How Do We Learn Without Schools?
In my last post, I introduced the undergraduate class I've been teaching for two years, and suggested that there's a lot to learn about how we all think of schooling by asking academically successful students fresh out of high school who, in choosing my class among many other options, have self-selected for their interest in school reform.Some of the most interesting reforms to the way teaching and learning looks in school has come from researchers who have studied how learning happens outside of school. This has helped articulate theories based on, for example, apprenticeship (see, in particular, this book), and it has led reserachers like Jim Gee to see a rich model of learning in the ways kids learn video games (see also this book).
So my students start by describing the ways they learned to do something successfully, something important, outside of a typical school classroom--if possible, outside of school altogether. Students tend to choose things like learning a sport, an instrument, a hobby, or a practical skill like cooking (though a few have chosen things like "how to tell a true friend" and "how to lie"). They are to tell me the story of how they "got good at" that thing, from start to finish. This leads me to...
Curious Tendency #1: Almost without fail, if students have had formal instruction in the thing in question, they will narrate the "start" of their learning with the first formal instruction they had. Pianists say their learning of the piano "began" with their first lessons, baseball players say their baseball learning "began" in little league, etc.
To push past these conceptions, I usually have to point out that maybe there was some point long ago when they (at least theoretically) knew absolutely nothing about their chosen practice...had never seen a baseball, didn't know what a piano was, etc. Then what happened? Asking the question this way starts to nudge students toward something more interesting. Suddenly, "learning" began when dad was watching the Cubs play on TV one day when I was four, or when I smacked the church piano keys at random to imitate the mysterious grace with which my grandmother played. A story of learning starts to develop that goes far beyond institutional or formal settings, but it requires separating LEARNING from TEACHERS TRYING TO TEACH.
Then I ask the students to figure out the different ways learning "happened" in their stories, which more or less amounts to a theory or "model" of learning. The next step is to imagine what it might look like if schools fundamentally changed the ways they worked in order to look more like the learning model by which you learned baseball, piano, etc. What might schools do to incorporate the WAYS you learned something outside of school?
(Not so) Curious Tendency #2: This is really hard. It's hard to abstract a theory of learning from something a person learned over time and from many different sources. It's also hard (and dangerous) to apply a theory of learning from one practice to other practices in other settings. But most striking is how hard it is to imagine schools that are FUNDAMENTALLY different than they are now.
One student, for instance, analyzed what was so powerful and effective about the way he learned to play soccer. He emphasized the role of teamwork, healthy competition, and the distribution of responsibilities (not everyone has to play goalie, etc.). You and I might have abstracted other important aspects of soccer learning, but he found those. Turning his attention to schools, he suggested that, taking a lesson from the way soccer learning worked for him, classroom teachers could let students work in teams and share the responsibility of studying for tests. Which brings us to
Curious Tendency #3: There are some notions about school that die hard, even in an assignment that demands a total reimagining of school. For this student, no matter how much soccer could inform in-class learning, there will always be tests, the same kinds of tests we take now, taken individually like they're taken now. When I pointed out that there aren't individual final exams in the playing of soccer, he seemed genuinely surprised that he had license to imagine a school with different forms of testing or, Lord help us all, a school without tests (or subjects, or classes, or teachers). I might have chalked this up to a lack of clarity on my part when I gave the assignment, but this has been the pattern for several semesters now: there's an awful lot about school that we seem to consider natural and inevitable, EVEN in a college class about school reform, EVEN within a writing assignment that explicitly invites bold changes, and EVEN when directly comparing school learning to out-of-school learning.
My students would be the first to point out that school classes aren't the same things as sports teams or musical instruments, and that a model of learning one thing doesn't automatically transfer to the learning of everything else (although they are less likely to make the same argument about how similarly schooling works from subject to subject). But there's still something rather revealing about how hard it is to figure out how we learned the things we've learned outside of formal settings (I learned math by doing worksheets and homework problems and tests...didn't I??), and how hard it is to imagine that whether or not they should or will, schools COULD look very, very different than than they do.
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I am in my 6th year of teaching second grade and I often wonder if my students would learn more given the opportunities to get out of the classroom. I sometimes feel that every day should be a field trip. Most of my students are "at risk" and have never left the county we live in. It makes it hard to teach a subject when you can't relate ANYTHING to prior knowledge. Maybe elementary school should be all about field trips and prior knowledge experiences. I know I learned from my parents, from the things I did and saw, the things they took me to see and do, the friends I made, the mistakes I made, and the choices I've made. Now how do you get away from the testing?