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MINDFOOD IV: Top 3 Interdisciplinary Learning Ideas
19 Plays2 years ago
Reimagining education is no small feat, but there is hope on the horizon. MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
Learn more about our free resources, podcast, writings, and more at https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/
Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit centered on enabling human-centered schools through progressive pedagogy.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
The
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Mind Food, a series of more casual content that's easily digestible.
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This episode is of course brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are C. Billy Campbell, Monique Schramm, and Corinne Greenblatt.
00:00:28
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Thank you so much.
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My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:30
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I'm the creative director of the Human Restoration Project, and I am here with Chris McNutt, our executive director.
Interdisciplinary Learning Overview
00:00:38
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And today on MindFood, we're talking about interdisciplinary learning.
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How do we define it?
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What's the need for it?
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And what are our top interdisciplinary learning ideas?
00:00:48
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And this episode is really inspired by the work we've done at HRP with schools and previously with 100 Days of Conversation.
00:00:55
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I thought, Chris, you were really involved in particular with the 100 Days of Conversation.
00:00:59
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Could you describe basically what that was and what HRP's role was in that?
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So back in 2020, 2021, we partnered up with Aaron Robb out of re-envision ed.
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And we ended up reaching out to a bunch of different organizations, schools, young people, individuals, et cetera, to host over 117 conversations with over 500 young people and adults.
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talking about reimagining education.
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So we asked a series of questions about what school means to different folks.
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What does equity mean in education?
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What does it mean to reimagine school?
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And that helped both reinforce our own ideas, as well as build upon our resources, reimagine our professional development process.
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And in general, it's built into a lot of what HRP does now.
00:01:47
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On our website, if you go to humanrestorationproject.org slash listening, you'll see that framework as well as various findings.
00:01:54
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And that's really built into the human-centered schools model, which is we go around, we listen to students, we listen to young people, we listen to community members, and we build classroom experiences based off of what folks
Purpose-Driven Learning and Educational Critique
00:02:05
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are telling us.
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And interestingly enough, and it's not really surprising given the research, the work that we're pushing for is what everyone keeps saying, regardless of their background.
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What we want is common sense.
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We want more of that purpose-driven learning.
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And just for funsies, we'll play a few of those clips right now.
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I definitely agree.
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I think that when the most marginalized students in our community feel heard, feel valued, feel like they have enough resources and support, having those basic needs met, if they have all of those things and feel like and can voice that they can succeed, I think that is what equity looks like.
00:02:48
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Yeah, what Chuck said just recently,
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We can't just be doing this one size fits all and, you know, moving forward if the kid that we assume already knows the answer is like, okay, good, good to go.
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And then we move on to the next thing.
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It's when like the most, the kid that needs the most help is able to articulate that they're good to go is when we can move forward from there.
00:03:20
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top picks of classes so I think that having more of the power of choice is would be more fair and having like art as a subject and having those things as subjects instead of yeah you don't get to choose to do this you have to just like we'll either choose for you to that you get to do this or you just don't get to do this
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I do not think education should be a commodity.
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Like I said in the chat, it should be free, accessible.
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In a democracy, it's essential.
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It should be alive.
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That's a key word.
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It should be something that brings us alive, not puts us to sleep.
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And I know that, you know, I've read this a million times that the system currently is working exactly as it was made to work.
00:04:10
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So what those clips really drive home, I think, is what you had said before about we so frequently hear from kids and community members alike, right, the need for purpose-driven learning experiences that are rooted in the world outside of school in contrast to their experience of school as individualized, isolated, and increasingly like isolating.
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So that's to say not really connected to the things that they find meaningful and valuable to learn about.
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They don't have a lot of intrinsic motivation to learn them.
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They're not connected to the peer and community relationships they want to build and
Defining Interdisciplinary Learning
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maintain.
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So it's kind of in opposition to socialization.
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And they don't really see them as being connected to the world outside of school.
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So it's basically school as a series of hoops to jump through, as a series of tests to take that don't really build on top of one another and don't
00:05:04
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contribute to, you know, their vision of their life outside of school.
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So one of the things that I wrote down a couple of weeks ago, and we were engaged in this work with the school district was interdisciplinary learning and how that actually is a step towards solutions toward the
00:05:23
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these complaints and criticisms that we hear from students, parents, teachers, and community members.
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So I thought it would be interesting for us then to define what is interdisciplinary learning and what is the need for it.
