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Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes w/ Dr. Sarah Fine
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Today’s episode is Dr. Sarah Fine’s keynote, the Quest for Authenticity: Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes, from our Conference to Restore Humanity back in July of this year.
As Dr. Fine argues, the limits of our grammar of schooling and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but there is nothing inevitable or inherent about them. This is the throughline in her observation of co-constructed and collaborative humanized learning spaces, where inevitability gives way to possibility predominates.
Not only is it possible to change the grammar of schooling, but that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured school, Sarah argues, in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars, in the periphery. These spaces, she points out, offer “the hallmarks of a learner-centered system: trust, safety, & authentic care, where learners and educators codesign coursework.” As Sarah and her co-author Jal Mehta urge in their 2019 book, In Search of Deeper Learning, “We need to change student learning, so we need to change schools, so we need to change systems.”
Video version on the Human Restoration Project YouTube channel
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Kimberly Baker, and Simeon Frang.
00:00:26
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support. Today's
Limits of Traditional Schooling
00:00:30
Speaker
episode is Dr. Sarah Fine's keynote, the quest for authenticity, lessons in powerful learning from the fringes, from our conference to restore humanity back in July of this year.
00:00:41
Speaker
As Dr. Fine argues, the limits of our grammar of schooling and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but there's nothing inevitable or inherent about them.
00:00:52
Speaker
This is the through line in her observation of co-constructed and collaborative humanized learning spaces, where inevitability gives way and possibility predominates.
00:01:03
Speaker
not only is it possible to change the grammar of schooling, but that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured school, Sarah argues, in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars at the periphery.
00:01:18
Speaker
These spaces, she points out, offer, quote, the hallmarks of a learner-centered system, trust, safety, and authentic care, where learners and educators co-design coursework, end quote.
00:01:30
Speaker
And as Sarah and her co-author Jal Mehta urge in their 2019 book In Search of Deeper Learning, quote, we need to change student learning. So we need to change schools. So we need to change systems, end quote.
00:01:43
Speaker
You can
Keynote Introduction: Boredom and Authenticity
00:01:44
Speaker
find a video version of this on the Human Restoration Project YouTube channel. And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
00:02:04
Speaker
Welcome everybody to this flipped keynote address. My name is Sarah Fine and I'm honored to be with you for the conference to restore humanity. i just have to say, this is the most fitting name for a conference I could possibly imagine given the moments that we are living through collectively right now.
00:02:21
Speaker
And before I jump in, I do wanna say this is the first time I've ever done a flipped keynote. So I just welcome your grace as I venture into new territory with you. So just to begin, i am quite certain that everybody watching has encountered the teenage refrain that school is boring.
Student Perceptions of School
00:02:39
Speaker
I've certainly heard plenty of it from my own high school students when I was in the classroom and I began my teaching career. And as somebody who still spends a lot of time in middle and high school classrooms, I know that not much has changed since then.
00:02:52
Speaker
And it's not just anecdotal. Nearly 20 years ago, findings from a survey of more to more than 80,000 adolescents across the United States found that three quarters of all high school students felt bored in school every day, with more than a third reporting that they saw no personal relevance in the material that they were required to learn.
00:03:11
Speaker
In the decades since these data were first released, the situation has gotten worse. In one recent study, only 4% of adolescent students reported having a learning environment that regularly let them develop their own ideas or have a say about what happened to them.
00:03:27
Speaker
Boring certainly captures one of the essential problems of the American secondary school, an absence of sizzle, a lack of playfulness, a sense of purposeless slog. A few years ago though, a young man named Damian, 12th grade student at a school in Chula Vista, California near where I live, reframe the problem in a way that I've never forgotten.
00:03:48
Speaker
It's not that school is boring, he told me. It's that school is fake. I knew instantly what he meant, which was that he experienced academic learning as being arbitrary and contrived, an elaborate artifice with few real connections to his lived experiences, his community, or his sense of self.
