Thursday, January 16, 2020

Injustice, Cooperation, and Emotion as Tools in Co-Constructed Learning Design


Everything they do should be meaningful and everything should have some sort of context to it.
At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Ellen Key The Century of the Child



Psychological science has established that emotion intensifies attention. The present findings provide evidence for the reverse: Attention can alter the experience of perception and, in so doing, intensify the perception of emotion.
Kellen Mrkva, Jacob Westfall, and Leaf Van Boven Attention Drives Emotion

Climbing to Make Connections in Colombia
Two classes of third graders climbed up the mountain behind our school.  A creek runs down it, water from the paramos further up, pure and drinkable.  Alongside the creek the vegetation changes with spongy mosses, algae, and decomposing leaves - perfect for studying Wetlands.

#guatavita #bogota #colombia #paramo

Students unpacked their lab kits, four stubby pencils and four meters of yarn and tied off their quadrants.  After sketching every kind of plant life they could find in the quadrant, they counted the numbers of each.  Further away from the creek, trees had been cleared for some grazing cows, land appropriated by squatters from before stricter controls on constructing on the mountain (compare Bogota to Caracas or La Paz).  They repeated the same study with glaringly obvious results, the cleared field had almost no diversity of plant life, almost no insects recorded.

#bogota #chingaza #frailejon

Colombia is water rich, mostly powered by hydro-electrics, and most cities have drinkable tap water.  Protecting the paramo and the filtration system is written into environmental law.  One student’s father’s job was constructing massive hydro electric projects and working with local communities to make sure they benefit with jobs, education and health services from the projects.  Poking holes in the earth can also be a very sensitive issue for indigenous groups that consider the earth as a sacred body.  Step one of the project was getting students to experience the rich mix between culture and ecology, to realize the impact of cities, to see themselves as its stewards.

#bogota #chingaza #paramo

In class students compiled their data sets, reflected on their observations, and prepared for the next step, to find out what happens to the purity of water on the other side of the city.  We “slow watched”* Bill Nye’s Wetlands video along with documentation of the Bogota humedales.  Texts compiled from the library extended research.  Once students had brainstormed, affinity grouped, and framed an inquiry, there was a purpose to learning skills for decoding informative text.  Mini-lessons, guided and individual reading became a part of the larger quest to discover the complex ecosystems of wetlands, human impact, and design an informative event as a social action.  




Later in the week we bused across the city passing mad-made canals.  We followed the water flow to the humedales, the wetlands that feed into Rio Bogota, which from the overlook at Salto de Tequendama, reeks.  There we met out guide who would lead us on an informative hike through the wetlands.  Students discovered a map of the original quebrada water movements before the construction of the city.  Bogota’s urban development stretches like a timeline from the Candelaria colonial center along the mountain, each quebrada marking a different period.  They took a guided walk through the wetlands attuned to any plant and wildlife they could find.  The guide’s oral narratives pointed out the bird species that had recently returned as the wetlands revived, and of new species appearing, seeking higher altitudes in migration patterns due to a warming Bogota.  Our humedal was one of the success stories, but there are several others that are wastelands.  They also learned that community protests had pushed the local government to stop the rampant dumping and improper drainage.  Over time the wetland area had resuscitated itself.


This particular wetland project culminated in a live museum.  In a “glocalized model” where students compared their embodied experience with further research on different kinds of wetlands around the world.  They built a life size classroom size model of mangroves, modeled after Colombian coastal regions under threat.  In Art class students designed masks and body extensions to simulate animal adaptations to the environment.  During the museum they enacted improv theater skits of their animals while demonstrating concepts and vocabulary.  Each student presented posters of their research process from immersion, framing inquiry, research process to results to wonder.  As an introduction to the museum students performed an interactive rap on water.  As a closing, using a map of concentric rings extending from Bogota, they explained the small human moves of sustainability such as consuming more local produce, how small actions multiplied ripple into global consequences.