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Should I read my definition that I came up with?
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Yeah.
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I just, I said, and this is just based on, you know, my experience to date so far as a teacher, the research and work that I've read, and obviously the work that we've done too.
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But I said,
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that interdisciplinary learning cultivates a mindset of active inquiry that draws from a range of disciplinary ways of thinking in order to investigate essential questions and ideas about the world.
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So essentially, it's not necessarily...
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a body of knowledge that seeks to be a master, but it's really like a way of thinking that just gets you active and engaged and involved in answering interesting questions about the world at large.
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What do you got?
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And just to add on to that, it's really the practice of weaving together standards from multiple different subject areas.
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So, you know, that's how things are in the quote unquote real world.
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You could be integrating other disciplines into your curriculum on your own.
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For example, a lot of folks integrate reading into their curriculum, even though they're not necessarily English teachers.
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Or in a best case scenario, it's partnering with one or more other teachers to talk about lessons, project ideas, units, where you're going beyond just your traditional discipline area to talk about something that's a lot more complex and multimodal.
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And I think, too, a big difference and a shift when you go from disciplinary thinking to interdisciplinary thinking, again, is that while disciplinary learning almost necessarily presumes the why.
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So it's like, okay, in a math class, for example, why are we here learning, say, algebra one?
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Well, you'd say, maybe we're here to get you ready for algebra two because that's the next thing in the progression or
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You know, why are we in U.S. history from, you know, pre-colonial to like the 1860s or something?
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Well, that's to prepare you for the next step in the process, which is, you know, reconstruction through the modern day.
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So, yeah.
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It's kind of like that that disciplinary way of kind of getting you to think about a prescribed set of content.
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Right.
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And to kind of test you through that.
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But that's not necessarily how the world works.
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So I think that the world is necessarily interdisciplinary, meaning you start with a complex problem or an interest or something else that exists out there in the world.
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And you draw from a range of perspectives and frameworks and content and skills in order to
Real-World Learning Connections
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address it.
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So.
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I think our take is that interdisciplinary learning really looks like how we learn in the world outside of school.
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So the more that we can make schools look like interdisciplinary learning spaces, the more easily kids will navigate that transition from the world of school to the world outside of it.
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I think a lot of students to add really quick on that too.
00:08:20
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It's, it's interesting to note that when you look at content through an interdisciplinary lens, it actually makes the disciplinary stuff more interesting in and of itself.
00:08:31
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For example, when I was in school, I thought math was very boring and didn't understand the point of it at all.
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And just really didn't excel at it because I wasn't interested in it.
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You can tell we both became social studies teachers.
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I know we can't be socialized teachers, but as I grew older and I dove into more of the philosophy of math and how you find it in the real world and puzzles and logistics and just, just all the different ways that math is actually utilized.
00:08:56
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I find it fascinating.
00:08:57
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And if that would have been how it was approached in that interdisciplinary lens when I was younger, I wouldn't have dismissed it as heavily.
00:09:05
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Yeah.
00:09:05
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Connecting to those big picture questions, those key themes, those big things that then you say, okay, let's learn about,
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Maybe some of the topics that we'll talk about coming up here from this variety of lenses.
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And I wanted to bring a couple of things to bear on this because I had just been reading Hurt Biestas, his domains of education.
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And and he really wrestles with this question, too.
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He's a Dutch researcher, education, philosopher, educator.
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And he had written a series of articles in the last decade or so exploring this idea of subjectification as one of the many purposes of education.
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So he pretty much says that there are three domains of education.
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There's qualification, which is the school stuff.
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That's the content stuff.
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That's
00:09:48
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that he defines as transferring knowledge and skills deemed valuable by society.
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So, right, what are the things you're going to need to know just to be, you know, competent, have a shared body of knowledge and shared experience between, you know, adults and kids alike.
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Okay.
00:10:02
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Socialization, which is pretty self-explanatory, but he calls it the presentation or the representation of cultures, traditions, and practices.
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And he kind of warns that the questions that we ask,
00:10:15
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often answer in education kind of fall on an imbalance of one of those two things, right?
00:10:19
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Kind of seeing those at odds with one another, um, the content delivery model.
00:10:23
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And a lot of the, uh, the, the ideas that we push back again tend to be in that qualification territory, but beast to also argues about maybe, um,
00:10:33
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avoiding an over-reliance on socialization too, you know, in that the cultures, traditions, and practices.
