Liberating Learning

Educational Change as Social Movement

Santiago Rincón-Gallardo

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351032087
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación general

This book is about three complementary ideas: 1) learning is a practice of freedom; 2) liberating learning in public education requires widespread cultural change in classrooms, schools, and entire education systems; and 3) social movements have been the most powerful vehicles for widespread cultural change, and in their logic of operation lie the keys to liberate learning. Drawing on existing knowledge and new research on educational change, the author offers nine principles of action to liberate learning in schools and across entire educational systems. Topics discussed include learning, pedagogy, leadership, education policy, widespread cultural change, collective action, and whole system improvement. Written for educators and leaders interested in transforming teaching and learning in classrooms and schools, as well as for public intellectuals and people interested in widespread pedagogical change, the book articulates a new way to think about and pursue educational change.

1

Introduction

For a few centuries [sapiens] has tried to make himself like a machine

[S]He’s learned to arrive on time.

[S]He’s learned to repeat after teacher.

[S]He’s learned to do repetitious tasks reliably.

Machines are now better at being machines than [sapiens] is.

[Sapiens] must now relearn how to be [hu]man

Tweet by @TheStoicEmperor

Ideas are powerful forces. They shape not only how we think about the world but, perhaps most importantly, how we act on it. Our ways of thinking about the world delimit what we believe is possible and desirable – what we can and should do. One set of ideas in particular has shaped in deep and pervasive ways how we have acted in our schools and educational systems for over a century. This set of ideas is scientific management, a way of thinking and acting that emerged in the wake of the industrial revolution in the early twentieth century. In an era where mass production and efficiency were considered key forces for economic growth and prosperity, scientific management was a revolutionary idea. It proposed that the best way to organize human activity was to break down complex work into small, repetitive and routine tasks, with external incentives to ensure adequate execution of the work. Mass compulsory schooling was an invention that responded to the needs of the industrial revolution, which resulted in waves of immigration from the countryside to cities for work in emerging industries. We needed a place to send our kids while adults were working. We needed a way to ensure a somewhat harmonious social order and prevent the chaos that the arrival, fast and en masse, of new people to the cities could bring. And the new industrial order required mechanisms to sort and select the future managers.

Schools and school systems, along with many other organizations, were profoundly shaped by the ideas of scientific management. Organizing students by age, breaking down the day in timed blocks with each group following instructions from the adult in the room, and creating external incentives such as grades became, and indeed continue to be, some of their key defining features of schools and school systems. This was an effective way to manage large numbers of students.

The problem is that, learning – at least joyful, self-directed learning – was set aside. Scientific management assumed that work was inherently boring and meaningless – and thus the importance of creating external incentives for its execution. And in many ways, this is what school work has become – a series of tasks to get done for compliance, good grades, and certificates.

Few experiences are as liberating, joyful and intrinsically motivating as powerful learning. Making sense of questions that matter to us is inherent to our human condition. Seeing the spark in the eyes of children and youth when they figure out solutions to problems that matter to them is one of the most powerful sources of meaning for educators and administrators alike.

This book is about three complementary ideas:

• Powerful learning is liberating for those who experience it;
• Classrooms, schools, and entire educational systems can be transformed in the service of liberating learning; and
• This can be best achieved through social movements organized around liberating learning.

Imagine that we stopped thinking for a moment about formal education as a technical solution to managing large groups of students efficiently. Imagine we thought instead of education as a vehicle to ignite the innate capacity of every human being to learn and change the world. And that we used this as our starting point to create practices and strategies to liberate learning in schools and across entire educational systems. This book is my invitation to reimagine how we think about and pursue educational change.

Reimagining Educational Change

I will start with the pessimistic part. I promise optimism awaits a couple pages ahead. As a father of two young boys, and as a human, I am deeply worried about the state of the world. Many rapidly unfolding trends and conditions are forcing us to rethink, individually and collectively, what we stand for and what we want to become. Such worrisome changes include, among many others: the rapidly growing scale and speed of natural disasters caused by human activity; the prospects of extinction of life on the planet; mass global migration and displacement; and the rise of fundamentalism and violence.

In this daunting scenario, it is worth asking ourselves what schools and school systems can and should do to give our children a fighting chance to survive, thrive in, and positively change a highly unpredictable and unjust world. Schools already face unreasonable expectations concerning problems in society. But education for the future is not about adding more to the pile of things teachers and school leaders are expected to do. It is about pausing to redefine our key priorities, and then learning to do things differently.