Impact of Systemic Values
00:04:08
Speaker
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Damien's comment provides a lens into the project to which I've devoted my career, which is a project of transforming schools into more humanizing and vital spaces to teach and learn.
00:04:22
Speaker
Characterizing school as fake rather than just as boring captures the fact that classroom learning is often essentially inauthentic. It involves practicing skills out of context, learning about things at a distance, trying to make sense of the world without the embodied and social emotional dimensions that come along with direct experience.
00:04:43
Speaker
What Damien didn't say is that when learners experience school as being fake, the consequences for them are all too real. So let's begin with students for whom academic learning is fake, but also useful.
Marginalized Students and Fake School
00:04:57
Speaker
These are the students who become invested in playing the game of school for the purposes of achieving some desired end, like a grade, a score on a test, admissions to college, approval by family or community.
00:05:10
Speaker
The logic here is straightforward. Even if the curriculum feels artificial, learning school stuff in school ways will get you where you want to go. But the rules that govern school sanction ways of knowing, as we know, are usually a reflection of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy culture, and the many other hegemonic viewpoints that are baked into this country's identity.
00:05:34
Speaker
So when learners play the game of school for long enough, and especially when they're validated over and over again for playing it well, they're a risk for internalizing these values and then feeding them back into the system when they become parents or policy makers or educators.
00:05:50
Speaker
And unfortunately it gets worse because there are also young people who experienced school as being fake to the point of toxicity. These are learners who are deprived of opportunities to make rich connections between academic content and their lived experiences, who are diminished or rendered invisible by the curriculum and for whom playing the game of school is either out of reach or too hard a pill to swallow.
00:06:16
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We all know too well what happens in these cases. This is a story of chronic absenteeism and frequent discipline referrals and the school to prison pipeline.
Authentic Learning Moments
00:06:27
Speaker
And of course, this story is one disproportionately experienced by BIPOC youth, youth who identify as LGTBQ+, youth who are learning English, and youth with disabilities.
00:06:39
Speaker
I wish i were overstating the case. But over the course of the last 20 years, I've spent thousands of hours in more than 50 secondary schools across the US and Canada. And the realities that I'm describing are depressingly pervasive.
00:06:53
Speaker
And again, it's just not me. There is a large work body of work which documents the ways in which oppressive schooling practices negatively impact already marginalized students. So this is all pretty heavy, but, and here I hope you'll pivot with me toward a space of possibility.
00:07:11
Speaker
I wanna suggest that the fakeness of school is not inevitable. There are and always have been positive outliers. Schools and classrooms and moments in time where the relationship between learners and content is transformative rather than toxic.
00:07:28
Speaker
Where watching the clock gives way to focus and flow. Where the boundary between artificial and authentic becomes blurry to the point of irrelevant. And where shallowness gives way to depth and learning is not a game anymore.
00:07:42
Speaker
This quest for this kind of deep and authentic learning and the desire to understand and spread the conditions that produce it is the through line to
Deep Learning in Electives and Extracurriculars
00:07:50
Speaker
my work. And I think it's the reason that I'm here with you today.
00:07:53
Speaker
What I wanna share with you is one of the more surprising conclusions that my work has surfaced. which is that the places where deep and authentic learning tends to flourish are places where we don't always think to look.
00:08:05
Speaker
Elective courses, career and technical education pathways, alternative education programs, and extracurricular activities.
00:08:15
Speaker
So today I'm gonna explore a few specific examples of what learning looks like in what I'm gonna call these fringe learning spaces. And as I do, invite you to ask yourself the question I'm going to return to at the end of this talk and that I'd love to talk more about during the Q&A, which is what if instead of viewing these spaces as an educational afterthought, we treated them as a blueprint for what schools and educational systems could become?
00:08:42
Speaker
I want to start with an example drawn from my decade long collaboration with Jalmetta, which produced our 2019 book, In Search of Deeper Learning, the Quest to Remake the American High School. And I guess I should note here in case you couldn't already tell that most of my work has been focused on teenagers and their experiences in school.
