The problem is coming from inside the school.

I’m not racist.

And, it turns out, you’re not racist.

It’s amazing, really… we have all of this research that tells us that racialized students are over disciplined and underestimated in school systems all over the world and yet none of us in education is racist. Weird.

People are all over my social media feed railing against the de-streaming of Ontario’s grade 9 program because it’s impossible for secondary teachers to differentiate their instruction the way that elementary teachers do every day and (pearl clutch) there can’t possibly be any differential impact on learning from having specialist teachers teach the subjects in which they’ve specialized. Most of all, however, many people in education seem unable or unwilling to believe what the research is telling us, namely that streaming is a practice that disproportionately impacts racialized students.

My first teaching job was in an urban, big-city public secondary school with a majority black student population and a majority white teacher population. I taught kids in several streams while I was there and I can remember, vividly, individual kids in the applied stream that could have handled more academic content. The streaming became, for them, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Was it technically possible for them to move into the academic stream after grade 9? Sure. Was it likely? No. They had made friends in the applied stream. They would have to bridge the content gap somehow, likely in the summer, when most of them needed to get jobs. Most of all, however, they were unlikely to change streams because they had internalized our assessment of them as learners. We, the people with the letters behind our names, had put them there so that must be where they belonged.

Most students in Ontario enter grade 9 having never been taught mathematics by someone with a mathematics degree. The idea that we get to decide a student’s academic trajectory before they’ve even had the chance to learn from a subject specialist is astonishing. We are setting students on a pathway that will impact their whole life; that’s a lot of power. If we get it wrong, the consequences for them are enormous.

Zevenbergen writes that ability grouping is “achieved through a differentiated curriculum that increasingly reifies differences as students progress through school” (2003, p. 7). That means that streaming makes existing differences between students more real, more concrete, and harder to change. While streaming is not the only way those differences are reified, it is one important way that is (relatively) easy to change. Zevenberger goes on to write that

most often when students are grouped by ability, the outcomes support the practice – that is, the higher streams perform very well, and the lower streams perform poorly. This can be used as evidence to show that the practice is justified and that the groupings are correct since the outcomes ‘prove‘ the effectiveness of the original groupings. However, questions need to be posed as to whether pedagogy is matching the needs of the students or whether the outcomes are a reflection of the pedagogies being used. (2003, p. 3)

I get a lot of things wrong every day, just ask my kids. I know that my decision-making is fallible; to paraphrase Amos Oz, I frequently disagree with myself. Why is it so hard for so many people to entertain the possibility that we have biases that impact our decision-making around streaming? Why is it so difficult to believe that we might be getting things wrong, systemically, when it comes to streaming? Why do we believe that we are uniquely exempt from bias? We let ourselves off the hook and point the finger elsewhere with a breezy casualness that takes my breath away. This is not reflective practice.

Are there other factors that contribute to student learning? Absolutely. Do we, as educators, control most of those factors? We don’t, at least not beyond our power as engaged citizens in a democracy. We can’t control whether a student has books at home. We can’t control whether they are growing up in poverty or plenty. We can’t control what their experiences were like in the early years. What we can control are the decisions we make on their behalf in our schools.

We can make better decisions. We can look at the research (if you want a good research summary, I’ve listed some sources below which I’d sugest as a starting point) and then look at ourselves with a dollop of humility. The research on streaming tells us that it’s a problematic practice, that it privileges the privileged and disadvantages the disadvantaged. Awareness is change. We know better, now we need to do better – kids are counting on us.

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Forgasz, H. (2010). Streaming for Mathematics in Victorian Secondary Schools. Australian Mathematics Teacher, 66(1), p. 31–40.

Gaztambide-Fernández, R., & Parekh, G. (2017). Market “Choices” or Structured Pathways? How Specialized Arts Education Contributes to the Reproduction of Inequality. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(41).

Murdoch, J., Guégnard, C., Koomen, M., Imdorf, C., Kamanzi, C. & Meyer, T. (2017). Pathways fostering mobility to higher education for vulnerable immigrants in France, Switzerland and Canada, European Journal of Higher Education, 7:1, p. 29-42.