What legacy can public education give to our young people to give them a fighting chance to survive and thrive? Learning to learn deeply is top of my list. If our kids will have to solve problems that are bigger and more complex than those we know how to solve, the best we can do for them is nurture their ability to learn on their own, to find joy in their power to learn, and to make the world a better place. The current legacy of schooling, at best, falls short and, at worst, is disabling our younger generations for the future. High school diplomas, university degrees, grades and standardized test scores, among other measures of attainment, may have worked as predictors of individual success (income, employment, physical and mental health) and some measures of social wellbeing (economic development, safety). But they tell us little about the extent to which young people are prepared to learn whatever they will have to learn to address the massive challenges ahead. They tell us little about whether they are prepared to pursue individual and collective freedom, build robust democracies, and contribute to sustaining life on the planet. Schools as we know them are far from preparing our young people for what’s coming and, in many ways, for what’s already here. Reimagining classrooms, schools, and educational systems so that they become vibrant places for learning and living examples of the societies we aspire to become is more urgent than ever. It is indeed crucial for our survival.

Reinventing schools and school systems requires also that we reimagine educational change. By “educational change” I mean the body of knowledge and ideas that has developed as an attempt to better understand and improve efforts to reform schools and school systems. Over several decades, the educational change field has offered robust findings that continue to be relevant in the pursuit of radically new versions of schools and school systems. At the same time, the future of educational change requires that we look directly at two blindspots: learning and power. And when these two are brought front and centre, we are compelled to shift how we understand and pursue educational change.

Overall, the educational change field has assumed that formal education – or schooling – is inherently good, directly and unquestionably linked to human progress and wellbeing. But a different picture emerges when we dare to look directly at its key blind spots. Let’s start with learning.

Where Did Learning Go?

Ironically, student learning has remained a marginal area of concern for the educational change field. A historical review of the Journal of Educational Change, for example, reported that student learning has been seriously overlooked over the 15-year span of the journal’s existence (García-Huidobro, Nannemann, Bacon, & Thompson, 2017). With a widely shared focus on understanding and fostering large-scale, sustainable school improvement through the professionalism of educators, only a marginal number of articles touch directly upon student learning. Furthermore, when student learning is given some attention, it is through proxies, most prominently student achievement scores, course completion, graduation rates, and the like.¹

In the educational change field, learning has been primarily valued for its functional value – for example, scores in standardized testing as indicators of knowledge and skills for future employability, and high-school certificates as standardized measures of college or career readiness. Learning is rarely seen as an intrinsic value, a liberating act, a deliberate practice with larger societal implications.

Compulsory school systems were not originally designed to foster learning – certainly not finding creative solutions to problems, communicating effectively, collaborating with others or deliberately transforming the world for the better. The historical role of schools has been custody, control, and sorting. With the waves of immigration that started to pour into big cities after the industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century and the wake of the twentieth century, governments had to find ways to provide custody to children, to shape the future work force (mostly low-skilled factory workers), and to identify the selected few who would access managerial roles. Schooling emerged and stuck as the preferred solution. The design of schooling, as with many organizations and companies of the time, found inspiration in the scientific management principles of Fredrick Taylor: activities broken down into simple, repetitive tasks carried out by low-skilled workers, and external incentives (punishments and rewards) to ensure tasks were completed. These principles continue to influence how many organizations, schools included, operate to this day. Indeed, the fundamental design of schooling has remained practically unchanged more than a century later.

To be sure, throughout this period, more powerful ideas about learning have shaped the discourse around the desirability and virtues of schools. Progressive educators and thinkers such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori offered powerful insights into the nature of learning. But while ideas of this sort have continued to exist throughout the history of compulsory schooling, they rarely influenced more than a small proportion of educators and schools. Instead, schools came to resemble factories or prisons more than they did vibrant environments for learning.

Of course, many of us have fond memories of school. Many of us remember one or two teachers who touched our lives and changed their course for the better. There is immense value in having institutions that offer a relatively safe and stable environment to children while parents are working.² There is value in having spaces where children can socialize and learn to live with others. But when it comes to learning – what specifically do we take away from school and how much of it do we actually remember or use? – the balance is less encouraging.

