Making in the classroom is a political stance

When I talk about the maker movement in schools I do talk about tools and spaces, but I try to make the point that it’s about giving agency to kids in a system that most often considers students to be objects of change, rather than agents of change.

One of our reasons for writing the book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom  was to try to create momentum for the return of progressive principles of education, principles that have been yanked away from kids and teachers by politicians, corporations, and Silicon Valley gurus who think they know how to fix everything with an app.

I think this is a historic time, a second Industrial Revolution, where everything is coming together right at the right time. And like the Industrial Revolution, it will not be just a change in technology, but will resonate in politics, culture, economics, and how people live and work worldwide.

Politics, power, and empowerment
People may not think of the Maker Movement or making in the classroom as a political stance, but they both are.

Politics isn’t only about who gets elected, or the day to day “action” on Capitol Hill, it’s a negotiation of power in any relationship – who has it, who can use it, and over how many other people. The Maker Movement is about sharing ideas and access to solutions with the world, not for money or power, but to make the world a better place. It’s about trusting other people, often people you don’t know, to use these ideas for good.

Making in the classroom is also about power and trust, and perhaps in an even more important way, because it’s about transferring power to a new generation. Young people who are the ones who will take over the world in the not too distant future. And if the learner has agency and responsibility over their own learning, they gain trust, not just the trust of the adults in the room, but trust in themselves as powerful problem-solvers and agents of change.

It is a political statement to work to empower people, just as it is a political statement to work to disempower people. That holds true for all people, not just young people. Being a helpless pawn in a game controlled by others is disempowering, whether you are a teacher, student, parent, or citizen of the world. Deciding that you trust another person enough to share power, or even more radical, give them agency over important decisions, is indeed political.

Making is not only a stance towards taking that power back, as individuals and as a community, but also trusting ourselves and each other to share that power to create, learn, grow, and solve problems. Empowering students is an act of showing trust by transferring power and agency to the learner. Helping young people learn how to handle the responsibility that goes along with this power is the sensible way to do it. Creating opportunities to develop student voice and inspiring them with modern tools and modern knowledge needed to solve real problems is part of this job.

And by the way, you can’t have empowered students without empowered teachers. Script-reading robot teachers will not empower students. We have to fight against the devaluation of teachers, and the devaluation of kids as cogs in some corporate education machine. We can do this, we can change minds, even if it’s hard, even if it seems impossible. We just have to do it anyway. That’s politics.

Education will change, how it changes is up to us
For education to change, it can’t just be tweaks to policy, or speeches, or buying the new new thing — teachers have to know how to empower learners every day in every classroom and be able to make it happen. Leadership is creating the conditions for this to happen.

Let me say it again – There is no chance of having empowered students without empowered teachers — competent, professional, caring teachers who have agency over their classroom and curriculum – who are supported by their leaders and community in that work.

So the question is – can the maker movement really have this kind of impact on schools? Or will this fade into a long line of fads and new-new things that promise educational revolution without actually requiring any change at all.

I see this as a singular time in history. There is an opportunity to leverage momentum swinging away from the testing idiocracy, away from techno-centric answers — to making education better with thoughtful, human answers.

Am I really saying that technology is the way to make education more human? Yes – but only if the technology is used to give agency to the learner, not the system.

I see a convergence of science and technology, along with the power of networks to connect people who are solving problems both global and local. I see people who are fed up with consumerism, opting out of corporate testing schemes – people who no longer have to wait for answers or hand outs from the government, from a big company, or from a university. They can figure it out, make it, and share it with the world.

Why is it different this time?
But haven’t there been a thousand “revolutions” that failed to change education? Why do I think this time is different? Why is this movement going to not be another failed attempt to “fix” education? Because my hero, Seymour Papert, the father of everything that’s good in educational technology, said so.

In his 1998 paper Technology in Schools: To Support the System or to Render it Obsolete, Papert said that the profound ideas of John Dewey didn’t fail, but were simply ahead of their time. Experiential learning is not just another school reform destined to failure because three reversals are taking place right now.

The first reversal is that children can be part of the change. Papert called it “kid power”.

Schools used to demand that students meet standards. But the time is coming when students will demand that schools live up to the standards of learning they have come to expect via their personal computers, even their phones. As Mimi Ito has written about so persuasively, more and more young people learn independently and follow their own passions via online sites and communities, and most of them are NOT run by traditional educational institutions.