Segedin, L. (2012). Listening to the Student Voice: Understanding the School-Related Factors that Limit Student Success. McGill Journal of Education, 47(1), 93–107.

Zevenbergen, R. (2003). Grouping by ability. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Australian Mathematics Teacher, 59(4), p. 2-7.

It’s okay to play

We’re about to embark on week 6 of distance learning in Ontario, week 4 of that learning being led by classroom teachers. The novelty has worn off and our reserves of cheerful optimism are running low. Teachers, elementary teachers in particular, are known for their cheeriness but even the sun-shiniest among us are showing the wear and tear of this uniquely stressful time. If you’re feeling out of sorts you’re in good company.

Kids are feeling weary too. It’s a long haul and it’s going to get longer. My own children are tech-savy and have all their basic needs met: they wake up and go to bed on a regular schedule, they’re getting outside every day, they’re eating well and they have parents who can help them academically (although I confess that dividing fractions required me to do some review).  If my kids are struggling to remain motivated with their online classes, which they are, then it’s likely that everyone is. The teachers I’m in touch with reported that this week felt like heavy lifting with kids. They weren’t engaged, they weren’t handing in work and they weren’t present for synchronous sessions. What had been working before, suddenly wasn’t.

In my last post, I shared this image which describes the Community of Inquiry as conceptualized by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000). The model proposes that the educational experience in distance learning is composed of three equally important types of presence: cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence.

Over the past several weeks we have seen a lot of influential educational thinkers frantically distancing themselves from the terms “distance learning” and “online learning” as we struggle to both name what we’re doing and to describe its challenges. Emergency remote learning seems to be a term most people can agree on. While I agree that what’s happening is somewhat different from a planned distance learning experience that students have chosen to engage in, I think that we ignore the lessons of distance education research at our peril. Imagining that what we’re doing is entirely different from what distance educators have been doing for decades just isn’t accurate. We’re doing it under intense pressure and with students who haven’t chosen to learn this way but the nuts and bolts of how it works is very similar.

One of the distance education practices that I think we would be wise to pay attention to is valuing social presence. Garrison (2009) describes social presence as “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” I don’t know if that’s something most teachers thought about when they were rushing to put their online classrooms together a few weeks ago.

How are we allowing students to sustain and develop their relationships with us and with each other in our online context? How are we having fun? How are we being silly? How are we playing? We do this effortlessly in our classrooms by telling stories, joking with students, providing feedback, and relating personal connections to the material. We don’t even realize we’re doing it most of the time. Online we have to be more deliberate about it.

Even if you’re teaching grade 12 Physics, allowing time and space for the development of social presence matters. Why? It matters for its own sake – we all want to feel like we’re part of a community, especially now – and it also matters because it contributes to cognitive presence; students learn better when they’re socially engaged.  As an adult taking distance education courses, you may have never experienced this being done well but the research supports that social presence and cognitive presence go hand-in-hand. So don’t be afraid to ease off the content gas pedal for a while and focus on having fun with your students. Have a look at tools like FlipGrid, which allows students to post short video clips. Have a pet beauty contest, even if the contestants are pet rocks. Re-name the elements in the periodic table based on characters on their favourite TV shows, or politicians, or celebrities. Ask students to complete an activity outdoors – tableaux anyone? Have a silly walk contest. Give yourself permission to have fun. It’s not just okay to play, it may actually be essential to sustaining students’ cognitive presence over the long haul. We can be here for a good time and a long time.

Dive in: 5 things to think about when you’re planning for early learning online.

There aren’t many superlatives left to describe the times we’re living in: unprecedented is pretty much worn out by now.  But thread-bare though our adjectives may be they are nevertheless apt.  Most people alive today have never experienced anything like this pandemic and even those who can remember living through quarantines have never experienced something on this scale. My 95 year old grandmother was born 7 years after the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and there aren’t many people alive who are older than her.

Next week, we in Ontario’s public education sector will begin on a trajectory that has never before been attempted – the roll out of distance learning from Kindergarten to grade 12 across an entire system of public education. Truly, the mind boggles. I challenge you to go into a research database (all Ontario College of Teachers members have access to one here: www.oct.ca) and use the search terms “early childhood education or kindergarten or first grade or elementary school” and “distance education or distance learning or online education or online learning.”  You’re going to come up with virtually nothing.

