Steve has been an incredible voice, ear, oprah, … to/for/with us.
He’s the most generous and insightful host, always amazing us with his wisdom, openness and kind heart. In my listening to future of ed, to Steve and his guests, over the last couple of years, our reading list is rich.
He’s known to talk of narratives, and hacking things and revolutions. Four years ago when we first met up.. my kids called him the Oprah of Ed.
Grazie to the man.
His latest write up – for his episode with connectedlearning.tv (dec 20):
I see two larger education reform movements. This is an over-generalization, of course, but maybe not by much.
The first ed reform movement is the high-stakes, NCLB, foundation/corporation/lobby-driven movement that is couched in the language of business: achievement, accountability, job skills, efficiency, etc. The second ed reform movement is the passionate, largely-educator-driven and pedagogically-progressive movement.
While both groups would likely disagree with me, I propose that they are actually different versions of the same story. While there are individuals in both movements that are well-meaning (arguably more by my own definitions in the latter), both movements take as core premises that change comes from the top, that there is a “better solution” to education, and–while not overtly stated–that education is something we impose on others.As well, my take is that because both are institutionally-directed, and the “institutionalization” of values (see Illich) is itself a part of the problem, their ultimate outcome will not be individual independence, but rather continued dependence on our educational and economic “systems”–systems which are driven by the needs of those running them rather than by any desire for individual independence.
I believe we are in this mess (which is certainly not new), where both of the larger reform movements are actually more similar than we want to admit, because we are focused on outcome rather thanprocess. Laws, for example, are outcomes, while the democratic activities that produce them are processes. The progressive ed reform movement often commits this outcome-over-process error when committees or research or prominent voices are taken as “what we should be doing,” when really we need to encouraging participation in the processes of determining for ourselves and our communities that which we care about and how we can work together to accomplish our goals. A list of “21st century skills” might be really fun to create as part of some meeting of prestigious educators, but please don’t think that pushing that outcome or list down to schools, teachers and students is what would really benefit them. Instead, we should be pushing down or encouraging the process of creating such a conversation to local levels, where all involved might participate in the discussions that attend the process.
Implementing one group’s particular outcomes is fundamentally disrespectful to the agency of others. Process demands and allows that we respect the inherent rights of individuals to be self-directing agents of their own lives. However, we must recognize that there are few if any lobbies or businesses that will see financial or institutional benefit from self-direction and independence as the outcome of education, so they are not likely going to promote or support this. Intriguingly, we must also recognize that parents, administrators, teachers, and students have often been so inculcated into the co-dependence model of schooling that they not only willingly build prisons for themselves and for others, but often demand agreement with this perspective in an emotional way that suggests schooling as a cultural ritual requiring (and therefore publicly manifesting) our conformity. Perhaps we also fear the mental and moral requirements of independent thought, finding it easier to follow the norm; and (going out on a another limb) perhaps our participation in a known power structure, while demanding we follow others in authority, gives us at least some power of our own as we exert control over others (students/children) below us.
So that leaves me trying to figure out how you generate the kind of public mobilizations that have characterized important civil and social rights movements–ergo, my HackYourEducation.com tour (now being re-branded for the new year as the “Learning Revolution Tour”). What are the models for scaling independent thinking without simplifying it beyond value in order to gain traction? How do you talk about and encourage agency while also respecting it? How do you help the 30% who drop out, and the even greater number of students and families who don’t thrive in school and therefore see themselves as failing, to realize that they are in a perverse game of intellectual inadequacy that someone else has set up and rigged against them? How do you help those who benefit from the current system to see the moral failure of perpetuated financial inequity through a college-track system that they believe it is rewarding their own excellence, but is often just confirming the power of better expectations and individual student care?
This is certainly not anti-intellectual; it is, rather, the only moral course of questioning that I can see an intellectual taking.
Currently, my answer is to hold, and hopefully therefore to model, conversations on learning that provide a positive path for helping students, families, teachers, and administrators to recognize that they know a lot more about when and how good learning takes place than they and the establishment have given themselves credit for. And that identifying the positive conditions of learning from their own experiences trumps the proclaimed expertise of others who would impose mindsets and expectations on them–expectations that most never feel they have fully achieved. There is a pervasive and sad fear of straying in any authentic way from the path that others proclaim leads to educational (but not learning) success.
I suggest we need to hold these conversations one-to-one, starting with the choir then moving to those the system has failed and to those willing to see the unfairness of their own advantage. Then, perhaps, we have the opportunity for real change, the kind of change that comes from inside each of us, and not from the outside or movements that would merely replace one form of schooling with another. We must ourselves be the learning revolution.
A recent talk on reframing the ed revolution:
And connectedlearning.tv’s write up of him:
Steve Hargadon is director of the Web 2.0 Labs, host of the Future of Education interview series, chair of the Learning 2.0 Conference and the Social Learning Summit, and co-chair the annual Global Education and Library 2.0 w
orldwide conferences. He has pioneered both the use of social networking in education (creating the now 70,000 member Classroom 2.0 social network in 2007) and the massive peer-to-peer professional development of his virtual conferences. He has supported and encouraged the development of thousands of other education networks and events, particularly for professional development. He blogs at stevehargadon.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @SteveHargadon.
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interesting – while interviewing Jay Cross – he shared – he’s deepest learning happens between reading a book and interviewing the person, when he’s transcribing his notes (from reading) into interview questions..
I cannot explain, scientifically, my belief in the inherent worth and value of every person, but I do know that when I act as if that is true, I not only feel better about who I am, but I believe those who are treated that way are more likely to experience their own growth and development.
The advent of modern public schooling coincides with the rise of propaganda and psychological marketing, and we’ve become incredibly used to seeing that what institutions advertise they do is not what’s really going on: the pharmaceutical, food, banking, political institutions in our lives are driven by financial interests that are often at odds with their marketed images. And in the age of the Internet, we now have a whole generation that accurately distrusts those institutions–but are often lost without a good alternative model or framework.
For me, that framework is individual agency: understanding that schools exist for students, not the other way around. And teaching kids how the game works, and how to become the drivers of their own learning, is what my project is about.
The more I have understood what’s really going on in education, honestly, the less of a visible leader I have been in the field.
Imagine any other large-scale institution (pharmaceutical, food, banking): actual truths that break existing narratives create an uncomfortable confusion, as so many people depend so deeply on things working they way that they currently do. It’s not malicious, it’s human nature. People have spent years in school, have personal and financial responsibilities, are doing good things in their communities–if you discover or uncover something that makes much of what they do irrelevant and that doesn’t financially benefit them or their company, and you might as well be speaking another language.
Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Modern public schooling is a disaster by any human measure. I have talked to individual after individual who will actually begin to cry when I ask about their school experiences.
As I’ve looked at revolutionary changes in thinking that have taken place (Jesus, Gandhi, MLK), those changes came from brave individuals speaking the truth. A different kind of leadership. But like the slave in Plato’s Cave discovers when coming back to free his fellow slaves after discovering the narrative illusion they had been living in, the emotional and hypnotic bonds we live in can make it really hard those around us to be willing to see through the illusion.
i’d say.. we’ve never really seen change.. (getting back/to an undisturbed ecosystem).. because it won’t come from speaking the truth.. and leadership ness..
be you. 