Language & Identity Forum for Educators (LIFE)

"Global Citizenship," or what the International Baccalaureate Organization terms "International Mindedness," is a fuzzy concept. Every educator wants it but few are able to define it. More importantly, few can describe how exactly to cultivate it in a school. There's a reason for this. The concept, intriguingly, has been ignored by academia, with the result that literally no operational definition exists. Fascinating, right? Particularly now, as we witness such political polarization around the world. The desire to move towards a shared understanding of international mindedness, along with determination to conquer the IB's bewilderingly complex framework for language acquisition (while helping our students retain a coherent sense of identity!) are what prompted the convening of our first Language and Identity Forum for Educators (LIFE).

We were determined to run this conference differently than many of our own conference experiences, which have involved making fleeting, often superficial connections with other educators during long presentations of dubious worth. We wanted meaningful connections and practical, valuable outcomes for all attendees.

LIFE was a joint effort of Woodstock's Language Department and the Centre for Imagination. We carefully selected ten, like-minded IB schools around India to invite, including the American School of Bombay, UWC Mahindra in Pune, Deutsche Schule Bombay, American International School of Chennai, Heritage Xpeditionary School, Mercedes-Benz International, Pathways, Kodaikanal International School, The Doon School, and Oberoi International. Joining us to share his research and inspire us was Dr. Douglas Kennedy, whose areas of expertise include cultural intelligence and the introduction of mindfulness practice in schools. In preparation for the Forum, we all took the revealing, multi-rater CQ assessment out of the Cultural Intelligence Center in Singapore and Doug spent some time leading us through the results.

Doug has considerable experience helping schools and teachers understand what high and low CQ look like in daily life, and what sort of steps they might take to increase their CQ. The most common finding is that educators (and perhaps all of us) overestimate our cultural awareness and intelligence. We may be surprised to learn that our students and coworkers regularly observe and identify even micro-moments of cultural ignorance and sometimes offense. If we begin to recognize the difficulties, how might we train ourselves to move more fluidly across cultural boundaries in ways that honor the diversity we encounter?

As a host, I learned again the profound value of simply creating the right spaces for real, human connection, and therefore growth, to take place. From the beginning dinner reception outdoors in our beautiful, Himalayan surroundings to the closing dinner high at the top of the mountain, looking out over the valley, we interspersed the presentation of hard-core academic research with informal opportunities to socialize and share ideas and resources. By the time we got to an afternoon open space session dedicated to looking forward, we had a flood of ideas for specific ways to grow a lively network of language teachers and school leaders dedicated to working out the concept of International Mindedness.  Here are some top outcomes:

1. We will establish a professional learning community for school leaders and educators around the question of how to navigate diversity and increase CQ, led by Deutsche Schule Bombay. Part of this includes establishing a book-of-the-month club. April's book is Erin Meyer's The Culture Map.
2. We will set up a network of shared online teachers across the country so that students can keep learning home languages, even when their language is underrepresented in a school.
3. We will collaborate to create a curriculum for Hindi ab initio in the IB (a strange gap in the IB's thinking means that students are not yet able to study beginners' Hindi), led by UWC Pune.
4. We will create a handbook for school leaders on how to cultivate International Mindedness, a handbook that includes an operational definition and a rubric for measuring whether progress is happening, a collaborative effort led by Woodstock's Centre for Imagination. 

The Stomach

"When God first made man, man just laid around like a pillow. He wouldn't do anything! God regretted the decision to make such a useless creature. So he decided to give man a stomach. In this way, man would experience hunger. The hunger would motivate man to act. Since the time God gave man his stomach, the stomach has never been satisfied. And so we have greed."

A student shared the above story with me a few days ago, first shared with her by her grandmother.  She came to the CFI for help with structuring a paper in response to this question: Why is it so hard for humans to check their greed, even when they know the impact it is having on each other and on the environment? Why can we not change direction?

Schwartz's Circumplex of Values

We ended up in a fascinating conversation about Tim Kasser's work on Schwartz's theory of a circumplex of values. Kasser's research on materialism shows how misguided we are when we try to, for example, get people to start recycling or buy less by appealing to "Self-enhancement" values that have to do with power, achievement, or hedonism. See, for example, H&M's efforts to motivate people to recycle H&M clothing in exchange for a $5 voucher or 15% off their next purchase. The method works, temporarily, BUT every appeal to self-enhancement values ends up simply reinforcing those values, at measurable cost to the self-transcendence values on the opposite side of the circumplex. Instead, when we try to nudge behavior by emphasizing our interdependence, we reinforce values of universalism and benevolence, causing a measurable decrease in the value for self-enhancement. The basic premise of Kasser's and Schwartz's work is that we all possess all these values in some portion, and we can be consciously or subconsciously steered towards a greater emphasis, tilting the circle in one direction or another. 