00:10:39
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He says the most important and the most ignored is, in fact, subjectification.
00:10:43
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So that's turning yourself, right, as the subject of education, which he calls the freedom of human beings to act or refrain from action.
00:10:53
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Of course, implying that there's some sort of autonomy and agency within the learner as well.
00:10:57
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And I think that really fits the interdisciplinary lens because, right, it's not...
00:11:02
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memorizing a prescribed list of content and skills and abilities that might fall more in the qualification part, it's not even necessarily concerned with reproducing social cultural norms, but it's really like seeing yourself as an active agent in the world and kind of seeing how all the various lenses of thinking about yourself and the world apply to you or not and how you act based on that information.
00:11:26
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And another framework I want to bring to bear on this is actually an interdisciplinary framework that I think really mirrors Bista's domains of education.
00:11:34
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So the framework that I'm going to look at here actually says that there are three aspects of interdisciplinary learning, critical thinking, collaboration, and reflection.
00:11:43
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So even having some of those components of qualification in the critical thinking, what is it that we are thinking about?
00:11:50
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There's
Interdisciplinary Framework and Practice
00:11:51
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the collaboration part.
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So formulating a common goal,
00:11:55
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situational awareness, shared leadership, perhaps getting at the lens of socialization.
00:11:59
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And then the reflection part, again, should I act on this information or not?
00:12:03
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How am I the subject of this learning experience?
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How can I deal with cognitive biases?
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How can I take multiple perspectives?
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How can I embody a questioning attitude with things?
00:12:15
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So those will be some of the frameworks that help
00:12:18
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root this conversation here today.
00:12:21
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But Chris and I also just have some experience in, I don't know, teaching interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary ways, teaching project-based learning, which tends to have an interdisciplinary focus.
00:12:31
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Chris, do you want to talk about your experiences with that too?
00:12:35
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Yeah, I was very fortunate.
00:12:36
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So I used to teach at a school explicitly focused on hands-on learning, PBL and interdisciplinary learning.
00:12:44
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And over time, we really push for the idea of having multiple teachers work on these projects and collaborate together.
00:12:52
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And we did that for a long time just on a traditional block schedule.
00:12:56
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So we would partner together as teachers.
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We would come up with project ideas.
00:12:59
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Two or three of us would pair up and we would just treat our class like a long PBL experience.
00:13:06
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It'd be one or two days a week and we'd explore different interdisciplinary projects.
00:13:09
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I remember doing some of these were good.
00:13:11
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Some of them weren't so hot, but we tried.
00:13:14
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We did some math social studies stuff with roller coasters.
00:13:18
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So talking about like
00:13:19
Speaker
The roots of theme parks, the history of theme parks, how they're themed themselves, and then getting into the math of actually operating those coasters and how that integrates into the experience.
00:13:30
Speaker
We did a lot of work about feeding the world and tackling how do you do everything from like.
00:13:37
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do chemical engineering, GMO type stuff with seeds and what are the ethics of that?
00:13:41
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What does it mean to do that?
00:13:43
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Is it okay to do that?
00:13:45
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And if so, how do we actually feed the world with that in mind?
00:13:48
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Is it a supply chain issue?
00:13:50
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There are so many different questions to answer there, as well as various projects, which I'll get to later surrounding video games and other forms of just explicit content creation that goes both beyond social studies and digital design, which are the classes I taught, into English, science, and math.
00:14:07
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By the time I had left, we had actually integrated an actual PBL period with the idea that we would design projects alongside the kids that were a framework beyond all four or five of our subject area courses.
00:14:22
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So it would tackle the standards beyond, you know, four or five different classes.
00:14:26
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So I was very fortunate in that regard that we had a lot of experience doing interdisciplinary learning.
00:14:31
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And it's interesting reflecting back on those models that you just shared that, you
00:14:35
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But really what you're learning when you're doing interdisciplinary content is less about rote memorization or worksheet-driven learning that you would see in a more traditional subcutariat class because you can't have all the answers in an interdisciplinary classroom.
00:14:51
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Your whole goal is to accomplish some kind of objective, like to make something or to ask questions.
00:14:57
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And think about critical questions, which means that you're all going to be finding different types of information.
00:15:03
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You're going to be able to critically source that, find it, collaborate on it, and then reflect on what that means to you.
