An exchange of ideas

One of the things I enjoy most about reading is the intersection of ideas that results in new thoughts and ways of thinking about every day life and goings on in the world and quite frequently ideas that are new to me that help in the day-to-day work that I do. Whew, that was a long sentence. Through an academic lens, we could choose to overlay our text-oriented transactional-approach-to-reading phenomenon with Activity Theory, and think of the book as a mediating artifact or one of the tools that effects change within our own little activity network and beyond. Or we could choose to view our new ideas and thoughts a la Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) and witness the height of our own scaffold being raised. And through yet another perspective, we might apply Barbara Rogoff with a view toward an academic Apprenticeship in Thinking (Rogoff, 1990). However we might choose to reflect on our insights gained through reading, choice of author plays a guiding role, and I would like to share some insights gleaned from three of my idea influencers of the past year or so. In particular I’m talking about Arnold Toynbee, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and Ayn Rand.

I was introduced to Arnold Toynbee through John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), and I ventured into Toynbee’s world with The World and the West (1953) followed by Civilization on Trial (1948) and topped off with Change and Habit (1966). Through this master of history and historical perspective, I discovered that the world hasn’t changed all that much since the closing days of World War II (see Robert Greene’s, The 48 Laws of Power for additional perspectives on why this is). I discovered a new perspective on religion as a way of life and the role that technology plays in influencing cultures around the world and across time. I was also privy to the insight of a truly brilliant researcher and am delighted he allowed me to stand on his shoulders across three major works and benefit from all that he had studied. “Our experience in the past gives us the only light on the future that is accessible to us” (p. 3).

I met the thinking of Rosabeth Moss Kanter through queries surrounding my doctoral research on leadership and self-regulated learning among high school students. Kanter has written numerous books on success, innovation, change, and leadership. Of particular interest to me was her book entitled Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End (2004, 2006). This work includes stories of success, stories of failure, and among the examples ranging from sports to corporate cultures, Kanter substantiates examples that focus on success building blocks in education. I was enchanted. I had moved from macro-cultural historical examples with Toynbee to micro-cultural narratives with Kanter, but the overarching tenets remained constant, “Failure and success are not episodes, they are trajectories” (p. 9).

Then I met the grand master of philosophical narrative and the exploration of ideas, Ayn Rand. Through my navigation back into public education and in particular the study of adolescent literacy practices, two amazing high school English teachers recommended that I read Anthem. Captivated barely begins to describe my delight at this introduction! Jolted was I (with all due apologies to Master Yoda – oops, that’s another story) back to an era dominated by two super powers with counter productive antagonisms. Here lived a portion of Toynbee’s post-WWII historical analysis, captured in abstraction, and marvelously re-framed as “Equality 7-2521”. And then I discovered Atlas Shrugged (1957), Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. This one took me a month, but it was worth every minute of time committed and every ounce of mental energy exchanged: living purpose and trajectories as radiated by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, collision of cultures as magnified by Toynbee. It is an exploration of ideas and ideals from which no one could possibly walk away unchanged. From Ayn Rand’s own notes, dated May 4, 1946,

In learning, we draw an abstraction from concrete objects and events. In creating, we make our own concrete objects and events out of the abstraction; we bring the abstraction down and back to its specific meaning, to the concrete; but the abstraction has helped us to make the kind of concrete we want the concrete to be (pp. xiv-xv, Plume edition, 1999).

Isn’t this what teaching and learning are all about? Vygotsky would be proud.

(With special thanks to Jeannie and Kathie at Greece Odyssey Academy and to Nancy Ares, Kevin O'Connor, and Ruthanne Vitagliano at The Warner School of Education)

21st Century Teaching Practice

An assistant superintendent of instruction at a K-12 public school asked me during a first introduction recently why I do what I do. No one had asked me this question since I started my doctoral program and the kajour website, and the question caused me to take pause and reflect on events in technology and education spanning the past 15 years. Fortunately she was patient as I began formulating my thoughts and expressing events as they had occurred to me since about 1994 when I began teaching at a local university. As my thoughts started to focus and we continued our conversation, the central tenet became clear; student thinking changed in a big way somewhere in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, and there were relevant reasons why. This big change and how we modify our teaching practices to elicit creative and critical thinking in today’s realm are the why behind “why I do what I do”.

Prior to 1994 or 1995 few of us had common access to the Internet, and contemporary student outside-of-school practices with instant messaging, blogs and microblogs, wikis, instant messaging, and online social networking were not even on the horizon. Back then, students at college level organized their thinking for class papers and discussion topics through native library systems and perhaps even card catalogs. This halcyon process, in and of itself, required a substantial amount of forethought and critical thinking in advance of knowledge building. Coupling the information collection and organization process with writing the actual paper, and synthetic and evaluative thought were the norms that first year students at college level were producing on a fairly consistent basis through about 1998.

Then Google happened. It was the second half of the 1990s, and search engines had been out there for a while, but Google was different for some reason – maybe the name sounded good, or maybe it was because Google figured out how to monatize the search engine – in any event, it was shortly after Google came on the scene that student work began to change. Within the span of about 2 to 3 years, frequent were the student submissions that had morphed from papers rich in analysis, critical thought, and original ideas borne of making connections into compendia of aggregated and summarized information. It was all good and relevant information, but the original ideas that had been so forthcoming before-Google were lacking, frequently reduced to adjunct reporting.

That’s when teaching changed for me. Rather than the didactic model on which I was raised, I found myself adapting to the new culture of online searches by facilitating rather than lecturing. There were occasional moments of relapse to traditional and well-established pedagogical practices, but the era of participative and interactive knowledge building had begun for me. The days of teacher as source were gone. Students were already way ahead of the game and willing to embrace the information that was conveniently and readily available to them through the Internet, and shame on you if you misstated something. Students were all too quick to the challenge. Harken! Then came the answer. All that students needed within an ocean of data in this new paradigm was substantive guidance toward productive outcomes to raise their focus or change their focus in a meaningful way. Wasn’t this what we as teachers had always done? Wasn’t this simply good teaching? And what a delight it was to make that re-discovery. That’s when I noticed that analysis, evaluation, and critical thinking weren’t dead, these practices just needed an after-Google way and contemporary pedagogical approach to call them forth.

An ever-expanding and continuously growing universe of information surrounds us. It’s at our fingertips. Our students know how to access it, and many of we teachers do, too. The trick is to use it as productively as possible and incorporate it into our teaching practices. I missed the early indications of how my own practice needed to change to call forth all the richness that students had produced in the past – and would have continued to produce had I recognized how my own guidance of their approach to learning needed to change. But once I made the leap and embraced the new along with the old, the old came back accompanied by the new. It was a strange new world (with tribute to Mr. Aldous Huxley), but rife with opportunity and new approaches and a learning environment rich in the teachable moments we, and our students, strive for. This 21st century teaching practice paradigm is really intriguing, if not downright fun, and it reconnects us with our students. Every day there's something new. New ways to connect the dots. New ways to help our students achieve. This is why I do what I do. (With special thanks to Angela Perrotto, ASI, Victor Central Schools, Victor, NY.)

Ideas in Education

We started Kajour to provide teachers and students with an online extension to the classroom.