00:09:00
Speaker
Many of the ideas I'm going to explore, however, have parallels in elementary education. So I invite any of you who work with the littles to ask about those connections during the live Q&A session that we'll have together.
00:09:12
Speaker
So as Joel and I began our work together back 2010, we were steered by two shared convictions. First, we believe that under the right conditions, schools can be places of powerful learning and development.
00:09:24
Speaker
And second, we believe that the No Child Left Behind era had pulled schools away from those goals. And so in our work, we asked, what does it mean and what does it look like and what might it require for all high school students to experience powerful learning regularly?
00:09:40
Speaker
In addition to that, we wanted to know about the policies, the school models, the leadership stances, and the pedagogical approaches that offered a promising path forward.
Contrasting Learning Environments
00:09:51
Speaker
So over the course of six years, we visited 30 different high schools around the country, deliberately seeking to capture a range of promising approaches to teaching and learning. In total, we spent more than 750 hours observing classrooms, and we interviewed more than 300 students, teachers, leaders, and parents.
00:10:10
Speaker
the book that we eventually wrote from this work was over 400 pages. So I guess I should tell some of you to read it if you're intrigued. But for the purposes of this talk, I'm gonna focus on just one of our many findings.
00:10:22
Speaker
um Going back to what I referred to before, which is that the conditions for deep learning are often more fully present in peripheral or fringe school spaces, such as elective courses and extracurricular activities than in core academic classes.
00:10:36
Speaker
And to explore this idea right now, I want to double click on a single afternoon that we spent at a school that I'm going to call Achievement High, which is a pseudonym in case you didn't figure that out. So to set the scene, Achievement High serves around 2000 predominantly white and Asian students in an upper middle class suburban district in the Northeast United States.
00:10:57
Speaker
Despite a major renovation to add innovative spaces such as a state-of-the-art science lab to its campus, Achievement High remains heavily reliant on traditional structures such as the seven-period schedule, bells, lockers, et cetera, or what Tayyip and Cuban dubbed the grammar of schooling.
00:11:17
Speaker
The culture
Theater as an Authentic Learning Model
00:11:18
Speaker
of the school's academic courses revolved around heavy tracking, racking up AP courses and exams, scores, and securing admission into selective colleges. As one teacher at Achievement High put it to us, the most commonly heard word in the hallways was, what'd you get?
00:11:35
Speaker
um So on the afternoon, I wanna describe right now, we were shadowing a 12th grade student that I'm going to call Emily. Emily was a middle-class white student whose perceived academic ability had landed her in the college prep track at Achievement High.
00:11:50
Speaker
The last period of Emily's day was a senior English course where students had been reading Hamlet. The class lasted the standard 50 minutes during which the teacher screened several film adaptations of the to be or not to be speech, facilitated a brief discussion and then handed out a quote matching worksheet.
00:12:08
Speaker
The general feeling of the period was one of listlessness. Only six of the 26 students participated verbally. The discussion of the differences among the two films lasted a short five minutes.
00:12:20
Speaker
And most of the questions that students asked were about what would be on the upcoming quiz. This is the version of high school that Ted Sizer famously described in Horace's Compromise in the 80s.
00:12:31
Speaker
Teachers pretending to teach and students pretending to learn until the bell rings and everybody can go home.
00:12:39
Speaker
After the bell rang, we followed Emily through the school's hallways to the downstairs auditorium, where she was the stage manager for an upcoming production of A Servant of Two Masters. As we entered the backstage area, there was a palpable and dramatic shift in her energy and in the energy of the space itself.
00:12:56
Speaker
So I'm going to read you an excerpt from the notes that we took on that day. Students bound in through the double doors and begin chatting with their friends. The stage crew kids are buzzing around the stage, putting some finishing touches on a railing, which is being just attached to the upper deck.