The research that has been done on early childhood/early primary education and distance learning has been done in teacher preparation, not with young children.  From a research point of view, this isn’t surprising given the challenges in recruiting subjects and getting ethics approval to work with young children.  There are lots of reasons that this research hasn’t been done, not the least of which is that we’ve never had a reason to do it.  As a parent, I wanted my young children learning while interacting with their peers and it’s a well-supported truism that social engagment is critically important to learning, particularly in the early years. Necessity, however, is the mother of innovation.

So, what are some things we might want to consider as we reach out to families online and think about how to continue the learning we were doing face-to-face only a few weeks ago? Obviously, what’s below is only conjecture… there aren’t any actual experts out there, this is all too new. But, as an educator who spent years in Kindergarten and Primary classes both as a teacher and as a consultant and as a student working on her Doctorate in Distance Education, here are some suggestions that might be helpful.

1. It’s still a community.

If your online learning experiences so far have been less-than-great, as I hear quite often, you may not realize that there this is a domain with theoretical pillars – there’s actually quite a lot of research into what works in Distance Education (DE), albeit mostly with older students. One of these big ideas in DE is the Community of Inquiry (COI) (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000). This framework “represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements – social, cognitive and teaching presence.”

What that means for Kindergarten and Primary teachers is that all those things we already do: creating community, nurturing relationships, and supporting families still matter to learning in an online classroom. Your presence in the online space, responding to questions, making comments, asking questions, and sharing content matters. It’s not just a matter of creating content and leaving it there. Your ongoing presence and interaction remain important to the learning. 

Student presence also matters and it’s important that there’s room for student voice and choice. Students should feel that they have input into the class and how it evolves online, in the same way that you teach responsively in the face-to-face context. I know I’ve taken courses online that feel rote and whose content clearly isn’t responsive to the people taking the class. It’s a miserable experience.

Don’t feel that you have to spend the next few days putting everything imaginable online. Try a few things and see how it goes. Think of it as dancing with a partner: wait to see what moves they make before you make your next move.

2. You are pioneers, be kind to yourselves… and ask for help.

Have I mentioned yet that this is brand new? For some of you the technology itself is brand new. For almost everyone, designing an online classroom is brand new.

It’s not going to be perfect. You’re going to try things that don’t work and there will be moments of frustration. That’s okay. We’re all learning this together.

When you get stuck, take a break or ask for help. There are lots of great videos out there explaining how all of the technolgical tools (D2L, Google Classroom, SeeSaw, etc…) work. There are also some good resources. You can ask your colleagues, you can ask your kids, you can ask me! Try to frame it as a unique learning opportunity for you too and be kind to yourself, no one is expecting perfection.

3. Boil it down

Think about the most important learning for your grade level. Think about where your students were in their learning trajectories when you last saw them. What are the key pieces for them to be successful as they continue through their education? Focus on those. It’s maple syrup season, which is fitting. Be inspired by that process and concentrate on the essence of your curriculum.

4. Think outside the screen.

The classroom will be online, yes, but the learning doesn’t have to be.

Think of your online posts to your classroom as provocations and invite students to use them as a springboard for their own ideas and explorations. You might ask them to write and record a video interviewing their parents or their siblings, they might collect objects in their homes to sort using a variety of attributes, they might create a movement pattern that they record so that their classmates can learn it.  They might collect rocks to use as counters. It’s going to be a less linear learning process than you might be used to and you’ll have to accept that individual products might be quite different but, if you can wrap your head around planning for differentiation, you might find that students are learning in new and unexpected ways.

5. Relationships before everything.

You are the experts on your students, not me or anyone else. You know their families, what their living situations are, how many siblings they have, what language(s) they speak and whether they have grandparents at home. All of these factors, and more, are going to influence the ways that they interact with an online classroom. All the relationships you’ve built with parents and families in the past 7 months are going to matter a lot over the course of this process.

