as always. 

A Third Party Perspective / Join the Tribe

What would a visitor take away from your school after visiting for a few hours? Or a day?

Or a week?

Béa and Oliver Beste

Béa Beste visited my school, (Northern Beaches Christian School) in March 2011 for two days, and then returned with her husband Oliver for the best part of a week before Christmas. 

We bonded immediately as kindred spirits. Béa had, previously, launched a series of bilingual schools in Germany and was travelling the world seeking inspiration for her next idea: 'playducation'. Béa understands the implications of the attention economy; that engagement is everything, imagination all powerful, inspiration un-stoppable. I decohered somewhat in my last post about 'life is desire', but the point is simple: learning comes from internal impulses. 

Béa took a LOT of video footage over her week-long séjour at NBCS in November. 

A Third Party Perspective

She has since mixed down hours of footage down to a 7 minute video which is likely to become my definitive resource for communicating what we're on about. First of all, I'm grateful to Béa for her hard work! (Thanks Béa!)

It's fascinating for me to see what a visitor notices. What was most salient? What stood out, out of everything?

SCIL Special Agents of Change from Bea Beste on Vimeo.

Themes Explored:

A bold vision: turning school into an 'airport of learning', and radically rethinking timetabling and physical spaces.

Vision first, administration second, and distributed-leadership rather than top-down.

Get ideas from other learning spaces, that aren't schools. 

Dissolve walls, even between 'inside' and 'outside'.

Possibilities open up with 200 students + 8 teachers in 1 large space, especially 'culture of sharing'.

Students in the driving seat, including co-desigining learning landscape. 

Teacher PD must be inline with the same principles. PD isn't lead from the front but is grass-roots. e.g. teachers on field trips to visit businesses around Sydney and investigate modern spaces. 

Safe-failing, risk-taking culture.

Connecting teachers and students to the world via the internet.

Teaching the curriculum, but going FURTHER, and not letting it constrain the pedagogy.

Gathering a Tribe, Building a Movement

I am delighted by the video and by what Béa saw after a week embedded in our school.

You know what? Our connection with Béa and Oliver is so strong because we recognise we belong to the same tribe. 

The tribe is rethinking learning. I suspect that you, o ye humble blog reader, are part of our tribe too, by virtue of spending your SPARE TIME reading about learning. Why would anyone spend their SPARE TIME on this!? You could be at the beach! No one has asked you to do it. No one is accrediting you. No one is paying you extra. No one has given you permission, a mandate or a deadline.

It takes courage to be in this tribe. Most of us had 13 years schooling learning how to DO SCHOOL. Then in our teacher training were taught how to DO SCHOOL. When we watch soap opera school scenes we're reminded how to DO SCHOOL. 

Courage to be in this tribe, because we reject the well-worn DNA, resist its momentum, refuse its answers, recant its first principles - but if we leave the well-worn path, where will we go instead?

It's a conversation:

Learning Experiences from SCIL on Vimeo.

The tribe is open for membership, no interview required, no papework. It's conceptual: your name isn't written anywhere. It helps if you tweet or blog, but there's no rules, and there's not even a territory mapped out (we're the surveyors). You may be a lone ranger at your school. That's ok, you can be like a secret spy seeking to overthrow the ancien régime from the inside, lighting a little fire in your own backyard.

If you're in the tribe, wave at me, won't you? Leave a comment and say g'day!

P.S. Keep your eye on SCIL in 2012 - we're keener than ever to help build steam in the transformation movement. 

/GAT Project/ Google 20% Rule In School

/GAT Project/ Concluding Post 2011: "Boiling Pot" Edition

First-time readers: ‘GAT Project’ is our attempt at applying the Google 20% rule to school – no program, assessments, no teacher talk, no predefined curriculum, every student a different direction. For 6 months I’ve been working with Talar Khatchoyan to run a pilot project and see if we can grow it. See previous posts here to get up to speed.

THE CONCLUSION TO OUR INITIAL 6-MONTH PILOT: 

The Granny Cloud Worked a Treat (although it was sans grannies)

As we hoped, industry experts emerged from our wider school community and gave of themselves, not only visiting the school to tutor the students, but also staying in email and phone contact with the students:

Lee Romer from Lee Media Design helping Sarita choose a color scheme for her anti-slavery campaign website.

Ex-cricketer and published author Neil Marks talks Peter through the writing and publishing process.

Steve Mansfield, with a degree in photography, explores the implications of eye biology for photo editing and filtering with Hugh and Daniel.

The Students Created Wonderful New Things and Learned a Stack

They did really well, especially considering they only really had about 20 hours class time in our small-scale pilot.

Hugh's Photographs

Daniel's Photographs

Sarita's Anti-Slavery Website

Peter's WW2 Pacific Articles: article 1, article 2, article 3, Doolittle's Raids

Absent Katrina's or Dominic's novels, Nick's Tropfest entry can't be released until after Tropfest, & Jarrod and Jayme's film coming soon.