00:13:12
Speaker
Emily is reading through the the script and preparing for the day. After 10 minutes, Ben, the adult director of the show, calls the kids together and offers a brief agenda of the scenes that they're going to run today.
00:13:24
Speaker
The students instantly quiet down and listen attentively. The action kicks off with warmups, first verbal warmups led by some of the show's senior actors, then mental warmups led by Ben.
00:13:36
Speaker
And then for two hours, the students rehearse, stopping for feedback from each other, as well as from the adults in the space.
00:13:44
Speaker
Intrigued by the stark contrast between the English 12 class and the theater rehearsal, Dahl and I followed the Servant of Two Masters production from its inception until the night of the show. We triangulated what we learned from this deep dive with what we observed in other fringe contexts, such as debate, Model UN, n school newspaper, step team, and elective courses.
00:14:05
Speaker
It was this process that gradually helped us to see that the periphery or the fringe has a completely different and much more promising grammar than that of the academic core.
00:14:17
Speaker
So what are the key features of this second grammar of schooling? In order to explore this question, I'm gonna use a Servant of Two Masters production as an example. But as I talk, I invite you
Collaborative Spaces and Ancient Traditions
00:14:28
Speaker
to think about other activities such as the ones that I just described.
00:14:32
Speaker
So first there was choice. But theater production was a voluntary community. As one of the actors put it, I'm happier to be at rehearsal than in class because it's something that I want to do, that I love to do with people who want to do it.
00:14:48
Speaker
This underscores the simple but critical point that elective activities position adolescents as humans who can be trusted to make meaningful choices about how to use their time and who benefit from opportunities to explore the endeavors that call to them.
00:15:02
Speaker
Second, there was a sense of community. Emily and her peers identified themselves as being theater kids. Their participation had become core to their identities.
00:15:14
Speaker
In turn, this left a peer to peer interactions that extended beyond the boundaries of the show. As one of the students put it, if I'm talking to you in the scene, I should talk to you outside of it because I wanna know who you are as a person.
00:15:28
Speaker
Whereas in class, you might work in groups and it's, you sound interesting, but then you're back in rows and you forget about it.
00:15:36
Speaker
Third, there are opportunities for apprenticeship learning. The students who had been involved in other theater productions worked with the newbies, taking on more and more leadership roles as their expertise deepened.
00:15:47
Speaker
You can see this in the fact that the senior actors were leading the warmup and in the fact that the students offering each other feedback during rehearsals were participating as real leaders of the show. It also shows up in the fact that the show had a student director as well as an adult director and the two collaborated to pull the production together.
00:16:07
Speaker
Fourth, the learners had interdependent roles. Unlike in core academic classes, students were not all doing the same things at the same time and then being asked to demonstrate their mastery via identical tasks.
00:16:19
Speaker
The students running the lights and the students making the set and the students playing the active roles all had different responsibilities and different skillsets, but they also had to rely on each other and figure out how to coordinate their work.
00:16:32
Speaker
Here's how Emily put it. If anyone is out or sick, it puts a damper on the whole process. You can function, but it's not gonna be the best because every part is crucial and every person is there for a reason.
00:16:46
Speaker
And just ah by contrast, when we talked to Ben, the show's director, he talked about how in his his Spanish class, which is his day job, if a kid was asleep in a corner, it didn't really matter, but in the theater of production, it was a powerful um impact on the whole quality of the work.
00:17:04
Speaker
So finally, the work had an authentic audience and authentic standards for quality. Working
Transforming High School Experiences
00:17:10
Speaker
together to make something that had a real audience lent rehearsals the sense of momentum and meaning.
00:17:15
Speaker
relating Relatedly, the standards of quality for the show came not from some five by five rubric, but rather from the impact the actors were able to have on the audience come showtime. Would the audience laugh the moments that were designed to be funny?
00:17:30
Speaker
Would they catch the double meanings? Would the end seem tragic comic as planned? These questions are connected to the ways of thinking that characterize the domain of professional theater.