My own children have been studying online with their Hebrew School teacher since they were very young. They’ve never met her; it’s unlikely that they’ll ever meet her – she lives on the other side of the world. They nevertheless have a great relationship with her.  You have an advantage she doesn’t; you already know your students. Distance learning is a great opportunity to get to know them in a new way. You can maintain and even grow your relationships with your students and their families during this time – what a unique experience to have lived together! What stories you’ll all have to tell! You are going where no one has gone before… be brave.

I’d love to hear how it’s going… please leave a comment below to share your experiences. We may be physically distanced but let’s stay connected!

 

It’s all about you

This year, for the first time, I’m teaching one of my own children.  Now, it’s only for 75 minutes a week, but it’s an adventure nonetheless. My son, who’s 8, is having a very hard time separating Mommy from Miss Emily and it’s a challenge for me to manage his needs effectively when I have 9 other kids to teach at the same time. It’s usually not pretty and I often leave with a nagging headache.

But this week, for the first time in several weeks, I managed to sleep through the night uninterrupted prior to teaching his ballet class.  Instead of going into the class feeling exhausted and edgy, I went in feeling pretty good and I even had enough energy to teach the following class without worrying that I’d fall asleep on my feet.

I’ve been doing some extra reading about how to best teach younger boys in ballet class (there are 3 boys in my son’s class) so I’ve been putting some of those strategies into place for the past few weeks (floor exercises instead of centre work, movement games, team ballet ‘battles’, and lots of fun breaks between the serious bits… in case you’re wondering) but this was the first week when it felt like the dynamic had shifted.  For the first time this year, I felt successful with this group of kids and I didn’t get so frustrated with my own child.

After the class was over, I found myself reflecting on why things had shifted.  Was it because I had tried some new things that were more developmentally suited to that group of kids or was it because I was more well rested and better able to teach effectively and be present in the room?  How much of my frustration with the kids was really about me and my state of mind?  I had been blaming my negative experience of the class on them… but was it really all about me?

We get into this kind of thinking a lot in education.  Too often, I hear teachers talking about being “saddled with behaviours” in their classes, as though the children are choosing to overwhelm their teacher, as though their behaviour is a personal affront to the adults.  We talk about kids in a way that dehumanizes them, that ignores their individuality and that focuses exclusively on their deficits.  I have, many times, observed teachers who have become blind to the amazing things that children are doing right in front of them because they have become so focused on what their students aren’t doing that they can’t see anything else.  It’s one of the most challenging parts of my work: trying to push back against that negativity and advocate for the kids while at the same time not alienating the teacher.

Children are capable… what does that really mean?  Does it mean that we can never talk about the challenges we’re having with kids?  Does it mean that we have to adopt a Pollyanna tone in our conversations so that everything is about sunshine and robins who perch on your finger as you sing a merry tune?  No, I don’t think so.

A colleague once described me as a creative pragmatist, something I took as a great compliment. I don’t want to suggest that problems don’t exist; we all need to vent sometimes and it’s good to have people with whom you can let out all your frustrations. But when venting becomes the tone of all our conversations about children, we have a problem.  Children come to school with all sorts of experiences and it is our job, our mission, our vocation to help them learn.  They are children, we are adults; it’s not their fault, it’s just their turn.

Courtesy of Anita Simpson @asimpsonEDU

This week has been an excellent reminder of the power of “yet” in my life both personally and professionally.  When things aren’t going well, I need to take a deep breath and remind myself that they’re not going well… yet.  Keeping that mental door open to the possibility of change makes all the difference in my perception of the problem.  As my perception changes, the problem changes too and I start to be able to see solutions that weren’t obvious when I was in full venting mode.  In order to be there for kids I need to be there… really in the room, wide awake (both literally and in the Maxine Greene way), and present, prepared to advocate for them even when it’s uncomfortable and prepared to make the changes in my own practice that will make a difference for them.  You’re the only teacher they have and so am I; what we do and what we say matters.  There are no mulligans in childhood.

The Best Laid Plans

Welcome to the new school year!  I hope it’s been a great experience so far, full of the excitement and rush of newness.  In the spirit of that classic September assignment “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” I’m going to tell you about one of the adventures I had this summer and the way it’s changing my thinking about the work that I do.

