Radical Equality in Education

Starting Over in U.S. Schooling

Joanne Larson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415528030
• eBook ISBN: 9781136310966
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Tinkering with the current educational system from within has not provided a just and equitable education for all children. In this book, acclaimed education theorist Joanne Larson poses basic questions about the nature and purpose of schooling. Proposing that what is needed is a new purpose that is more consistent with contemporary knowledge production processes—one that moves beyond the either/or binary of preparing workers/citizens in a competitive global economy or a democracy, Larson argues that the only real solution is to start over in U.S. education—the purpose of schooling should be to facilitate human learning, meaning making, and knowledge production toward just and equitable education for all.

Radical Equality in Education offers a new ontological starting point and a new theoretical framing that would follow from it; articulates theoretical, curricular, pedagogical, and assessment principles that frame a real plan for fundamental change in American education, and presents examples of what these ideas might look like in schools and communities.

1
Fed up with Tinkering

Imagine if schools were different than they are now¹—equitable and fair for all children and youth. Imagine if we started with an assumption of equality of intelligence and saw all people as important and valuable contributors to learning endeavors. Imagine if everybody counted and that, by everybody, we meant everybody. Imagine if teachers and students were both learners in just and equitable communities where we all worked together to use what we produce, or produse,² knowledge, and make meaning. Imagine.

Can you imagine children and youth (and community members, teachers, administrators, parents) drawing from a range of institutions (schools, museums, businesses, social service agencies) to solve local problems or issues all while produsing knowledge in the service of a common good that they themselves have constructed? Imagine a space where learners co-construct their learning, their understandings of the sociopolitical problems at play, the potential solutions, and their consequences. Imagine that outdated autonomous³ school knowledges are transformed to be relevant in real communities and for social justice ends. While we would find some classrooms where these things are happening, they are not systemic.

What sort of ontological changes would we need to move away from assumptions of inequality to assumptions of equality? How might we implement the transformation needed to accomplish these imaginings? A lot of things would need to change to make these imaginings real. Given the years of reform tried already, perhaps it is time to start over with new assumptions. None of the past or current reforms have resulted in a just and equitable education system, and a just and equitable system should be a minimum goal. Dramatic change seems especially important now that new technologies and their resultant new practices have radically changed the way humans learn, interact, and produse knowledge in contemporary times. Schools are moving dangerously toward irrelevance in ways that make starting over the only viable option.

While not a script for action, this book does articulate theoretical, curricular, pedagogical, and assessment principles to start over in education in order to adequately respond to and shape radical changes in ways of knowing and being associated with new technologies and knowledge production practices. I argue that schools are in what Bruns (2008) calls “casual collapse” because they have not responded to the profound changes in knowing and being that have occurred globally in the twenty-first century. Working within the system as it is currently will not work to prevent this collapse. We need to start over with different ontological and epistemological foundations and robust theories that help explain new social and power relations. We need to assume equality rather than inequality of intelligence (Rancière, 1991). We, educational researchers, practitioners, parents, community members, and children and youth, need to understand what it means when everybody comes (Shirky, 2008) and when everybody counts, because not to do so will maintain current and deepening inequities (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Gee, 2013a).

There are three main threads to my argument that we need to start over. One, schools are limited and outdated in the models of learning they rely on, especially when compared with models of learning we find elsewhere. Two, schools do not serve the interests of the majority of children and youth in schools today, privileged or otherwise. Moreover, the lack of attention to new communicative practices results in inequities and damages children, especially with the current obsessive focus on test scores. And three, schools are oriented around producing/sorting worker-citizens whereas they should be organized to equitably produce socially engaged produsers. Given these points, we need to start over with new ontological and epistemological assumptions rather than tinker with the current system. In what follows I offer more detailed explanations of these three strands of my argument.

What We Already Know: Schools Are Outdated

In their current state, schools are irrelevant to the meaning making and knowledge production needed in contemporary times. Schools are based on an outdated, scarcity production model of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that is grounded in traditional business economics and that does not respond to changes in skills and practices needed to participate in a global world. This is not a new argument, however. Similar arguments were made in the early twentieth century during industrialization. Calls for changing schools to accommodate a changing world of work rang through the public discourse on education. I am not making a “change so we can have more efficient workers” argument here. My main argument is that we need to change schools so that they are equitable and just, not so that they produce workers who can compete in a global marketplace. Part of how we make schools equitable and just has to do with ensuring they are relevant and meaningful to children and youth in all communities. One place where schools have become outdated is by not taking into account the changed and changing practices associated with Internet communication technologies and social media. They have missed the valuable learning and development going on in those spaces. Furthermore, authentic acknowledgment and use of culturally varied ways of knowing and being (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; King, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lee, 2001; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzales, 1992) occurring in those spaces is also lost on schools.