00:17:41
Speaker
So the students work had meaningful ties to the world beyond school. So just stepping back for a minute here, um it's easy to imagine a parent or a policymaker commenting that it's nice that Emily and her peers were engaged in something enjoyable after school.
00:17:57
Speaker
And my view though, and what I wanna argue right now is that it's much more than nice. There is, I believe something truly radical about creating a learning environment where students experience an alternative to the instrumental and individualistic logic that dominates so much of American society and so many American classrooms.
00:18:17
Speaker
What was happening in the Servant of Two Masters production connects to a set of ancient and powerful traditions. Traditions where everybody has a role to play where everybody can both teach and learn, and where people depend on each other's varied talents to create something bigger than the sum of the parts.
00:18:34
Speaker
If young people experience these kinds of messages and experiences consistently over the course of their 13 or more years in formal education, just imagine the world that they might be able to create together as adults.
00:18:49
Speaker
So we're gonna shift a little bit now to a related strand of work, um which is much more recent to my career. So specifically, I'm gonna talk about a project which is in the process of becoming my second book.
00:19:01
Speaker
And the book is coauthored with Santiago Rincon Gallardo and Michael Fullan. And with any luck, it will be out next March from Corwin Press. So ah keep your eyes open. um I also want to say the book does not yet have a real cover, so the Human Restoration Project has helped me to create a generic one, which you're seeing right now, so please don't take any pictures of it.
00:19:22
Speaker
So as the book's title suggests, the project is less focused on schools and more on school systems. Beyond that, though, the goals and methodology of the project are very similar to the one that I did with JAWL.
00:19:35
Speaker
We identified six education systems across the state of California, which are all in different ways and in very different contexts doing promising work related to transforming the high school experience.
00:19:47
Speaker
We explored these places by doing a wide range of school and classroom observations and by conducting in-depth interviews with many different stakeholders. On paper, our work was guided by academic research questions related to systemic strategies for improving adolescent learning and wellbeing at scale.
00:20:06
Speaker
In interviews, however, we stripped away the jargon. With educators, we asked, where are teenagers thriving in your schools? What has been the district's role in helping to make that happen?
00:20:17
Speaker
And with students, we asked, where do you feel most alive at school? It's a very
Finding Purpose Beyond Core Academics
00:20:22
Speaker
simple question and it reveals some very powerful answers.
00:20:27
Speaker
So by now you probably won't be shocked to hear that one of the most powerful patterns that emerged from this work was that the spaces where adolescents are thriving in school are not usually their core academic classes.
00:20:38
Speaker
To the contrary, many of the core academic courses that we visited across the six districts remained depressingly stagnant. In a math class, students anxiously copied worksheet answers from each other.
00:20:50
Speaker
In a history class, a few students took notes on a lecture while the rest stared out the window. and In an English class, some students listened to the audiobook version of a novel, while others sent text messages on half-hidden phones.
00:21:03
Speaker
There were, of course, bright spots, classrooms where teachers had found ways to reignite students with a sense of connection and authentic purpose. But these were the exception rather than the norm, just as Jahl and I had found a decade earlier.
00:21:16
Speaker
That is the bad news, and I always like to start with bad and move to good. The good news is that across the six districts that we studied, there were many spaces where teenagers were learning deeply and finding an authentic sense of purpose, including but not limited to extracurricular spaces like the Servant of Two Masters production I described.
00:21:36
Speaker
But in this instance, the most consistently vital spaces were actually the Career and Technical Education Pathway courses, which I'm going to shorthand as CTE.
CTE Courses as Learning Models
00:21:46
Speaker
CTE has long occupied a peripheral space within high schools, with traditional pathways such as auto tech historically being treated as a kind of dumping ground for students labeled as non-college worthy.
00:21:58
Speaker
In recent years, however, a CTE has begun to experience an incredible renaissance. When we walked into CTE courses across high schools in Fresno Unified School District, for example, we saw deep engagement and newly re-imagined high wage high skill pathways.