A colleague and I had the good fortune of leading a 3-day summer workshop for Kindergarten teachers hosted by our provincial teacher’s union (If you’re reading this from outside of Ontario, you may be thinking: “Your union provides PD… what’s up with that?!?” We’re a lucky bunch.)  This workshop was focused on the new Kindergarten Program Document and the assessment framework laid out in the Growing Success Addendum for Kindergarten.  We also wanted to touch on some of the themes (eek! that word!) of our Kindergarten program: the teaching partnership, the classroom environment, outdoor inquiry, and the thoughtful use of materials.

It was a jam-packed agenda for three days together and we approached the planning with some jumpy nerves.  How could we plan for three days of learning without knowing who we were going to be working with?  When you’re presenting about a student-led, inquiry-based program, it doesn’t make much sense to plan everything out minute-by-minute.  We felt that the meta-message of the workshop needed to align with the messages coming out of our mouths.  You can’t credibly tell people: “You need to be flexible and responsive to students’ needs.”  while simultaneously ignoring the learning needs of the people in front of you.

So we began with enough material for the first two days, with the intention of planning the third day responsively, but after the first morning it became obvious, based on the questions that teachers and educators were sharing and the notes they were sending forward to us, that we would need to re-think our planning sooner than that.

So we did, and we continued to plan in the same responsive way over the next two and a half days.  We also talked to each other about our plans, right in front of the workshop participants, because we wanted to model that collaborative teaching partnership that is so important to a successful Kindergarten classroom in Ontario.  Sometimes it probably looked like we weren’t organized but, while the type-A part of my brain squirms uncomfortably at that perception, I know that the structured improvisation of inquiry-based planning is often what dictates its success in keeping it closely tied to the learning needs of the students.   It’s going to look a bit messy; by nature it’s not a tidy process.

In reflecting on the process of those three days, I’ve been thinking about the nature of the professional development experience in education.  We are very accustomed to receiving our professional development in a tidy, packaged format.  We’ve been schooled in being good consumers and we often expect to be passive receptacles of information that’s delivered to us in a well-polished box.  I know that I’ve been guilty of those preconceptions.  What does that do to the process of professional development?  When it’s so one-sided, what are we really learning?  How does it impact on changing professional practice when the process is so divorced from the needs and interests of the people around the table?

The learning for me, as a person who’s often at the front (side, back – I like to wander) of the room, has been that shifting those perceptions about what professional development “should be”is a challenge.  Our expectations are a strong fortress.  They protect us, true, but they also confine us.  Teaching responsively requires not just an attitude of curiosity but it also requires honesty from both sides of the process.  You can’t meet people’s needs when they won’t share them.  It really distributes the burden of responsibility when the “leader” isn’t always the one in charge.  The success of our professional learning suddenly isn’t someone else’s responsibility; it’s ours.

I was at a meeting last week, led by a teacher who has been seconded to our provincial Ministry of Education.  At the beginning of the meeting she announced, with a twinkle in her eye:  “I have an agenda for today, but really, it’s nonsense… we’ll be going wherever you want to take us.”  And so we did, and it was great.  It was a little bit chaotic, and we didn’t always know what would happen next, but we left having learned what was relevant to us.  For each of us that was different.  And we were okay with that.  I wonder what would happen if this started to be our new normal.  Would some of our cynicism about teacher PD dissolve if we felt more responsible for our learning, if it were more responsive to us?  Would we rise to the challenge?

 

 

 

Critiquing the un-critiqueable

Twenty years ago, Arlene Croce, writing in the New Yorker, declared that she felt that Bill T. Jones’ work exploring his own AIDS diagnosis and the terminal illnesses of his performers made his work “undiscussable” – beyond the reach of criticism. She coined the term “victim art” and vented her frustration at the way she felt manipulated by art that seemed more about issues than it was about aesthetics.  Now, I don’t agree with Croce, but I’m finding myself this morning sympathizing with her frustration.

I’m frustrated because I’m struggling with another type of performance that we do treat as undiscussable, performances we don’t dare to critique, not because the performers are victims but because they’re just so darn cute.  I’m talking about performances that are so far away from Bill T. Jones as to hardly be in the same universe.  I’m talking about the school concert.

