November+2012

November 14, 2012
Right now in all of my classes students are creating performance projects. Here in Manitoba English is taught in six strands: Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, Viewing, and Representing. Performance projects are helpful for having students learn about all six of the strands, with the emphasis on listening, speaking, viewing, and representing. I am always impressed by the quality and variety of the project work. Some students write and perform a classic three-minute speech that explores a theme in a novel or film. Others develop short (live) sketches to perform in class. Still others take to the machines and create short video excerpts that highlight the themes and ideas they've found in the books.

While I am a proponent of "learning out loud" and sharing, I know that many of my students, their parents, and even a good portion of my colleagues are not yet comfortable with the idea of a wider audience for student work. Elsewhere on this wiki you can find examples of my own work, but you won't find links to my student work, and that is on purpose. I have students who do share their work online-some of them have well developed YouTube channels with decent followings, others blog regularly. I find myself caught in the middle between a growing youth culture of sharing and openness that is contrasted with the custodial, insular, and protective role I play as a Public School teacher. At any rate, I do encourage students to establish a healthy online presence in part by sharing the good work that they are doing in school. However, I am not at liberty to compel my students to share publicly, or to require that the assignments that they hand in to me be handed in via a public forum like YouTube.

I suppose my problem can be summed up by a set of contrasting metaphors: are schools greenhouses or arenas? A greenhouse is a protective but artificial environment where the conditions for growth are maximized. Schools can be like greenhouses, protecting students and encouraging their growth until they are "ready" to leave the greenhouse (at graduation). Schools can also be like arenas, artificial environments where scripted and unscripted athletic, artistic, and academic pursuits are cheered or booed by a massive and somewhat anonymous third party audience. Those who perform well in the arena succeed, those who do not are shuffled aside, or worse. Hmmm...echoes of //The Hunger Games// are working their way into this post. Or perhaps neither metaphor really fits, since both greenhouses and arenas are artificial environments.

Maybe the way forward for education has to do with authenticity. So often we think of school as artificial somehow- getting children ready for the "real" world, as though somehow all of education is simply practice. We need authentic practice. We also need authentic performance. Maybe the way forward will be to provide authentic opportunities for students to share their practice with wider audiences, be they live, or virtual. I seem to recall many voices calling for authentic education, student centred, competency based, with a genuine interest in establishing and promoting student voice in the broader community. Maybe this kind of schooling (a hybrid of sorts) is the way forward. I think we need to find a more authentic way beyond the greenhouse, the arena, and the bricks and mortar.