00:22:13
Speaker
In a media arts pathway course, students clustered in front of desktop computers immersed in a digital storytelling project about the affordable housing crisis. In an agricultural technology pathway course, students were learning to operate a laser cutter, which they were using to create a chicken seat cup chickens shaped cover for a drain outside the coops they had built for the school's beloved hens.
00:22:36
Speaker
In an entrepreneurship pathway course, students practice presenting for the pitch decks that they had created for their clients, which were local mom and pop businesses that could not afford a marketing team.
00:22:48
Speaker
These CTE spaces were positively bursting with the qualities that I described in the previous case, choice, community, interdependence, and apprenticeship and authentic audiences.
00:23:00
Speaker
In addition, when we talked with the young people in these CTE courses, we encountered a deeply moving sense of purpose and momentum. When we asked them about their pathways, they were animated and effusive, explaining in detail their current work and chattering about their plans for the future, such as dual enrollment courses, summer internships, and college.
00:23:21
Speaker
CTE then is one more example of how programs within secondary schools and secondary education systems that have historically been treated as peripheral to the core of schooling carry powerful lessons about how to design for deep and authentic learning.
Competency-Based Approach in Lindsay, CA
00:23:37
Speaker
In this study, we also found that the notion of learning from the fringes held true at a more macro level. What I mean by this is that some of the most powerful examples of secondary education transformation came from some of the most unassuming districts.
00:23:51
Speaker
To demonstrate this, I wanna take you for a moment to Lindsay, California, which I'm guessing that very few of you have ever heard of.
00:23:59
Speaker
Located in the far Eastern region of the Central Valley, Lindsay is tiny, isolated, and very agricultural. To enter the town from the north, south, or west is to drive through endless miles of industrial orange groves along narrow roads crisscrossed by railroad tracks.
00:24:16
Speaker
there's no entrance to Lindsay on the east side. The town ends where the treeless Sierra Nevada foothills begin rising toward the snowy peaks of above. Of the six districts that we studied for this work, Lindsay is the most deeply impacted by opportunity gaps.
00:24:33
Speaker
Of Lindsay's 12,600 residents, 90% identify as Latino or Hispanic, 30% live below the federal poverty line, and only 5% of adults have completed a bachelor's degree or above.
00:24:45
Speaker
The town has few job opportunities outside of agricultural and municipal work. However, despite these obstacles, the unified school system in Lindsay is doing incredible work related to the learning and well-being of its adolescents.
00:25:00
Speaker
The district's known, among those who know it, for its competency-based approach, which it developed almost 20 years ago after a group of teachers, leaders, and community members decided together that it wasn't working to expect all kids to learn the same thing at the same pace.
00:25:16
Speaker
Long before personalization was a buzzword in education, Lindsay's educators started to work through the complex puzzle of what it might look like to make sure that all learners got the support that they needed exactly when they needed it.
00:25:29
Speaker
What struck us most about Lindsay, however, was not their competency-based systems, although although those were very interesting. and Instead, it was actually the incredible youth-centered ethos, one where adolescents were trusted to lead, learn, and contribute.
00:25:44
Speaker
um And in that spirit, I wanna read you an excerpt from our notes on Lindsay when we spent some time there. A group of seniors at the district's Alternative High School sit in a circle during their hour long advisory period and share their feelings about their imminent transition to adult life.
00:26:01
Speaker
They are remarkably raw and vulnerable with each other. One student talks about her fear of like leaving Lindsay's rural and tight knit community and attending college in the city. Another shares that it feels both exciting and heavy to know that he will soon have to support himself financially.
00:26:18
Speaker
There are murmurs, nods, fist bumps, and even some tears. The feeling of the space is one of incredible trust, safety, and authentic care. We encounter a similar feeling later in the morning as we sit with a group of sophomores in a conference room.
00:26:33
Speaker
These students, each of whom have had difficulty thriving in a comprehensive high school environment, talk about the ways in which they feel empowered to seek support for their needs. A young woman who describes herself as struggling with trust issues tells us that she feels seen, heard, and so supported by the adults in the school community.