In fact, de Alba, Gonzáles-Gaudiano, Lankshear, and Peters (2000, p. 9) argue that “our curricula are becoming overwhelmed by practices of diagnosis, intervention, and remediation grounded not merely in ‘basic skills,’ but in old and outmoded forms of basic skills” (emphasis in original). The basic skills we need are not simply those used to fill a workforce, but to engage a dynamic generation of sophisticated children and youth in knowledge production. Recently there has been a call in the research on teaching for high-level content knowledge that echoes the call to move beyond reductionist notions about what counts as basic:

Business, government, and educational leaders assert that across grade levels and subject matters, all kinds of students should be engaged in cognitively challenging tasks in school and should be treated as people who can think and who know how to do things. They believe students should learn, not only to read and calculate, but also to analyze texts and tables and to write in ways that communicate the results of their analysis, providing evidence for their conclusions.

(Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007, cited in Lambert, Boerst, & Graziani, 2011, p. 1361)

Additionally, models of production/consumption imported from old business practices no longer apply, since this binary has shifted to produsage models (Bruns, 2008; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). Fordist models of production used an input–output model in which the “public’s” only role was as passive consumers of goods designed and built by others. We had no role in the design of goods or services beyond embodying the “demand” (as in the supply/demand binary), to use the language of economists. Education simply imported this model into the design and implementation of curriculum in ways that have led to students and teachers being positioned as passive consumers, which seriously underestimates their capabilities (de Certeau, 1984), and does not serve them well. We could say that assessment equals the demand of economists and that students (and taxpayers) are positioned as passive consumers. Building on principles of efficiency and productivity imported from industry, the “users,” (students) only role was to have needs that the expert (curriculum developer) measured, filled, and measured again. The user-only role positioned students and teachers as unequal in relation to outside curriculum “experts” and as needing instruction. A counter to this hegemonic economic model would build local and sustainable economies that educate people to think in complex and critical ways that can contribute to the construction of an equitable and just society.

Traditional models of schooling operate on the factory model (Kliebard, 2004) in which production efficiency is the priority and which focuses on linearity and conformity (Robinson, 2010b). From this perspective, knowledge exists as a static entity outside of human action that floats around or that exists in textbooks and curriculum materials waiting to be discovered. The materials themselves are containers from which learners extract knowledge. In effect, the belief is that textbooks, not teachers, teach (Shannon, 1989). Teachers, or better yet curriculum experts, take the knowledge and break it down into component parts, sequence it according to developmental (stage) theories of learning or disciplinary logics, and insert tests/rewards at pre-determined points. In this traditional input–output model (see Figure 1.1), knowledge is put into empty heads, and it is assumed that we can determine whether someone has learned something through administering a standardized test. However, some educational research has pointed to a more local vision of knowledge production that articulates the use of local curriculum teams such as those I discuss in this book, rather than outside entities “giving” curriculum (cf. Bigum, 2002; Facer, 2011; Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006).

FIGURE 1.1 Outdated model

In current times, further assumptions about knowledge production stemming from this input–output model have been brought to bear on schools. Indeed the factory model has become hegemonic. Current accountability discourses, for example, operate from the assumption that teachers are not adequately skilled to teach, so they need increasingly detailed and prescriptive curriculum packages that will teach for them (Apple, 1990; Shannon, 1989). Furthermore, students

are assumed to be empty vessels that need filling by packaged curricula designed by “experts” (Freire, 1970). The only role available to students is recipient of external expertise—the ultimate in inequality according to Rancière (see Chapter 2). As the child realizes that her intelligence is not equal, she takes on the role of mourner. She is always in need, never in a position to be expert at something, hence the need to mourn. Anything other than the old school traditional “transmission” model of education, such as collaborative learning in inquiry communities, is considered with disdain to be a fad and can thus be dismissed (Kohn, 1999).

In other fields, such as communication and economics, Shirky (2008, 2010), Bruns (2008), and Godin (2008) have articulated ideas about the changed and changing nature of society, ideas that focus on what is different now that everyone can participate. Internet sites such as Wikipedia, open source computer languages such as Linux, and the mass participation afforded by social networking technologies are consistent with what educational researchers from a social practice perspective of content knowledge and learning have been saying for decades about the social construction of knowledge (Cole, 1996). By bringing these views together, we can reconceptualize contexts for learning that focus more on what it means to participate in authentic practices in the twenty-first century than on memorizing and testing decontextualized skills.

