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Seeds

May 20, 2013 by admin middlegrounds

At the rise of today, and after a long and wonderful day in our vegetable garden prepping and planting, I watched as my wife and co-conspirator did something that reminded me of how wondrous learning environments are designed.

Design can be many things to many people and the at times worry laden “field” of educational design takes into account the cultural, corporate and confused landscape of “education” with an engineers eye and an activists heart, often to good ends. Learning in many places (I will not list here) shows progress, smiling children and overall good results. However, the best results, and we all know this, come from something more organic than even the best design plan.

Back to the land (in this case our organically certified property that we lease to some of the most amazing organic farmers and try to farm ourselves), and my wife. I spent the day prepping beds, raking and honing some of the best soil in Maine….it will grow amazing vegetables if tended well. No chemicals, no water (seriously) and little interference tell of much understanding and planning year after year….good results. My wife though, always has a way of bypassing all of the planning and just planting the seeds.

On this day, she emptied out a compost bin on a mostly tilled piece of pasture near our garden beds. Its important to know that I have been worried over this piece of land as it was planted but untended last year (read re-pastured) and has had one disc and one till this year (still a frontier). No matter, out came the rich compost-ish material: some soil but also egg shells a few carrot bits and some other still showing things (not totally “cooked” at all). She then proceeded to gently mix in some soil from the area near the pile. It looked messy, disheveled and then…. then she planted seeds.

No this is not the first time she has done this and yes it is second nature to her, passed down from a line of powerful and practical women and their gardens–and it works every time but it always takes me by pleasant surprise. For out of this pile of mixed and mashed freedom will come our best and sweetest melon of the year, the pumpkin that makes us all gasp…..

I sat and watched, then after all was well finished and I remained in the field, I looked at the pile and thought of the best learning experiences I have had with communities of kids. Should they have grown to what they were, did I have a plan or design….( was the soil prepared enough)? I can only say that I trusted the seeds, and the environment found–mashed-up and perhaps even unsightly (you do remember the last time you heard the *sound* of learning or looked deeply at the kids as they interacted? That sweet and tad bit chaotic sound and sight….). These times, yield the most growth, the sweetest moments, and the lasting bonds.

A wondrous learning environment is often one that emerges, with our care as adults. Our care in letting go of our worry and will to control, our importance in knowing what “works”, or what history says will work “always”…. For just as those seeds will grow wild, they will grow because a gentle bravery bucked all of horticulture and believed in the ability of seeds and freedom at one moment in time.

On Mutation in Education

May 14, 2013 by admin middlegrounds

Mutation in Education¹

Focus

The Individual

In the 21st century, the individual is the kernal of energy for educational design.

Question

Who are you? What do you need?

Two questions that drive education at the root and rhizomatic levels. Schools have not been tasked with these questions in the past at more than a philosophical level (there are distinct examples otherwise most certainly).

Problem

Education–>>Content–>>Hours | Resources and assets needed for each individual.

A premium puzzle exists within this design.

Education is multifaceted–culture-as-local space blends with a global civic culture born of the networked world. The individual as interdependent and connected part of the world.
Content drives education, be it pure experience or didactic instruction, content is what we as humans intake and produce in organic realms of design, iteration, understanding and beyond in cycles.
For schools and society at present hours matter. How long someone needs to spend on any given content is important for both progress and leisure. Schools need to understand the fluidity of time and its discontents. Ubiquity in learning requires a very different conception of “scheduling”.

Once education, content and hours are considered in design, schools must look at the resources and assets necessary to see education as an ecology.

Discussion

What would need to happen to realize this mutation in your learning community?

¹ Distilled from ongoing conversation and deliberation with Shoshana Zuboff, Jim Maxmin, Grant Litchman and a very important roundtable discsussion on Lake Damariscotta, ME this spring.

Mobile Learning: Education and Adaptation

May 9, 2013 by admin middlegrounds

A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.

