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.

The myth of standardisation

Mechanisation: Learning as a belt conveyor (illustration developed for my MA dissertation, copied from a 19th-century factory diagram and re-labelled)

We educators have bought into the myth of standardization for too long. I cannot count the number of times I have commiserated with brilliant students whose test scores barred them from their universities of choice, despite months of preparation. Similarly, I cannot count the number of times I have commiserated with passionate educators frustrated that the "need" to cover the same material as schools around the world meant that they couldn't deeply explore a theme that had emerged in class and seemed far more urgent. At the same time, news outlets are filled with statistics and warnings that teen depression and anxiety are rising, attributable to social media, perfectionism and, yes, the pressure of standardized testing.

As a former history teacher, I've been fascinated for years at the notion that the world history textbooks used in high schools around the world (written in the West by scholars raised in a school system saturated by standardization) consider markers of "civilization" partly, if not primarily, in terms of the emergence of standardization. For example, the Indus River Valley settlements "qualify" as civilized, according to many textbooks and exam curricula, because they developed standardization of weights, measures, and symbols across a wide geographical area, mostly to facilitate trade. Similarly, our textbooks mark the century-long emergence of standardized spelling and language in English, Spanish, French, and German as a mark of civilization and progress facilitated by the technology of the printing press from the mid-fifteenth century (borrowed from China, incidentally). I would suggest that perhaps we equate standardization with progress a little too quickly. After all, academic Latin--a standardized language of scholars and theologians--was in use across Europe for a millenium before the printing press and contributed mostly to the continuing power of the Church and the loss of troves of medical knowledge, philosophy, and even fundamental technologies like the making of bricks and the pouring of concrete. Diversity of thought was systematically weeded out as heresy. As with almost any facet of human life and development, standardization can represent positive or negative growth; civilization or its opposite; humanism or authoritarianism.

Our current model of schooling developed at the turn of the last century, as a well-documented response to and facilitation of mass industrialization. At the time, the promise of standardization enchanted experts. As educators, we have grown to accept the need for standardization to the degree that we no longer question, instead viewing it as a heavy but inevitable burden. While standardization offers certain undeniable benefits, it also cannot meet the profound needs of young people today for flexibility, meaning, and a versatile imagination--all qualities they will need to navigate current and approaching global crises.

Standardization has played a critical role in developing commonly held language and ideas around education.  It allows us to measure whether individual teachers, schools, and schools systems are in line with each other.  We now rarely question the need for alignment. In fact, we often assume that the value of a particular education cannot be determined without reference to standardized test results. Not only do students face standardized testing, but teachers are continually assessed using standardized measures, their worth often determined by the production of standardized curriculum documents or test results far more than by the quality of their interactions with students.

On a more fundamental level, standardization cannot adequately meet the need of young people to be known as individual, whole human beings. It's time to shift the paradigm of education radically toward personalization, and this is already happening--particularly in schools for the elite. The challenge remains in training teachers for a new paradigm and in creating a framework that permits and encourages universal access to this new, personalized approach. Schools all over the world are experimenting. I'm interested in how we can collect, analyze, and draw on the wealth of prototypes.

How might we most effectively share our adventures in developing a more personalized, human approach to learning and teaching--the approach so many of us educators wish we had experienced ourselves?