Research in these and other fields has shown that profound shifts are happening in society in the everyday multimodal, multi-authored digital communication practices that enable formerly passive audiences to shift toward a participatory convergence culture,⁴ transforming the social relations between production and consumption (Jenkins, 2006) into what Bruns (2008) calls produsage or the simultaneous use and construction of knowledge. Ignoring these shifts has made schools largely irrelevant to the children, youth, and young adults across diverse communities who are participating in these practices in unprecedented ways (boyd, 2008; Gee, 2004, 2010; Ito et al., 2010; Lankshear & Knobel, 2010). These technologies have disassembled and rearranged old technologies and their associated subjectivities in ways that call for a profound rethinking of what schools do and what (and whose) purposes they serve (Peters & Burbules, 2004). The formerly closed space of the classroom is now open to futures as yet unwritten. By not paying attention to these changes and by allowing the narrative about those changes to go unexamined (Facer, 2011), schools will continue to have futures written for them instead of proactively taking an authorship role.

In produsage models common in contemporary life outside of school, the producer/consumer binary is disrupted. “We the people,” formerly known as the audience, now can talk back (and to each other) in powerful ways (Shirky, 2008). We do not wait for experts to tell us what we want or need; we make it ourselves. We evaluate whether it is good or bad, and if it is bad we fix it. We use what we produse and all this is done in record time. Bruns (2008) cites Wikipedia as a classic example of this process. In Wikipedia we see the collaborative, user-led produsage of a globally diverse human knowledge base that remains fluidly in production. When I mention this point to the teachers I work with, they immediately cite examples of false information on Wikipedia as evidence of its unreliability. True, but what has also happened is self-correction. “We the people” have found ways to stop the deliberate contamination of what constitutes a world knowledge base and produse a reliable resource for what humans know. If schools operated with a produsage mindset such as Wikipedia’s, curriculum and assessment would be constructed locally in collaborative activity. Collaborators would include students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members. What counted as evidence of success would not be efficiency measures, but use value. Shifting away from outdated input–output models is crucial to the starting over process I advocate for in this book.

What is frustrating is that we, education researchers and high-quality change agent⁵ teachers, know more meaningful ways to construct schooling because we have been researching and writing about just such scenarios for decades (Noguera, 2013; Rose, 2009). We (educational researchers and practitioners) know a lot about how to construct authentic and relevant contexts for learning, but what we know is not generally present in schools today, except for the few spaces where change agent teachers and administrators work against the grain. We know, for example, that you cannot do reform from the top down, outside in (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Yet governments, both state and federal, continue to impose a particular type of reform based on narrow modernism implemented from the outside which districts implement from the top down. What does it mean that “down” is always directed at teachers? When grassroots, teacher-driven reforms such as Whole Language (Goodman, 1987) surfaced and began to take hold, they were squashed vehemently and even banned. With the current focus on testing, we know that children and youth do not count except as data points in the form of standardized test scores (Spring, 2012). Now those same scores will shape teacher evaluations (USDOE, 2012b).

What we know about content and learning is extensive yet tends not to be present in the everyday life of schools or in teacher preparation. In literacy studies, for example, we know from Gee (2011) and Lankshear and Knobel (2011) among others that new digital literacies with a new ethos⁶ are predominant in the everyday lives of children and youth but that schools have not figured out how to address these, choosing instead to focus on outdated conceptions of literacy as neutral skills separated from their contexts of use and relations of power (Larson, 2007). Teacher preparation institutions often reflect autonomous models of literacy (Street, 1995) and are not preparing new teachers for these new practices. The focus on Internet communication technologies in schools relies almost exclusively on technologies that see children as data points to be managed (Spring, 2012) or in ways to make outdated practices more efficient. The affordances of new technologies to shape and change what and how we know is intentionally bypassed by the corporations that market data management software packages and glossy curriculum tools.

We also know that the learning theories emerging from studies of video games and social networking technologies are more robust than those in use in most schools. Children’s and youth’s learning in these environments is fluid, supported on a just-in-time and as needed basis, and driven by their interests, friendships, and desires (Gee, 2004, 2013b; Ito et al., 2010). Gee (2004, 2007) has shown that complex and authentic learning occurs when children and youth play difficult video games. He introduces the idea of affinity spaces to explain the social relations that develop from shared interest in these spaces. Traditional identity categories such as race, class, gender, ability, linguistic practice, and sexual orientation fade when the grouping is around interest and desire. Ito et al. (2010) have shown that youth spend time in these spaces developing and using complex communicative practices that have not been documented before.

This research is consistent with Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian theories of learning such as those found in communities of learners (Rogoff, 1994), communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and Gutiérrez and Rogoff’s (2003) ideas about repertoires of pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Fed Up with Tinkering
• 2 From an Equitable Starting Place
• 3 Toward Different Ends
• 4 Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
• 5 Imagine We Climb the Mountain
• References
• Index