Learning Design
These critical learning events were a once a year occurrence and enlisted the aid of specialists within and beyond the school.  The scope of planning and knowledge was far beyond the capabilities of one teacher.  Each module pushed the learner toward the final event, to develop their own inquiry, strive for the answer to their questions, and design an experience for others to understand the human connection to the natural world.  Our goal was to design embodied learning experiences that would immerse to the point of deep emotional attachment.  We wanted them to be subjects, not objects of their learning process.  

Modules within the project moved along a spectrum of inquiry based learning models, from more teacher prompted challenge based quests, to gradual release modules of species study where students could stretch their own voice and choice, to more free design models of the museum experience and presentation of improv theater performances of animal species.  The key was to keep modules within the frame of the driving inquiry, and to maintain reading and writing development as core threads, but for the design and making to be present not as the tack on module after the reading and writing, but as ongoing and adjacent.  Design and Making encompass a broader bandwidth of thought and expression and can often get at nascent ideas not yet ready to come out as language.  

We pulled from multiple sources to understand how learning about our natural world has changed.  The New Generation Science Standards were just gaining traction which helped in designing an inquiry based project where each of six classes would study a different biome but work through the same crosscutting concepts, core ideas, and scientific practices.  Student thinking paralleled that of the Primary Years Program's key concepts, although we didn’t want to give them the questions, but rather allow experiential immersion in a natural local environment.  Mindful documentation, followed by reflection served as catalyst for provoking inquiry.  Finally because there was no text to follow, we had to be comfortable co-creating content with students through the quebrada hike, the humedales venture, interview with a parent expert, and documentary photos and video from these experiences.


 Changing Mythologies 
These projects were run over two years ago and a lot has changed both in the world, and in my understanding of the co-creative potential.  Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations after a transatlantic crossing on an environmentally sound sailboat.  The youth are getting restless and are waking up to the co-creation potentials to mobilize through social media.  Just in the last six months, Hong Kong, Bogota, Santiago, Tehran, Paris have seen prolonged mass protests.  In the case of Hong Kong, school kids are planning, coordinating, and developing agile “be water” protest methods.  Rewind to a few years ago, we got mixed feedback on teaching students about sushi and carbon footprints, the water cost of different foods, and documenting food waste in the cafeteria.  Today students want to play a part in finding local solutions to big problems.  They should be able to expect embodied experiential approach to learning where knowledge is action upon their environment.

 An obstacle we faced was the media created mythologies of the natural world, a vestige of Aristotelean Cartesian dualism separating human mental worlds from the senses and connection to the natural world.  Nature documentaries that we all grew up with are basically lies.  The portrayal of these perfect worlds ignores that human impact has altered nodes in these natural systems, that we are part of the phenomenological world, but are failing to sustain its continuity.  So instead of teaching two separate units of study on systems in our natural world, and human impact on the environment, we fused the two in order to have more time to extend the project.



While we had the freedom to be agile with our standards, curriculum, and learning design and had full administrative and community support, I also realized that we were prototyping projects that would easily fit into Common Core, STEAM/STEAM’s New Generation Science Standards, Primary Years Program Essential Elements, New Literacies, Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning, ISTE Student Standards, and the d.School’s Design Thinking framework.  My concern is that any of these approaches can easily become rigid method, a pre-ordained schemata made by adults who are judged by accountability criteria by other adults, all lacking a child co-construction.

On Bullshit
Children understand injustice before they know the word for it.  They also get cooperative effort at the expense of their own immediate self gratification.  As one third grader angrily pointed out to me as we were walking down from the quebrada overlooking what would have been a perfect panorama of Bogota if it weren’t for the cloud of smog above the city, “I am breathing that!”  This project tapped into these powerful intrinsic drivers - injustice, cooperation, and emotion - but meanwhile, children are also attuning themselves to the second curriculum of adult systems and cultural mythologies that often have mixed extrinsic signals capable of overriding their Noble Savage wiring.