The second reversal Papert identifies is that the computer offers “learner technology” instead of “teacher technology.” Many attempts at inserting technology into classrooms simply reinforce the role of teacher (video lectures, Khan Academy), replace the teacher (drill and practice apps, computerized testing), or provide management tools for the teacher (LMS, CMS).

But now we have affordable computers, sensors, and simple programming tools that are LEARNER materials. This transition, if we choose to make the transition, Papert says “…offers a fundamental reversal in relationships between participants in learning.”

The third reversal is that powerful ideas previously only available in abstraction, or in high level courses can now be made understandable for young children. Much like learning a foreign language in early years is easier, we can help students live and breathe complex topics with hands-on experiences.

I believe that this is overlooked in much talk about making in education. While I love the awesome “get it done” Macgyver attitude of the maker movement and the incorporation of artistic sensibilities like mindfulness – I think these are secondary effects. The maker movement is laying 21st century content out on a silver platter – things that we want kids to know, things kids are interested in, but are hard to teach with paper and pencil. Content and ideas that are the cornerstone of learning in the 21st century – from electronics and computer programming to mathematical and scientific concepts like feedback, 3D design, precision, and randomness – can be learned and understood by very young children as they work with computational technology.

But this third reversal may be the most difficult – these ideas were not taught to parents and teachers when they were children. Convincing parents and teachers that today’s children need to understand these new, fundamentally different concepts may be the hardest work of all.

No doubt, there is hard work to be done
The strategy for overcoming the last obstacle brings us back to politics and back to empowerment.

It means that for those of us who want to change education, the hard work is in our own minds, bringing ourselves to enter intellectual domains we never thought existed. Challenging conventions and cultural institutions that are ingrained in us in childhood. Sharing power with others, including students who might not do exactly what we expect them to do. Being willing to change everything, even when we feel we can change nothing.

The deepest problem for us is not technology, or teaching, or school bureaucracies – it’s the limits of our own thinking.

Politics is action, but everyone doesn’t have to be doing the same thing
What can we do when each one of us is in our own unique situation, each of us has a different position on the levers of power, and each of us sees with our own lens? Actually, I believe that this diversity offers strength, because no one person can do everything. Everyone has a part to play to take back the power of learning and create classrooms and other learning spaces where teachers and students are empowered and acknowledged as the center of the learning process.

And that, I believe, is ultimately a political act that will make the world a better place.

Helpful bullying and cyberbullying model policies and resources from Washington State

The State of Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) has a very helpful website on resources for schools around the issues of youth online safety and bullying.

  • Resources on bullying and harassment
  • Slideshows useful for staff training
  • Model policies and procedures
  • Helpful links and reports

Of course these resources conform to Washington State laws, but might be a helpful starting point for any district looking for guidance in these matters. OSPI has recently updated these resources to reflect the latest legal advice for schools and a balanced view of bullying, cyber and otherwise, without scare tactics. Their approach is a cycle of “prevention, preparedness, response, recovery” rather than waiting for a crisis to strike. Good advice!

This link is courtesy of Mike Donlin, a program supervisor with the OSPI School Safety Center focusing on bullying & cyberbullying prevention and intervention. Previously, Mike was a consultant to the Seattle Public Schools’ prevention-intervention services, and spearheaded creation of a new cyberbullying curriculum for Seattle teachers.

It’s great that Washington’s OSPI is acknowledging that student’s digital lives are important and schools need policies that teach and inform, not ban and vilify.

Sylvia

Technology policy and human nature

“Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!

Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.

Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!

Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need”

From an e-mail sent home from a New Jersey middle school principal attempting to curb cyberbullying at his school (source)

Changes in technology mirror changes in society and culture, and can impact schools in a number of ways. Some schools hide their heads in the sand. Some take extreme stands like the principal quoted above. Some attempt to address the issues more evenhandedly, even though the law is not clear, nor is the “right” thing to do always obvious.

Schools try to create policies to address issues of cybersafety, security, fair use, and other new issues brought up as technology changes. But these are not actually policy issues, any more than cyberbullying is a technology issue.

People have difficulty making a choice when presented with too many options. And schools are collections of people, and to make it more complicated, people who do not have ultimate authority since they have to answer to parents, the community, school boards, district, city, state, and national oversight.

I just read a study that said that when people do make a choice from among equal options, afterwards they realign their thinking to elevate whatever choice they made to be the best one. We’ve all seen this, once a school policy gets created, it’s hard to change people’s minds. It’s not just that it’s a lot of work to re-do policy, it’s also that once you do the work, your mind creates the illusion that the work and choices you’ve made are the best and most valuable.