I have been part of school concerts as a music teacher, classroom teacher, director, and parent.  I’ve spent long hours rehearsing kids for all sorts of shows, some good, some bad, some cringe-worthy.  I’ve toiled in the trenches of recorders, boomwhackers, and box steps.  I know how much work it is to put on one of these shows, even the worst of them.

So, I’m reluctant to criticize, really I am.  But, I just can’t hold it in any more.  We need to take a hard look at this ritual and ask ourselves some big questions.  Like, why in the world are we doing this? What’s the value? What’s the point?

I attended the annual concert at my children’s school recently and found myself so uncomfortable watching it that I couldn’t stand to stay past when my children performed.  Part of that discomfort was the hard metal chairs and part of it was a sinking feeling of frustration at the image of the child that we seem determined to cultivate in our culture.  Their concert was full of what we’ve come to expect from these sorts of events: lip-synching, children trying to sing over-top of a recorded vocal track, and vague, gestural dancing whose lazy choreography hides some children in the back rows while others are featured.

When did we decide that children’s voices needed to be covered up by adult vocals?  When did it become okay for children to pretend to sing instead of actually singing? What’s the value in spending hours and hours of class time preparing a performance whose relationship to the Arts curriculum is tangential at best, if it exists at all?

Here’s what happens when children are forced to sing over recorded music: they don’t sing, they yell.  They force their little voices to shout so that they can hear themselves.  They can’t hear their peers so they can’t match their pitches to each other and they aren’t singing melodically at all both because the recordings often offer a very poor vocal model for children (a low chest voice instead of the head voice that children use) and because the recording is overpowering so they loose the melodic line almost as soon as they start to sing.

So, here’s an alternative: sing acapella.  If there isn’t someone in your school who can accompany the children on a guitar, a piano, or a ukulele (anything, really, most of this music isn’t complicated), let them sing without accompaniment.  I’ve accompanied kids on a tambourine and a hand drum just as a way of keeping the beat for them.  They sounded beautiful.  Another idea: sing with them.  No one expects you to be Celine Dion but I’d much rather hear children singing along with their teacher, regardless of her singing skills, than have to sit through another concert of yelling.

And then we come to the dance, oh, the dance.  For me, this is the hardest part.  It is like nails on a chalkboard having to sit through a dance performance that clearly has no relationship with the children who are performing it.  Our Arts curriculum in Ontario is very centred on children’s creativity and on facilitating children’s creative ideas as they develop in sophistication through the grades.  It is not about step-touching your way to a more developed understanding of compliance as an educational value.  

I had to watch my beautiful boy struggle through a dance that used none of his skills as a creative mover, none of his choreographic ideas, and none of his physical skills but instead featured him repeatedly being bumped from both sides as his classmates struggled to maintain the two horizontal lines they had been placed in and two of his classmates lip synched and danced at the front of the stage.  He came home crying several times prior to the concert because he was so frustrated.  Where is the pedagogy, the inclusiveness, the art, frankly, in that?

That these performances are accepted unquestioningly by so many parents and teachers speaks powerfully to our image of the child.  We blithely accept that children don’t have a voice, they don’t have agency, and they don’t have anything to contribute.  We have to do it for them.  We have to sing for them (or some adult does), we have to micro-manage their movements, and we have to limit their expressive choices so severely that they’re left with only two options: comply or act out.

I spent part of last week at the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance (NAREA) conference in Toronto.  Besides taking so many notes that I felt like my hand might fall off, I was struck by the enormous contrast in the image of the child between the Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of Reggio Emilia and the average North American public school.  As part of the conference, I got to visit the Wonder of Learning exhibit that will be housed in the basement of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel until November 23rd of this year (you should go!).  Included in that exhibit is the documentation  that is featured in the Reggio Children book Dialogues with Places. This documentation tells the story of a group of children who wanted to prepare a gift for a new school building.

“The children explored the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre while construction on the site was still underway. They chose a space that was interesting to them and designed a work of art, a gift conceived in harmony and in dialogue with the chosen place, respecting its identity while at the same time modifying it.”