I'm eager for educators to figure out how we might cultivate a deep understanding of interdependence from as young an age as possible, so that we actively grow young people's sense of responsibility and connection to others. Incidentally, this may also lead to a deeper sense of belonging for our students, possibly mitigating the widening crisis of anxiety and depression teenagers currently face.

Love and Learning

Monkey cuddling with a cloth "mother surrogate" in Harry Harlow's 1960s experiments

A couple days ago, I listened to a 2006 This American Life episode dedicated to answering the question of whether or not love and attachment can be taught. It got me thinking about the nature of love and learning.

The episode opened with Harry Harlow’s well-known attachment experiments with baby rhesus macaques and wire vs. cloth “mothers”. At a time when psychologists and doctors consistently warned mothers of the dangers of offering their children too much affection, Harlow set out to prove that children need affection to thrive. Over and over, he showed that baby rhesus macaques preferred a soft, cloth “mother” with no milk to a wire mother with milk. Not only that, but he demonstrated that these babies would continue to desperately seek affection from a cloth mother which had been designed to literally hurl the babies away each time they sought to bond or cuddle. Leaving the ethics of the experiment aside for a moment, the babies were so eager for attachment that they would reject their baby friends in favor of the mothers who rejected them.

From this introduction, the episode moved into interviews conducted with Rick and Heidi Solomon, a couple who had adopted a son from a Romanian orphanage. Adopted at the age of seven and a half, their new son had never been outside a crib. Daniel, the son, recounted how he had no real memories from his early years, how he didn’t remember thinking any real thoughts. He did recall a window and recalled wondering why he should be inside when the world outside the window seemed so lively and lovely.

Daniel’s first birthday with his new family triggered a crisis. He assumed that his new parents were his biological parents who had left him without love or birthdays for years. He grew angry. The anger was so intense that a series of psychologists and psychiatrists could offer no real solutions. Eventually, Heidi's persistence and relentless love for Daniel led the family to try a form of attachment therapy that involved recreating the conditions that infants experience while attaching to their parents. At the age of 13, Daniel was cuddled on his parents' joint laps and fed ice cream with a spoon while they gazed into each other's eyes. Bizarrely and miraculously, it sparked a change. Daniel calmed, developed attachment and slowly began to love his parents. He began to trust that they intended good for him.

But Heidi did not begin to suggest that this was some technique to be widely applied. What struck me was how Heidi responded to the interviewer's questions: "Do you feel like you can teach love?"

"No. I don't think the goal was ever love. The goal was attachment."

"Do you feel like you can teach attachment?"

"I mean, I think you can work really hard to create an environment where you can form an attachment."

Teachers face the same, soul-wrenching test as parents do. The poet Goethe said that, "we really only learn from those we love". This love and attachment, so necessary for deep learning, cannot be mandated or generated through a set of mechanical techniques.  As educators, we are limited to working really hard to create a particular environment, a set of ripe conditions, in which love and learning and wild growth can take place. Like Heidi's, our commitment must be relentless.

This is not some warm and fuzzy notion of learning. Researchers are increasingly finding that social and emotional learning necessarily take precedence. Without an environment characterized by healthy attachments and a sense of security, a young person struggles with academic learning.

It's more than a little ironic that, even as we "discover" the importance of profound attachments to other human beings in relation to learning, we find the prevalence of online learning and technology-driven education growing exponentially. It's not a perfect analogy, to be sure, but there are reasonable parallels between the screen as the wire mother surrogate, feeding the milk of information, and the preferred cloth surrogate, offering at least an illusion of warmth and life. Of course, a real live rhesus mother offers both warmth and food, as do real live, committed educators. 

https://baristanet.com/2018/03/our-kids-our-screens-what-can-we-do-find-out-at-montclair-cooperative-school-lifelong-learner-series-3-20/

I'm interested in how to create the conditions for secure, appropriate, and healthy attachments between teachers and students, so that rich learning can take place (recognizing the boundaries of a teaching/learning environment, as opposed to a parenting environment). What kind of bond does a student need with a teacher? And, in a classroom of twenty students with a range of needs, what might it look like to differentiate our approach to forming these attachments? I suspect that primary teachers might have a lot to teach the rest of us...

Coffee Wise

We started a weekly series this term, by and for staff, through which they can share areas of research, expertise or interest with the rest of us. Within two days of announcing the series, we had filled every slot till the end of term and four weeks into the next school year! People had clearly been waiting for the opportunity to share what excites them. As school leaders, sometimes it's easy to forget the depth of knowledge and expertise of a staff body.

In the four weeks since we started, we've heard about how Hindi cinema has shaped the Indian city and bourgeois tastes, about the network of international college counselors working diligently to widen access to higher education, about researching the expatriate community in Goa, and, today, about studying light as a physicist and understanding the depth of spiritual metaphor present in its nature.

Ten to fifteen teachers are choosing to spend an hour at the end of their school day, engaging intellectually with each other's work and passions. I can see it breeding new appreciation for unique areas of expertise. It is already proving a great way to kickstart professional learning communities again and to ascertain which members of the community may have the bandwidth and energy to help lead.

