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Hooray for Chris and the Camp!!!
<br>BTW - I'm appreciating deeply this discussion...
<br>best wishes for a joyous and meaning-filled Holiday season,
<br>glory
<p>Chris Weaver wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>Hi Alan, & thanks Harrison for being the conduit!
<p>I like your questions, and Eiwor's and Michael's responses (I had a
feeling this one would draw Michael out of the woods).
<p>I have taught all grades kindergarten through 9th in US public schools.
I studied a good deal of Educational Anthropology in grad school.
Currently I am the director of what could well be described as an Open
Space Camp for children and youth, on 80 acres in the Southern Appalachian
mountains. I will share a few reflections on your notions, one at
a time.
<blockquote>
<br><font color="#0000FF">- What if schools were formed as consciously
self-organizing systems.</font>
<p>Life would be good!
<p><font color="#0000FF">- What if all participants (parents, staff, and
students) were given equal, democratic power and rights within the school?</font>
<p>Hm.
<br>In the most enlightened educational organizations I've known, there's
a lot of open space. But always, certain people hold the responsibility
of setting the themes and defining the great mosaic of givens, whether
the issue is school structure or curriculum (in the broadest sense).
To me, a consciously self-organizing school doesn't concern itself with
power, rights, or even equality. These words are like curious tools
of a bygone era, not needed (reactions, you might say, to a paradigm of
dominance). Leadership processes are always at work, with a varying
pattern of leaders...but effective leadership naturally claims its authority,
within the givens of time and space that call that leadership into being.
Parents, students, and staff each have realms of activity in which they
are called to leadership -- with some cross-pollenization being very healthy.
<p><font color="#0000FF">- What if students of all ages were recognized
as responsible for their own learning?</font>
<p>I'm a constructivist through and through - people of all ages construct
their own knowledge, actively and creatively, reconciling their past learnings
of mind, heart, body, and spirit with their present experience (a process
that involves some disequilibrium!) But are students of all ages
responsible for their own learning? No. If I'm their teacher,
or mentor, or coach, or guide, or even their transparent Taoist master,
I accept and claim a deep responsibility for the quality of their learning
experience. This is first because we all learn in relationship.
As the old teacher's saying goes, a child doesn't care how much I know
until they know how much I care.
<p>I also accept responsibility for their learning experience because someone
initially must set the givens! Maybe the givens are a violin.
Maybe the givens are a violin and a scale to play. Maybe the givens
are the materials to make a violin. Maybe the givens are a hundred
books of poetry, or a creek in the woods, or a diesel engine. Yes,
invite young people to choose, and to direct their own learning.
But provide them with a whole village full of mentors who love their students,
who really know how to do things of this world, and who love the ART of
setting givens to establish open spaces for learning. Too much freedom
and not enough conscious mentoring leads to, in educator Lillian Katz's
phrase, "a mutual exchange of ignorance." (Also see May Sarton's
critique of Black Mountain College in her journal, The House by the Sea.)
<p>So yes, the student "does the learning." But as the years go by
I realize that I can't overestimate the power and art of a great mentor
to invite a learning experience into being. Mentoring is an ancient
human birthright, and to me the dream of the kind of school you invite
us to think about, Alan, is the dream of reclaiming the art of mentoring
for all.
<p><font color="#0000FF">- What if this meant that there were no mandated
classes, tests, or other externally imposed requirements?</font>
<p>Lovely.
<br>Though, in a different way than you mean, there are many externally
imposed requirements. If a theme is, "How do we paddle a skin-covered
umiak on Puget Sound from Southworth to Suquamish?" (as it was for a group
of eleven-year-olds I once knew) then one externally imposed requirement
is that the current in Rich Passage runs four knots against you on the
ebb tide. Not three -- four. That is to say, a curriculum that
is open to the world is in continuous negotiation with the world's imposed
requirements - again, the givens. These givens challenge and empower
and sometimes confound us. What's funny is that even a standardized
test was created with these effects in mind - to challenge, to empower,
to confound, in an entirely measurable way, like a factory...the mechanics
of learning with the heart cut out.
<p><font color="#0000FF">- What if the only requirement for graduation
is to defend (to the entire school community) the thesis that you are ready
to take responsibility for yourself in the outside world?</font>
<p>An interesting notion. Again, the language reveals our common
way of thinking in education (defend implies judgement; take responsibility
for yourself implies acute individualism). But I get your drift -
to present to the community, in depth, your creative vision, your practical
dreams, your skills, resources, and capacities for a meaningful path of
life.
<p>So, as you can probably tell, I would never tire of conversing on this
subject. I have opened space in public schools, and will do so again...but
I am at present exceedingly grateful to be working in an educational setting
(the camp) free of public schools' institutional constraints. We
have a land base and near-complete curricular freedom. And it's a
back-door into public education; this fall we gave 900 public middle school
students a day each of Open Space here, in groups of 75, with a great staff
of artists and other mentors, and many of their teachers were astonished
to see that their students know how to self-organize. If we keep
walking our talk as an OS organization, we'll provide lots of children,
youth, and educators with experiences that will leave them wanting more...
<p>Chris Weaver
<br>Swannanoa, North Carolina, USA
<br>
<br> </blockquote>
</blockquote>
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