After a core design of what Global Civ was to be , I sought a next generation developer.  That young person would give feedback and create for what was then a new organization The Institute for Global Civic Culture. Instead of the informal inputs I thought would occur with young people, I was incredibly fortunate that 15 year old Jake Maxmin entered the design process directly and became a full time student co-founder and designer.  Three years later, Jake is off to Georgetown and I sense a major chapter in my research and praxis about to iterate. In this first post on Global Civ I offer a few “views” from the eLearning Nexus (a Mahara instance that served as a learning portal for the project).

The North American Experience Syllabus From the syllabus:

“In this project we will learn about place through North American culture and history.  By  exploring  the relationship between landscape and the North American Identity we will seek to understand how different peoples have encountered, experienced, and represented North America from 10,000 years ago to contemporary times. How have the experiences of North American shaped the places in North America? How has the North American’s understanding of society, environment, and economy shaped a sense of who they are and how they impact an ecoregion?”

Global Civ Fieldwork (An Example) Global Civ experimented with Mobile “fieldwork” based in part on university anthropology fieldwork forms applied to specific settings.

Global Civ 21st Century Literacies (A Student Perspective) This work was based on the Institute for Global Civic Cultures Learning Ecology Framework created in the original design,

“an approach to learning embodied in an integrated and integrative curricular core will be intensified through eLearning. This nexus between highly student centric curriculum and eLearning will provide the learning community with a new learning ecology. This ecology will allow young people and their communities both local and global to connect in authentic, effective and exciting ways.”

“Project based and collaboration rich software such as the Mahara, 37 signals, and Elluminate will enable our learning spaces to have a flexible web 2.0 enabled system that work within Global Civ’s many project based learning endeavors. Throughout the first year of operations and then on a continual basis, the whole community of Global Civ will find and validate new eLearning tools for the proliferation of our learning spaces. This integrative process will allow for young people to use and develop the technologies they see as integral to their learning.

“Global Civ’s learning ecology will provide the frameworks necessary to utilize mLearning in expansive ways. Mobile Learning using, iPhones, netbooks, and other portable tools will offer the learning community chances to take learning in highly dynamic situations to a new level.”

- Channing

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.

“Imagining how events could be otherwise than they are is a hallmark freedom and power of human beings. Making social imagination work for us involves us in new concepts and principles, in new ways of using our minds to grasp complexities we do not yet comprehend. Thinking this way helps us construct new social realities both locally and globally. Social imagination is not merely for the sake of of academic knowing; it must include our feelings, and it must include our acting.”- D. Bob Gowin in Boulding (1998)

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.

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.

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”.

“May the weary traveler turn from life’s dusty road and in the wayside shade, out of this clear, cool fountain drink, and rest” R. E. Speer, “Robert Burns,” Nassau Literary Magazine 43 (1888): 469.*

Today, we are in the “middle grounds” of society, economy and the environment. This middle ground encourages the educator, intellectual and citizen to bend beliefs and praxis into new designs taking into account the realities of world systems.  Many recent encounters I have had remind me of the importance of developing and acting on a shared understanding for our collective work in education.

In The Middle Ground  (1991) Richard White describes the process of globalization, genocide, blended culture and mutual aid in the French-Algonquin great Lakes Region from 1650-1815 he writes that “the creation of the Middle Ground involved mutual invention” This mutuality was necessary because the French and Algonquian where displaced (for different purposes ) into a new space/human ecology and confident in the cultural forces that shaped there world view.  In their new- found common landscape however they did not war, or isolate the other but rather took part in the messy business of social, environmental and economic deliberation for mutual aid.  White posits:

Perhaps the central and defining aspect of the middle ground was the willingness of those who created it to justify their own actions in terms of what they perceived to be their partners cultural premises.

What is our shared middle ground as educators, community members and humans?  Forces outside of our control see many cultures, communities, regions, nations and world together at nexus in a new emergent space.  Education has been separated by the industrial and industrial culture for long enough that the new pattern of cultures, one currently under creation in our shared middle grounds takes a moment to see.  But the examples are everywhere.   Grant Litchman writes of interconnected “learning ponds” in a post he recently forwarded to me called Welcome to the Cognitosphere. This post was forwarded after I had shared a video with Grant that Roberto Greco had shared with me…. Both Grant’s post: a narrative of interconnectedness, along with Roberto’s feed that exemplifies his erudite thinking on the interdependence and need for freedom in learning without boundaries cause me to write this post. I could go on, my face to face meetings in the last two weeks with Kim Svick,  Chris Thinnes, Mike Gwaltney, Peter Gow and more at at EdcampIS,  NAIS 13 and TABS Global Symposium along with my conversations (Twitter and other) with MaryAnn Riley, Selin Jessa, Matt Henderson,   Fred Bartels, Christina Jenkins to name a few….not to mention my small rural public school board….exemplify conversations with the traditional to the radical educator and all in between.

I hope that all of you reading this recognize what a moment we are in.  Large corporations in education seek to reinforce the hegemony of industrial education in practice and function  while our schools and projects make motions to upend an industrial revolution long past and acknowledge the information revolution upon us.  We are seeking plans, programs, places and praxis to express our passion for humanity.  Remember as Burns reminded us at the beginning of this post to rest for a moment in “the wayside shade”.  Relish in the relationships you have with the young and elder , new and old and look around at the landscapes that make up your spatial turn. Because as my friend and historian-geographer-networker, Jo Guldi writes: “by ‘turning’ we propose a backwards glance at the reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here, fixated upon landscape, together.”*

See you in the middle grounds.

Readings I suggest:

Berry, W. NKU Commencement Speech http://youtu.be/oRgbLJnjwsQ

Boulding, E. (1990) Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2011 MOOC

Geertz (1977) The Interpretation of Cultures

* Guldi, J. http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/

Independent School Magazine Spring 2013

Wagner (1981)The Invention of Culture ,

White, R. (1991) The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

A deep map goes beyond simple landscape/history-based topographical writing – to include and interweave autobiography, archeology, stories, memories, folklore, traces, reportage, weather, interviews, natural history, science, and intuition. In its best form, the resulting work arrives at a subtle, multi-layered and ‘deep’ map of a small area of the earth.

This method of exploration has my full attention as it connects to the larger body of networked field studies I have created and those currently in creation.  My designs of late do not feel at all like curriculum development but rather like spatial sensemaking of new methods for learning. The interdisciplinarity of the learning through field studies goes without question, but what is fascinating to me is the very real potential for The Bridge Year Learner and young people in general to deeply map the areas they live, study and play in.  This goes so far beyond “service learning” or Experiential Education, ect… and into realms we need to consider, and enact with understanding.

To ground truth learning and reflect upon the experience is done to different degrees in different learning situations now.  A classroom teacher may follow this pattern or conversely a sailing semester at sea.  What interests me is the idea of curating intuition, folklore, patterns and authoethnographic self-observation and reflexive investigation (Maréchal 2009) while exploring, learning and giving back to an area of study. Creating new maps and new frontiers of possibility for self and community social, environmental and economic mutation. This post to be continued….

Those posts exist at http://blog.steelemaley.net

Looking forward to writing again here and I hope you find value, inspiration and use of the designs, bits, and ideations to come.