As schools face cyberbullying, sexting, fair use, online security, etc. they see a confusing array of policy, tradition, legal, moral and ethical concerns. When confused, people retreat from the threat. Then once that choice to retreat is made, even if they know it’s not optimal, they remain stubbornly wed to that choice.

Julie Evans of Student Speak-Up shared this insight last year after her focus groups with students said that teachers who got training about the Internet started using it less. Confusion creates support for limitations, and those limitations get set in stone. It’s human nature.

To me, this makes the task to involve schools in making informed choices regarding technology policy even more urgent.

The problem with this principal’s stand is not that he’s wrong. In fact, he’s probably right. If he had a magic wand and could actually make parents stop their children from texting and accessing the Internet, and the children actually stopped, and we rolled the clock back to 1970, we could just go back to the good old days of kids harassing each other in person.

The problem with this principal’s plan is that it won’t work. We simply can’t put this genie back in the bottle. We HAVE to address the issue of digital citizenship in the real climate that children actually live in.

This is a floodgate well and truly open, whether or not you declare it closed.

Internet safety – fear tactics don’t work

via NetFamilyNews

Last week Chairman Julius Genachowski unveiled the children-and-family part of the FCC’s universal broadband plan, designed to enable, among other things, 21st-century education. There’s just one problem: Schools have long turned to law enforcement for guidance in informing their communities about youth safety on the Net, broadband or otherwise, and the guidance they’re getting scares parents, school officials, and children about using the Internet.

Read the rest of this article from Net Family News Major obstacle to universal broadband & what can help for the real facts about Internet safety.

Ann Collier has collected a compact list of resources that YOU NEED today about a new approach called the “social norms” approach, used by health professionals to “identify, model, and promote the healthy, protective behavior.”

The scare tactics and stranger-danger approach prevalent over the last decade is “doubly problematic”, says Ann. It not only fails to change behavior, it hampers the efforts of educators to integrate technology into meaningful, relevant learning experiences for youth that WOULD change behavior.

The good news is this appears to be changing, and kudos to the FCC for seeing this so clearly – the bad news is, there’s still a long way to go to reach most K-12 schools.

Sylvia

Students are not the enemy

The upcoming NYSCATE conference includes this session.

The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters

So this session (by a security software vendor) sets up students as the  enemy. The job is not to educate the people who come to this session or help schools provide the best educational Internet experience (by those same evil students.) No, the idea is to create a climate of fear, demonize students, and imply that there is a war between students and IT administrators.

And why not? You need weapons to fight a war. Fear the children, buy our stuff.

Kids are not the terrorists, kids and teachers are being terrorized by outrageous IT policies and vendors eager to stir up fear to make a profit. Sad.

Sylvia

Student Voice in Ontario, Canada

In Ontario, Canada, every school board is required to include representatives from the local Student Senate, which is composed of student trustees from each high school in the board. The student trustees represent students and ensure that students’ ideas and opinions are heard at the school board level. These student representatives have joined together to form the Student Trustee Organization which is, according to their website, “the largest student stakeholder in education and the voice for the student vision” and they act as consultants at the provincial Ministry of Education level. This is probably one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to listen to and heed “student voice” in the development of education policy, and over the years, they have impacted some major school reform efforts.

Read the whole blog post from Susan Einhorn, Anywhere, Anytime Learning Foundation (AALF) Executive Director, Student Voice, Democracy and 1-to-1.

Sylvia

There’s still time for Student Speak Up

Speak Up BannerJust a reminder, Speak Up 2008 is going on through Dec 18, 2008.

Since inception, Speak Up, the national online research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow, has collected the viewpoints of over 1.2 million students, educators and parents on key educational issues and shared them with local and national policy makers.

This is your opportunity to have your students, teachers, administrators and parents participate in the local and national dialogue about key educational topics including: technology use, 21st century schools, science and media/information literacy.

For registration information, click here.

Students, Teachers, Parents and Administrators Speak Up!

Speak Up BannerAnnouncing Speak Up 2008: Oct 27 – Dec 18, 2008

Since inception, Speak Up, the national online research project facilitated by Project Tomorrow, has collected the viewpoints of over 1.2 million students, educators and parents on key educational issues and shared them with local and national policy makers.

This is your opportunity to have your students, teachers, administrators and parents participate in the local and national dialogue about key educational topics including: technology use, 21st century schools, science and media/information literacy.

For registration information, click here.