00:26:51
Speaker
We can advocate for needing space or whatever, and they actually listen to us, she says. Later in the conversation, she tells us that she and her peers have been working with their teachers and advisors to co-design next year's class experiences, including the academic curriculum.
00:27:08
Speaker
Hearing these multiply marginalized adolescents talk so passionately about their personal growth and sense of agency is quite moving to us. What is also moving is that at this campus, as at the main high school in Lindsay, we've been left alone to talk with them.
00:27:23
Speaker
For more than two hours during our first day in Lindsay, it's the young people who are the main source of information about the district's vision and values and practices. There's very little adult commentation yeah commentary or curation.
00:27:36
Speaker
In fact, there are very few adults involved at all, and that's the point. The students are trusted to run the show. I try not to play favorites among the many schools and districts that I've spent time in, but I think it's safe to say that I left a little part of my heart in Lindsay.
00:27:53
Speaker
It's a system that barely registers in state conversations about the future of schooling, but I dare say that I think it should. The alternative high school in Lindsay is at the absolute periphery of California's broader secondary education system.
00:28:07
Speaker
It's the fringe of the fringe, if you will. But there's much
Elective Spaces as Reform Blueprints
00:28:10
Speaker
to be learned from the deeply authentic ways in which Lindsay's young people and adults are collaborating to make consequential decisions about how they will engage together.
00:28:21
Speaker
Stepping back, it's been increasingly clear to me through these projects that it's at the margins of our broader secondary education system um where the soil is most fertile when it comes to deep and authentic learning.
00:28:33
Speaker
There's both bad and good news connected to this insight. And as you might guess, I'm going to start with the bad news. So the bad news is obvious. The spaces that many system leaders and policymakers and even educators see as core to the system, namely core academic courses, continue to be dogged by the same old problems of inauthenticity and intellectual stagnation that have been documented for decades.
00:28:59
Speaker
Despite all the carrots and sticks and despite the millions or maybe billions of dollars invested in standards development and new textbooks and PLC programs, the core has not budged. If the recent NAEP scores are any indication, in fact, things have maybe even gotten worse.
00:29:17
Speaker
The good news, though, is that we don't have to dream up what the alternative might look or feel like. It already exists. And in many cases, it exists just down the hall or in the CTE building at the back of campus or perhaps at the alternative high school on the other side of town.
00:29:34
Speaker
And so in closing, i want to return to the question that I posed near the start of this talk. What if, instead of viewing these fringe spaces as an educational afterthought, we treated them as a blueprint for what schools could become?
00:29:48
Speaker
What would it mean to design educational systems so that they centered rather than pushed to push to the edges qualities such as choice, apprenticeship, interdependence, and authentic performances for authentic audiences?
00:30:01
Speaker
What if well-being and a sense of authentic shared purpose co-constructed by young people and educators served as the starting point for our systems? The DNA
Conclusion and Invitation to Discussion
00:30:11
Speaker
of our existing system makes it very difficult to imagine such a reality, and yet it's clear that what we have is not working and the stakes for our young people couldn't be any higher.
00:30:23
Speaker
um That is where I'm going to end today. And I just thank you so much for walking but ah for for watching it. I'm really excited to have a conversation with all of you when we have a chance to be together on the 21st.
00:30:35
Speaker
And I invite you to ask me about anything that I've said during this talk, if you're interested. And also, there are some things that I've been working on and published recently that I did not have a chance to talk about. um For example, I just published an article about the dangers of real world learning when this kind of learning is done without sufficient criticality.
00:30:54
Speaker
um And I see that strand is very connected to what I just talked about. So please, um I invite you to ask me about that as well if you are interested. I really look forward to our conversation and I appreciate your grace during this flip keynote and I will see you all very soon.
00:31:09
Speaker
Thanks so much.
00:31:13
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:31:24
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.