Streaming, Pooling, and Flowing: Sitting Beside the Digital Stream

Recently, I posted on my Facebook page the following passage from Chiminanda Adichie's latest book, Americanah.  New to the American education system, Ifemelu, Adichie's protagonist, is baffled by the American practice of rewarding students for "participation":

"School in America was easy, assignments sent in by e-mail, classrooms air-conditioned, professors willing to give make-up tests. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called "participation," and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. And so she sat stiff-tongued, surrounded by students who were all folded easily in their seats, all flush with knowledge, not of the subject of the classes, but of how to be in classes. They never said, 'I don't know.' They said, instead, 'I'm not sure,' which did not give any information, but still suggested the possibility of knowledge."

There were assorted responses to my Facebook posting -- some calling for more conversation (which I hope this blog will be a place for), some identifying the challenge of and need to cultivate real learning discourse in classrooms, some suggesting the effects of culture and previous schooling experience on students' understandings of how to learn and how to fulfill their teachers' expectations of them as students (often not the same thing as learning!), some expressing enthusiasm about other literary and cultural contributions of Chimimanda Adichie.

It's an interesting moment to be thinking about this this weekend.  On Friday, the Project Zero Classroom summer institute drew to a close; and tomorrow, the Project Zero Future of Learning summer institute begins.  

At last week's institute, my role was to co-lead a workshop about a set of ideas called Making Learning Visible -- in fact, a new book called Visible Learners:  Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools just came out. The case study that I presented in the workshop was about my efforts to move my AP Literature and Composition students  beyond "participation," as Adichie's heroine would describe it, to the kind of speaking and listening on which I believed their collective and individual learning depended:  only when students engage authentically with one another's ideas is there the potential for re-examined and deepened content knowledge, re-examined and even transformed attitudes, and new insights that can lead to enlightened action. At the center of Making Learning Visible practice is capturing, representing, and sharing (via documentation) the potential moment of learning -- the snippet of conversation, the gesture or action that guides learning activity down a certain path, the student creations that accompany these moments -- so that it can be explored, examined, interpreted -- used to advance the learning of those inquiring into it.  

At next week's (tomorrow's!) institute, my role will be to co-lead a learning group that will grapple with some of the "big forces" that have ramifications for education:  globalization, the digital revolution, and new understandings of the mind and the brain. Perspectives will abound. Content will challenge our ideas about "what's possible" and "what we already know." Again, speaking and listening will be foregrounded, not just because institute participants will be coming from all over the world, will represent diverse perspectives, and will be part of so many different experiences and face-to-face discussions -- but because one of our topics is the digital world, which is always humming, churning, never sleeping, and endlessly spewing forth more words, more words, more words.   

I sit here blogging; Adichie's heroine is also a blogger. Lately I've been tweeting, too, trying to figure out what tweets are for, or can be for.  So here I am, contributing to and inquiring into that relentless digital streaming that sometimes irresistibly and sometimes irritatingly compels us to participate.  And at the same instant, here I am advocating for those Making Learning Visible learning approaches that insist on slowing things down, hitting the "pause" button, holding up learning experiences like crystals with multiple glittering facets that all deserve attention, advocating for taking the time to understand them deeply and with others.  

Hmmm . . . . could I tweet about the experience of capturing and exploring a moment? Could I convey in 140 characters the metaphorical experiences of managing to lift, with patience and a glass, some interesting creature from the rushing stream; of spending time observing it swimming around in the glass jar, trying to understand it and to learn from it; and of then returning it to its world and using what I learned from it in my own? Could one tweet do that? Could a bunch of tweets do that? Could a bunch of tweets from multiple people do that?

Recently, while I was contemplating the inherent contradictions in my Project-Zero-related learning life, I came across a photo that I took of my favorite reading spot along the stream right near our Berlin, New York cabin. I had taken the photo over the Fourth of July weekend because I wanted to remember that very hot afternoon when just keeping my feet in the water had kept me wonderfully cool while I was reading -- in fact, it was Americanah I was reading.  What caught my eye in the photo (don't know if I noticed this in the moment, but that's why Making Learning Visible encourages exploration of promising moments as they reveal themselves in photos and videotapes as well as words and other media) -- was the sky's bright blue reflection on a small, captured part of the stream that wasn't rushing by -- one of those many small pools that often establish themselves in some indentation in a stone or in some crevice between stones.  (I hope you can see it on the right side of the photograph  on the bottom half.)

Everyone who has ever had any association with Project Zero ideas knows that reflection is highly regarded as an essential learning activity.  The word "reflection" shows up in institute throughlines, and time and space is regularly dedicated to it.  So reflection is bright blue and sparkling in the Project Zero world, jewel-like and prized as it is here.

Streaming, pooling:  I can't resist wondering if this "learning tension" actually has me "flowing" -- experiencing "flow" as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi might define it.  But that would be too neat and too perfect. I still have this tendency to seek that kind of completeness of metaphor,* and I have to be careful of that:  too much truth gets lost when metaphors are over-applied. Even so, I bring it up because it's my blog and I can.  Maybe this whole paragraph is a perfect example of digitally shared words that didn't need to be shared.

But back to Adichie.  None of this solves the problem of participation that Ifemelu identifies. And I understand the well-intentioned sources of it:  the hope of compelling very quiet students to speak out at least once so that we, their teachers, have some idea of the degree to which they're understanding the lesson, and so that they can experience themselves as being respected by, listened to, and learned from by their classmates. But quantification of talk doesn't guarantee quality or respect; in worst case scenarios, it masks mere tolerance and even disdain.  And it also too often produces a simulation of "learning together," rather than authentic learning derived from thoughtful listening and interchange.  

Language does and will proliferate, but a real "pedagogy of listening," as Carlina Rinaldi and other Making Learning Visible practitioners would call it, takes practice, discipline, and commitment.  Years ago when I read Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, I was struck by his concept of "bracketing" -- essentially, taking one's own viewpoint or perspective and setting it aside for a while so that one might fully entertain "new ideas" and the possibility of growth and understanding to which they might lead.  Peck quoted from Sam Keen's To a Dancing God, which spoke of the necessity of "silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange." That's what students -- and adults, also -- need to do if they are really going to try on the thinking of others to strengthen and deepen their own.

This brings to mind once again Howards End and Helen Schlegel's comment to her sister Margaret that I mentioned a few weeks back:  "Meg, shall we ever learn to talk less?" Maybe we don't need to talk less, as long as we are talking for the sake of understanding more and helping others to do the same, for the sake of expressing ourselves truly, or for the sake of building and sustaining communities that respect and care for the individuals within them. 

And maybe we don't need to talk less as long as we're giving others space and time to talk also.

But chances are that talking less is a good idea in a lot of cases.  So many people are talking. I hope just as many people are listening, especially to those who are striving to "only connect" by sharing something meaningful (with all of its possible interpretations) with those who are listening.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts -- and words -- about any of this!

* When I post about my great affection for Howards End's Margaret Schlegel by the end of August, I will mention this as a weakness that characterizes her in the first half of the book.

#hgsepzfol