Cycle Three Introductory Post

Coming on the heels of our exploration of our own humanity as it relates to our interconnections to the natural world, we now turn to a consideration of that most unnatural aspect of contemporary human life: the screen. 

As a parent of three children--ages 6, 10, and 12--I know how much of their life is spent before screens. I know how much of my 12-year-old's life is dominated by the pressing question of when he will finally get his first phone (not before ninth grade). I know that their future work will likely involve heavy doses of screen time, and I know that their future leisure time will also likely be heavily influenced by the technological innovations of the future. (Ready player one?)

I also know that their health and happiness will be largely influenced by their ability to get their relationship to technology right.

And so, in this cycle, we ask: What is the relationship between popular culture and curriculum? How can technology be used in education?

This question, I assume, no teacher would find either obvious or satisfactorily answerable. Do we ban all phones from the school, or do we responsibly integrate their use into our curriculum and instruction? Can youtube, wikipedia, and snapchat be responsibly integrated into the educational experience? Can virtual reality really prepare children for the real thing?

In this cycle’s first reading, we will learn about a school that has undertaken some pretty interesting curricular experiments. As the article notes, “there are elements of the school’s curriculum that look familiar--nightly independent reading assignments, weekly reading-comprehension packets and plenty of work with pencils and paper--and others that don’t. Quest to Learn (Q2L) students record podcasts, film and edit videos, play video games, blog avidly and occasionally receive video messages from aliens.”

There are many questions we could ask about such a curriculum; and, indeed, one’s gut reaction to such a curriculum is probably a good read of how one approaches curriculum more generally--do you sense an opportunity worth investigating here, or see nothing but a big waste of time? 

But what most interests me is that the Q2L curriculum blurs the line between content and skills, between the child’s interests and the state-mandated content, between technology and the humanities. Such approaches have been around for a long time, though rarely have they had such an optimistic glow about them.

This article will hopefully get us thinking--perhaps shake us out of our well worn assumptions that students need to go to classes each day, with names like math, science, language arts, and social studies. The division of the curriculum into subject-matter areas has been long in place, but has also often been challenged. 

Regardless of how we organize the school day, the curricular imperative still forces us to ask: What should we teach the children? That is, it forces us to confront the relationship between past and future, between either learning the heritage of the human species as it comes to us from the past, or between learning the knowledge and skills that will allow students to thrive in the future. 

As we move through the cycle, we next look at two of the leading stars in the world of TED--Salman Khan (of Khan Academy and the flipped classroom fame) and Ken Robinson (of "schools kill creativity" fame). I'm guessing you've seen these videos before. But I ask you to watch them again, and perhaps think about them in the context of this cycle. 

Are Khan and Robinson in agreement? Maybe. But if they diverge, where do they diverge? And where does technology and the globally connected world fit into all of this? Does Robinson's argument that we are medicating our kids so as to get them to ignore the world of information technology equal an endorsement of the learning potential of the online, interconnected world?

Finally, we end with two academic articles that firmly ground us in the world of research. First, an article from James Paul Gee that makes a highly compelling case for the gamification of schooling and, more specifically, what schools might learn from the ways in which video games embody the principles of the learning sciences. Second, we have a classic article from Jean Anyon--a pioneer in the theory of schools as instruments of social reproduction--on how the content of the curriculum is differently situated depending on the amount of money your parents make. 

What would it mean to take a school like Q2L to scale? Would it make the rich richer? Would it simply keep the poor "in their place"? 

Can we imagine a world in which children coming from low-income backgrounds spend their days on computers, learning through gaming? 

Or do we subtly expect that children from low-income backgrounds need to learn the types of dispositions and skills that will allow them to endure the low-wage, low-skill jobs that are part and parcel of the service industry?