For example, preservation of the natural world has become just another children’s myth we perpetuate like bullying is wrong, cell phone use is bad for you, belief in democracy, equity, Santa Claus, and reducing carbon footprints.  They are watching us and while they can see through the BS, what we model is setting their cultural default mode.  We become what we do.  We teachers, as co-designers of learning, have to respond to both students emotional connections in a learning trajectory, and be authentically invested ourselves in that trajectory.  These two things work in tandem.

During the students’ Wetland Study, I was reading The World Without Us and The Sixth Extinction, and revisited my memory of a ground shaking series of lectures from Stephen Jay Gould back in college.  While my students brainstormed their biggest wonders, made affinity groups of their post-its, bracketed each group with an essential question, and framed their whole project with a Driving Question, I had created my own core motivating question - why are humans the only animal that fouls its own nest?  I also wanted an answer to my question.  

 Larry Rosenstock, CEO of High Tech High, defined rigor (one of the most annoying catch phrases in education along with grit, growth mindset, best practices, and the whopper - pedagogical automaticity) as being in the presence of an adult in passionate pursuit of a creative endeavor.  Rosenstock later advised new teachers that the profession will sometimes make you feel unprepared, not adequate for the job.  His message, you are already enough, find that thing you are passionate about, and make sure you bring it into the classroom.


2020 Vision, Thoughts for the Current Decade
A human centered, constructivist approach to learning has been surging now for the last few years through experiential models like Design/Systems Thinking, Maker Education, STEM/STEAM, civic action, and activism - all of which are in line with constructivism in education, all with roots in Key, Montessori, Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner, Papert and countless others.  Simultaneously we start the decade with four growing global crisis looming - social discontent, the environment, and the role of technology and artificial intelligence in our lives.  

 The fourth urgency brackets the other three, the lack of media literacy, which leaves the general public vulnerable to bad science, false narratives, blitzes of highly provoking emotive content, and algorithmic nudges.  The global necessity of addressing these complex problems, often beyond the comprehension by an individual, will drive us further toward the idea of knowledge as co-creation, with others, with nature, and with algorithm.  

In the next post I will explore progress in these areas by artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, educators, and bold anti-disciplinarians. 


Bibliography

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amritacreate. “To Study Plant Population Frequency by Quadrat Method - MeitY OLabs.” YouTube, YouTube, 16 Feb. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBYqBNyojMQ.

Anania, Billy, et al. “The Viral Artwork Emerging From Hong Kong's Protests.” Hyperallergic, 3 Jan. 2020, hyperallergic.com/535273/the-viral-artwork-emerging-from-hong-kongs-protests/.


Bloom, Paul. Just Babies The Origins of Good and Evil. Broadway Books, 2014.

 Calma, Justine. “Greta Thunberg Wraps up 15-Day Carbon-Free Voyage to New York City.” The Verge, The Verge, 28 Aug. 2019, www.theverge.com/2019/8/28/20837520/greta-thunberg-boat-new-york-city-climate-change.

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 Graham-McLay, Charlotte. “New Zealand Schools to Teach Students about Climate Crisis, Activism and 'Eco Anxiety'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Jan. 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/13/new-zealand-schools-to-teach-students-about-climate-crisis-activism-and-eco-anxiety.

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Koomen, Rebecca, et al. “Children Delay Gratification for Cooperative Ends.” Psychological Science, 9 Jan. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619894205.

 Mrkva, Kellen, et al. “Attention Drives Emotion: Voluntary Visual Attention Increases Perceived Emotional Intensity.” Psychological Science, vol. 30, no. 6, 2019, pp. 942–954., doi:10.1177/0956797619844231.

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Price, David. “Interview With Larry Rosenstock, CEO High Tech High.” YouTube, YouTube, 16 Mar. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8RAv2qwTbg.

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