Tom's robot is an absolute marvel, because he decided to build it out of recycled parts and scrap metal:

Don't be distracted by the yellow robot also in the video. His project is completely separate from that kit robot.

Tom explains how he found and chose the parts for his robot here:

Another two students, Morgan and Cody, had set their hearts on building "a robot that can find red objects". Cody's expertise was coding in Python, Morgan would build the robot itself. 

This is their end product. I had a red shirt on and they got it to chase me around the room!

Novel-writing, WW2 articles, photography, robots, anti-slavery campaign. The only thing that's missing is an expert teacher orchestrating. 

The /GAT Project/ in 2012

Talar has now written a kind of ‘GAT Syllabus’ complete with OUTCOMES (that’ll bring us some respectability!) reminiscent of Dan Buckley’s PbyP pathways (see p36 here) that somehow cover all student directions ('student pursues creativity' sort of thing). In 2012 we're forging ahead and increasing the time from 3 * 75 minutes to 5 * 75 minutes a fortnight (about 13% of weekly lesson time). We have about 16 students and I'll keep blogging.

Boiling Pots and Fires in Bellies

I once said something, then forgot I said it, and then Andrew Jeppeson reminded me, and I thought ‘gosh that’s so true’. So I’ll say it again now so I don’t forget it:

“Student engagement covers over a multitude of sins.”

This principle applies in any situation and in a much broader form. Let me rephrase it more simply:

“Life is desire.”

I mean “Life is desire, not obligation”.

You’ll need to define and redefine ‘desire’ in order to make this statement viable. It’s not too hard to subsume obligation into desire as a subset, i.e. I desire to do what I believe I ought to do (obviously true, since who can enjoy a cup of tea while there is washing waiting to hang out?)

The schooling machine tells students they ought to do well by the school’s own terms. Kindergarten kids wish to please, but it’s the ones who succeed early who embrace the ought with all their might. The ones who fail slowly give up, or find other ways (class clown/rebel leader/bully/social butterfly) or more likely in a tapestry of all of the above in rhythms and seasons too fluid to define.

Traumatic Schooling

How many times have I met someone new, and when they hear I’m a teacher, all their school-trauma plops out of them at me, still un-processed, un-healed; still childlike, as parts of their psyche still throb with the hurt of 13 years in a system that disapproved. If they didn’t desire they wouldn’t hurt.

See how obligation is a subset of desire?

Life is Desire

Life is desire.

Obligation is a socially constructed desire. It happens all the time, from momentary table conversations (‘pass the salt’) to nation-cultures (‘We need you!’). Our consciences are like a bubbling pot of oughts.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. 

If we look underneath underneath the bubbling pot there’s a fire.

The fire is desire. It precedes obligation, even though it may channel its energy through it.

It pulls us forward. 

It shifts and it flickers. It rages and dies, and rages again.

Rages, rages, against the machine,

or for the machine. 

Or against the dying of the light.

Or bizarrely, for the dying of the light, as if thirsty for death, as if it turned in on itself. 

Who is running your life? Whose terms? Whose agenda? Who do wish to please?

 “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords” – Kent Brockman 

Have you met that guy who knows who he is and what he stands for? Have you ever tried to stop her? Did you have any luck?

And I’ll stop right there, mid-thought, baffled as usual. 

One thing clear:

In the /GAT Project/ it has sure been nice to warm our hands by the fire. 

This is the 7th in an ongoing series of blog posts entitled /GAT Project/ They will appear regularly at this website, categorised under 'GAT Project'. If you'd like to receive future posts, you can:

- click here to subscribe to Steve's blog in general by email, or here in a reader.

- click here http://www.happysteve.com/contact/ and indicate 'GAT Posts Only' in the message body - I'll email you when I update the GAT Project just for the duration of the series.

- or regularly check this link for new posts: http://www.happysteve.com/blog/tag/gat-project

UK ICT in Languages Joe Dale visits Australia - April 2012

Here is a super opportunity for language teachers. 

Joe Dale, a language-teacher-turned-consultant from the UK, will be in Australia for most of April 2012 and is available to travel pretty much anywhere to work with you! (Particularly good news if you're in regional Australia!) 

I chatted with Joe over Skype for a good hour the other day and was excited to hear his plans. 

Don't know Joe? Read more about him here: http://joedale.typepad.com/about.html and his general website here: http://joedale.typepad.com/ Listen to an interview on the Australian Edtech Crew podcast here. You'll see immediately that he is all about serving colleagues with ideas, information and news, with an eye for practicalities and particularly extensive experience with ICT for language learning.  He is gentle and encouraging. 

Invite him to your school for a day: he'll inject confidence, creativity and energy! Contact him here.