Not only were schools not designed to foster learning; they can get in the way of learning. They do this, sometimes unintentionally, other times deliberately, through prioritizing compliance, compartmentalizing knowledge, creating fear of failure, and concentrating control in the hands of adults. Critics of schooling have pointed out such effects for decades. In 1970 Ivan Illich, in his classic Deschooling Society, argued and predicted that, after reaching a certain scale, institutions would start to direct their functions towards their own perpetuation, moving away from, and even working against, the purposes for which they were built: medical institutions creating widespread disease (currently medical error is among the top three causes of death in the United States, together with heart disease and cancer);³ super highways creating massive traffic congestions; schools preventing learning. A few years later, John Holt (1977), a passionate educator and an eloquent critic of schooling, poignantly said that if schools were responsible to teach kids to talk, the world would be full of mute people and stutterers. In the early 1990s, New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, announced in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal his decision to quit teaching because he was no longer willing to hurt children. A decade ago, Kirsten Olson (2009) set out to interview a whole range of highly accomplished professionals in search for their most powerful learning experiences in school. Instead, the consistent theme she found across the narratives is captured in the title of her bestselling book: Wounded by School. Highly accomplished professionals succeeded despite, rather than thanks to, school. Sir Ken Robinson, in his highly popular TED talk, has eloquently articulated how schools crush the natural creativity and curiosity of children. More recently, Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith, in their book Most Likely to Succeed (Wagner & Dintersmith, 2015), argue that what schools are teaching kids is for the most part irrelevant. And the list goes on.

Schooling has historically faced a core contradiction, which has become more blatantly evident, and increasingly unbearable over time: being the institutions charged with educating our younger generations, they are not only failing to nurture and develop their abilities to learn, but also crushing their ability and their joy to do it. Evidence of this core contradiction abounds. A simple test, called the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, has been used to measure the capacity to think creatively, starting with young kindergarten children and tracking their creativity over time (Kim, 2011; Torrance, 1968). These studies consistently find that creative thinking declines sharply as children go through school. As reported by Mirjam Schöning and Christina Witcomb (2017) from the LEGO Foundation in a blog post for the World Economic Forum, while 98 per cent of children in kindergarten score in the “creative genius” category, their creative ability is drastically diminished as they grow older (Schöning & Witcomb, 2017). By age 25, only 3 per cent remain creative geniuses. Children’s enthusiasm with school also goes through remarkable decline over time (Lepper, Corpus, & Iyengar, 2005). As an illustration, in 2012, Lee Jenkins, former district superintendent, asked about 2,000 of the elementary and secondary school teachers in his seminars to indicate the grade level they were teaching and the percentage of students in that grade whom they believed loved school. While teachers in kindergarten reported that, on average, 95 per cent of their children loved school, the average percentage reported by teachers in grade 9 was 37 per cent (Jenkins, 2012).⁴

Recent discoveries on the psychology of motivation and the neuroscience of learning are making the core contradiction of schooling even more evident. It is now a well-established finding that the following four conditions drive intrinsic motivation: purpose, autonomy, mastery, and connectedness. Learning and doing things that matter to us (purpose), with freedom to decide what, how, when, and with whom to do it (autonomy), getting better over time (mastery), and doing it with others (connectedness), are the core conditions needed to do what we do with full intention and focus. Yet all four conditions are rather absent in most schools and classrooms around the world. Indeed, the four opposite conditions offer a more accurate description of conventional schooling: little to no intrinsic purpose; control by adults over what, how, when, and with whom to “learn”; emphasis on “covering” as much content as possible; individualism and competition.

Neuroscience is making breakthrough discoveries about our natural inclination and our biological need to learn, as well as the conditions that nurture or inhibit such inclination.⁵ We know, for example, that in the act of learning our brains release dopamine, a hormone that produces feelings of pleasure and fulfilment. Learning always involves encountering something we don’t fully understand or cannot initially do, and our brains thrive on situations where we are faced with problems situated in what Lev Vygotsky (1978) called the zone of proximal development: the bordering zone in between what we know and are able to do and what we don’t yet know or aren’t able to do. The sense of feeling close to a new understanding or solution but not yet knowing whether we will succeed produces excitement and pleasure. Our brains not only can learn: they need to learn.

The brain learns by developing increasingly dense networks of neurons, and by pruning and reorganizing existing networks into more efficient forms of cognitive and affective processing. Language as the means of making sense of the world...