Each week, I leave feeling privileged to work with dedicated learners and gratified at having the opportunity to spend an hour completely shifting gears to consider a new question or issue. I'm reminded how much we all need to be seen and heard for our individual, deep selves. And how much I love to listen and learn!

Space to think

The Centre for Imagination enjoys a fabulous view and I make the most of it. Whenever we have a bit of sunshine, I set up on the wrap-around verandah. Invariably, a student (or several) will come sit near me. I have learned that sometimes they need silence and sometimes a conversation. In a residential school, with family far away, both can be in short supply.

Today, I was joined by a Grade 10 student from Afghanistan. Spring has not quite sprung yet here in Mussoorie, so he had his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee as he sat down and looked out over the hills. I waited, trying to sense his needs. After letting the silence settle, I looked up from my laptop and asked how things were going. He explained that he had come over to the Centre for space to think.

We have a break coming up at the end of this week and many of his friends are headed home. It's made him think about boys his age at home. The word he uses to describe them is "blind". He says so many in Kabul feel hopeless, like there's no point in educating themselves or trying to find work, because they may die. Drug use has spread, as an escape from harsh reality. He described arguments in his family about whether there was purpose in planning for the future.

I asked if he felt different, having come to a place outside that environment. He said the biggest change in himself is feeling like he has perspective, like he can really see. He is scared of what will come of the current peace talks with the Taliban. He wanted space to think through his own future, knowing that he wants to go back to Afghanistan and looking for his place. Answers will not come quickly, and I suspect he'll keep returning to think further and more deeply.

Days like this make me grateful students have a space to think surrounded by nature and wildness, and that, as educators, we are invited into the literal shaping of the future, as young people set their aspirations and imagine who they might become. 

Panic >> Act >> Hope

Young people teach me every day that we have no reason NOT to act boldly, particularly when a space for action opens in front of us.  Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager whose voice on climate change has ricocheted around the world this last year, has found her way into the hearts and minds of the student environmental interns at the Centre for Imagination.

Late last night, I received a politely worded email from the interns, suggesting that we ought to join the hundreds of schools around the world who are protesting for action on climate change this Friday, March 15. When I asked what they had in mind, I imagined a moderate informational display and perhaps a petition.

I thought too small. The interns wanted to meet with school leaders and then join with students in the schools around our small town to press the local city council for actions we can take close to home that will make a difference. They want a city-wide commitment, for example, to stop selling and consuming plastic water bottles, a re-examination of food consumption patterns locally, and a recycling partnership with Waste Warriors, among other proposals.

They don't understand why we adults are not panicking more and not taking more drastic action. With Greta, they see unequivocal action on climate change as the only possible source of hope.

I have to agree.

Family

One aspect of my work includes teaching the interdisciplinary research courses developed by the College Board: AP Seminar and AP Research. These portfolio-based courses cultivate a broad set of academic research, writing, and presentation skills, rather than requiring the acquisition or analysis of a fixed body of knowledge.

The AP Seminar course includes a team research project. This year, my class of fifteen students is made up of remarkable, driven and diligent students, for whom the thought of relying on a group for their success evokes a particular dread. All year, we have been working together to grow an environment of open critique of each other's work, as well as deepening an ability to trust others and to take risks with collaboration.

This Thursday marked the culmination of months of preparation, when groups presented their research-based proposals for how to solve complex problems that each group had identified--from wealth disparity in India to the marginalization of the Muslim minority population or the transgender hijra community here, to the particular challenge of how Afghanistan might be made safe for refugees to return. One Korean student who opted against the external portfolio had done her own research on comfort women, which she presented with passion and some incredulity at how they had been treated, demanding an apology and reparations from Japan. Honoring the personal value of her research, the silence in the room deepened. Not a sound could be heard as she spoke.

We debriefed after the presentations. Students commented first on how their proposed solutions all incorporated an element of education reform, aimed at tackling the prejudices that develop from an early age. I smiled as they then naturally moved into complimenting the careful slide design choices of one group or how the organization of the presentation for a second lent the argument a stronger element of persuasion, or how the rotation of speakers in a third highlighted the limitations of alternate possible solutions. Students were able to offer far more specific feedback than a simple, "Good job" to each other. Not only that, but as a group received encouraging comments or compliments, members of that group would quickly acknowledge the individual most responsible.

Rarely do we get to see such sweet generosity in the classroom, and it doesn't happen by default! Since July, we've been working hard, most fundamentally to create a safe container for dialogue, to develop skills for speaking to each other, trusting each other, working together, that can be applied throughout life across a range of situations, even in the face of complex problems and diverse opinions. The world needs these students to grow up and lead us. When class came to a close, as students packed up to leave, one said, "AP Seminar is just like a big, happy family now. It's weird."

Weird and wonderful.