While the photographs of their work are stunning, seeing a video of the dance they created was a revelation.  This was a dance of running, of leaping, of hiding behind pillars, of chasing, of spinning, and of falling down – not a step-touch or a gesture to be seen.  It was a dance that, while guided by an atelierista (artist-in-residence), was of the children and their creative voices were both strong and visible in the work.  It was a piece of art that was both discussable and critiqueable because it was thoughtfully created with children not pinned on them like ill-fitting clothing.  It was not about them being cute and it did not treat them like objects who exist to be passively viewed by adults.  It was a performance that celebrated their agency, their energy, and their individuality.  It was beautiful.

What is stopping us from giving children these same opportunities to express themselves?  The world is changing so that our creative skills are becoming more and more valuable but we are, largely, still stuck in a model of education that values compliance far ahead of creativity.  We do children an immense disservice by valuing their cuteness ahead of all else.  They are people with ideas and opinions and agency; they deserve to be treated that way… yes, even at the school concert.  Discuss.

 

 

 

Where do the Arts Belong?

Last week, I had an interesting conversation with one of my sons’ teachers. He has a classroom teacher who delivers the “core” subjects (not my favorite term, by any means), a physical education teacher, and a teacher whose job it is to teach social studies and the arts. I had asked her to call me in response to some assessments she had sent home. I was a little bewildered as to how she could manage to teach all of these subjects (Dance, Drama, Music, Visual Arts, and Social Studies) during the approximately 30 minutes a day she has with my son’s class.

It turns out that her background and mine are not all that different and that, until this year, she’d been doing a similar job in her school board to the one I have now. So we had a good chat about the challenges of her current role, the ways she’s trying to cope (by focusing on one subject per month in a rotation) and the near impossibility of giving any of these subjects their due in 30 minutes per day.

When I hung up the phone and went back to cooking dinner, I found myself thinking about these strange things we call subjects and how we often treat them in schools. I’ve come to realize that we really like boxes. We love boxes. We like boxes that describe our roles and we like performing those roles inside more boxes. We like boxes for timetabling and boxes for drawing. We can’t get enough of them.

But is that reality? Does it give students a real sense of the scope of a subject or a domain when we point to something and say “Here, this is math… that is science… and that is Art. They are different. They don’t go together.”? I don’t think so. I think that not only does it do our students a disservice, it doesn’t reflect the reality of the work being done in those fields.

I have observed an interesting phenomenon over many years of teaching and learning in the Arts. I’m going to call it the Beginners Paradox. Often when someone starts learning in an art form, they are very open, very curious and are willing to try almost anything. They don’t have a preconceived idea about what is and isn’t part of that form. As they become more advanced, however, their ideas narrow and their willingness to experiment with techniques or ideas that they perceive to be outside of their sphere dramatically declines. Only at the most advanced levels do people again become more willing to open up and, ironically, try to become more like beginners – to see their domain with fresh eyes so that they are able to innovate and push the work forward.

Yesterday, I was asked to create a question that would guide my work this year. We were working with Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question (put it on your reading list, it’s really good). I’m not sure that my question is all that beautiful but here it is:

How do I move teachers towards a more integrated model of Arts education that sees the arts less as discrete subjects (stop and teach) and more as languages of expression (ways of knowing) that are available all the time for all students?

I think that in most cases, in most schools, this is the way forward. If we want the arts to be central to education we need to integrate them into the curriculum, seeing them both as valuable subjects and as teaching tools that infuse the day with creation. However, I know that some artists and arts educators won’t agree with me. This model won’t produce as many technically skilled musicians and dancers as perhaps we’ve been accustomed to. High school music teachers will find that students don’t have the same knowledge and skill base as they have in years past because they’ve spent more time composing a body percussion opus describing the European settlement of North America and its effects on First Nations people (for instance) and less time learning how to read sheet music. That’s the trade-off.

In the introduction to his amazing little book, HearSing, R. Murray Schafer writes an indictment of music education. We could easily substitute any of the other arts (drama, dance, visual arts) and the indictment would still stand.