John Dewey 1916

The quote above was prominent on the new JISC Mobile Learning InfoKit.

Backpacks, Bow Ties and Beyond

April 7, 2013 by admin middlegrounds

Backpacks

I can still remember the rain drenched afternoon I realized I would devote my professional life/life to young people and education. My wife and I were leading six students in the remote backcountry of Alaska’s Chugach Range. At a river’s edge 12 miles from the last human sighting (fairly good considering seeing a human at all was rare) I waded in to test the crossing. On the other side of the river (still miles away) was a rare trapper’s cabin that I had (still) not made it to in my travels in Alaska. I “knew” that these dedicated 14-16 year olds would have “the experience of a lifetime” there. At midstream in the river I was waist deep in the river torrent shouldering a full Dana Designs Arcflex Astralplane Overkill pack and (at that time of my life;))built like a solid piece of muscle–it was unsafe…. but I wanted the cabin. But as I glanced back at my group on the shore I let go of “my” world forever and looked into the eyes of learners for the first time. What did I see? A group of cold, scared, able, intelligent, caring and wonderful young people looking at me seeming to say, “alright we will follow you….”. I moved back to them from the torrent and words came out that were newly natural: “this is not going to work”. Instead of testing my W-EMT by courting disaster with kids washed down a wild Alaskan river, we set up tarps on a river bar in the rain and ate burnt beans (yes I also cooked that night)….and thankfully were avoided by thousand pound brown bears. As we ate, I said the words that changed my life forever….”let’s plan what we are going to do from here-together”. We had no schedule when I dropped mine, and beyond the obvious considerations of safety and health they were given the power to learn for their own sake. In the future, I co-designed all of my wilderness programs and programs of any kind with learner control at the center. I became an educator.

Bowties

Fast forward to my “classroom” experiences. I have learned little about young people in the structure of schools. I have learned to be pained by what I have seen as “schooling” (from schedules to carrot and stick approaches in curriculum), watched confusion and complexity soak up the time and hearts of caring adults and young people….. I will stop here because you know these issues, they are a litany of “softballs” thrown in education– they are the “cabins across the river” in education. What did I do? I looked at the young people at the edge of new rivers. I encouraged learning communities that did not have the boundary of the classrooms assigned, I refused to numerically judge students. Instead, I saw the internet as a ubiquitous learning environment. I did then what is now called flipping, blended learning, and ePortfolio assessment. I needed to make learning as ubiquitous as I could, because I saw those eyes looking at me again and again–”alright we will follow you….”. I gave and still give the freedom to students to tell me and their learning communities about their lives, weaving that life into the history, geography, global studies, information studies and interdisciplinary projects we undertake. I didn’t give grades, instead narratives and facilitated constant feedback through peer assessment. I could not do this all in the school structure. I had to invent a wilderness experience on the internet. So with some luck, Moodle then Mahara, Basecamp, blogs, Twitter, Project Foundry and more we built communities that were integrative and start with the question “lets plan what we are going to do from here-together”.

Beyond

Where we go from our places of Backpacks or Bowties is vital. Private school, public school, unschool, homeschool, other programs aside, we have a mission to look into the eyes of the young people who have either decided or been compulsed to learn with us. Your choices as adults and educators intensely matter and you will be challenged by school and at times even the students who have grown comfortable in the ease of traditional schooling. The challenge is worth it.

My reflection here comes after meeting Deb Meier for the first time last week. Deb is a champion of democratic education and a wise, wise elder in our collective community. Her talk was an amazing blend of her common material, but also wildness. After a long pause in her speech and seeming to drift with thought she said simply: “our job as educators is to help create unconquerable humans”. Yes, unconquerable…., the words and meaning of these words are like a fresh mountain air to me. Will the “beyonds” you design help create unconquerable humans? Mine will. But regardless of what you decide to do, please always look back, see the young people you have dedicated your life to and I hope you hear yourself say “let’s plan what we are going to do from here-together”.

Mutation in Education1