“This is the indictment I make against music education as currently taught:

• That foreign music is valued above our own;
• That music composed by others is valued above anything we could achieve ourselves;
• That in trying to meet excessively high technical demands, many students become discouraged or are forced to forgo the pleasures of music-making;
• That by insisting that music is an expensive subject, opportunities for inexpensive music-making are ignored;
• That teachers (and parents and principals) fail to understand the value of music beyond the year-end concert or tour;
• That music has been isolated from contact with other subjects (science, the other arts, the environment);
• That teachers do not speak out strongly enough against the commodification of the music by the entertainment industry and the trash that it produces.

The music room is neither the beginning nor the end of music. Music is the whole sounding universe. We are simultaneously listeners and performers and composers of the universal symphony.”

Drama is the whole emotional universe.

Dance is the whole moving universe.

Visual Art is the whole seeing universe.

That’s how beginners see it. It’s how every 4-year-old I’ve ever met sees it. I think that’s how we need to teach it. Weave it into the day. Take away the boxes. Those subject divisions are illusions; we created them and we can make them disappear.

The Capable Child

I believe that children are capable.  If my teaching life has a base, that’s it.

I’ve started so many experiences with that assumption that it’s become second nature.  I’ve tried, over the past few years, to make that assumption really clear and obvious to children, parents, and colleagues.  Sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge: You think kindergarten kids can’t do that?  Let’s try!

They can’t climb and jump?  Let’s try.

They can’t paint with acrylics?  Let’s try

They can’t play with sticks?  Let’s try.

They can’t play on the ice? Let’s try.

They can’t build scale models?  Let’s try.

As a society, we place so many limitations on children, I take some mischievous delight in challenging them.

Sometimes it’s me that gets challenged.

This morning, I worked with some Kindergarten students, introducing them to clay for the first time.  I was expecting the usual progression: some exploration of the properties of the material, followed by some basic sculpture-building using the tools and techniques I had shown them.  Maybe in a few days, they would build something interesting.

Wrong.

This is what they built… in the first hour.

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So, yeah, children are capable.  Often more capable than I could have imagined.

The question that remains for me is this: how much of this capacity do we miss when we don’t allow children access to these rich materials?

I had a great conversation with a teacher of older students this morning.  We were talking about how her students, as they worked on printmaking, were having a hard time dealing with the fact that their prints didn’t always look exactly the way they had envisaged. Their discomfort at seeing art-making as a process with surprise embedded in it, prompted me to wonder how much of this anxiety is related to our cultural stigmatization of mistakes and how much is related to the product-based way we teach art.

One of the kindergarten sculptors took his piece apart three times and in the end didn’t have a final product.  He was fine with that.

The grade 6 students were upset when their prints weren’t “perfect”.

What happens in between?

 

A good school

Earlier this week, I wrote about our children starting at a new school. It’s a “good school”, that’s what everyone says. About their old school, they said less flattering things; it’s a rough school, a bad school. I always felt like I was on some kind of affirmative action campaign, trying to dispel those myths because, well, we loved that school. It was a great school.

Now, the new school is a good school too but my point here is that the perceptions we have about our local schools are very often based on little more than dust in the wind, snippets of conversation and rumours.  Sometimes the perception is entirely based on standardized test scores and media reports about them – a very narrow window into a very big world.

I spent this week working in a school that is very much like the school my children used to attend. If you asked around at swimming lessons, or on the side of the soccer field, you might hear that this school is a bad school. You might assume negative things about the students or the staff. You might avoid it for your own children.  You would be wrong, very wrong.

This is a great school. I have seen great teaching here this week and I have been so impressed by the ways that these teachers and administrators are carefully considering how to best serve their students. I haven’t heard a single disparaging comment about a child or a family and I have witnessed incredible compassion. These kids need great teachers and they have them.

We who hang out on the sides of soccer fields, holding Starbucks lattes in our hands need to think carefully about how we define good schools and how we talk about all schools. Is it really just about the test scores? Don’t we want more from schools than test scores? I know I sure do.

Maybe we should hold our opinions, like the foam on our lattes, until we’ve walked a mile in those hallways.

Of Leaders and Lunch Money

A new blog post on the BAM Radio Network – I hope you enjoy!

http://www.bamradionetwork.com/edwords-blog/leaders-and-lunch-money