00:15:08
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It just leads to more interesting things happening and more engagement across the board than just going through the standards as you normally would.
00:15:16
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You're discovering it or having that inquiry-based education as you go.
00:15:21
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Yeah.
00:15:21
Speaker
What's interesting is Bista actually refers to that in that article I was talking about.
00:15:24
Speaker
It's called The Beautiful Risk of Education, which is that subjectification part, because that's the part that resides in the minds and bodies of students that you really can't control at the end of the day, what it is that they're taking away from your course, what that's going to look like in five or 10 years, how that information is going to, what they're going to do with it, but then how it's going to impact them
00:15:47
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their personality, what they end up, you know, how they end up influencing the world as a result of that experience.
00:15:53
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So, you know, one thing that we have a lot of control over is perhaps that qualification part and even to some extent the socialization aspect.
00:16:00
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So schools increasingly, you know,
00:16:04
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control that qualification aspect to really double down on think of the number of content standards and all those kinds of things to prepare students for a lifetime of personal success or to be lifelong learners or whatever.
00:16:16
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And and Bista says, well, we have to step back and recognize that the beauty of education, the power of education is in like
00:16:23
Speaker
the discourse between the students and the teachers.
00:16:28
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It's discursive, he says.
00:16:30
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It's not a fixed, closed, deterministic system of inputs and outputs.
00:16:34
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So yeah, the interdisciplinary model just kind of makes sense if we're going to embrace that beautiful risk.
00:16:40
Speaker
We don't really know what students are going to take away anyway.
00:16:42
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We might as well just embrace it and have the opportunity to do so.
00:16:45
Speaker
Nick, do you want to talk about what your experience was like in the classroom learning interdisciplinary?
00:16:50
Speaker
Because yours is kind of the opposite of mine.
00:16:53
Speaker
Mine was very much focused on like connecting with the other teachers and being able to modify that schedule very easily because I taught a very small school.
00:17:02
Speaker
But you taught at a large public school that just it's a little more bureaucratic than where I was.
00:17:07
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Yeah.
00:17:09
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What was that like?
00:17:10
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Well, my take was always, so I implemented this in my senior economics class, which was a semester-long course that was required for seniors.
00:17:18
Speaker
And I thought, my goodness, what a huge waste of time if all kids get out of my class is preparation
Projects and Student Experiences
00:17:26
Speaker
to what?
00:17:26
Speaker
Become a business major in college or to prepare them for micro or macroeconomics at the university level, of which I
00:17:34
Speaker
You know, what percentage of students graduate from high school and go on to do those things.
00:17:38
Speaker
So for me, after teaching the class for really like about a year or two, and of course, by then that was like teaching it two to four times, you know, for a semester class, I was like, this ain't it.
00:17:50
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because here you have seniors who are at the pinnacle of their school experience.
00:17:53
Speaker
And what are they doing?
00:17:55
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The same thing, right?
00:17:57
Speaker
Worksheets, practice, tests, learning about the price elasticity of demand, doing all these formulas, whatever.
00:18:03
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I'm going like, what a waste of time because they're never going to, the vast majority of them are never going to need or use this information again.
00:18:09
Speaker
And if they want to become economics and business majors, well, they will have all the opportunity to do so when they get there.
00:18:16
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So I thought, let's carve out some time to actually do some interdisciplinary work.
00:18:19
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And at that point, it really wasn't through that explicit framework.
00:18:22
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I was like, we need to do something else.
00:18:24
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Like, we need to build a bridge between this as like the capstone of your school experience and then the rest of your life outside of school, because here you are.
00:18:34
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You know, four or five months away or maybe even weeks away from doing that.
00:18:38
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What is it about the world that you want to connect to become a part of?
00:18:43
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What is it that you haven't been able to learn throughout your school experience that you want to take some time to do here?
00:18:49
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And really, that was the only requirement.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:52
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for that project was you have to make some kind of community connection.
00:18:56
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You have to ask and answer your own question.
00:18:59
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You have to have an audience for that because authentic work generally has an audience.
00:19:04
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So whether you were going to write about it, well, you have to have somebody read and give you feedback.
00:19:09
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If you're
00:19:10
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You could make it, you know, there's a lot of multimedia presentations in here to a lot of YouTube videos, a lot of kind of like stand up presentations.
00:19:17
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So kids had to have an audience.
00:19:18
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We need to learn from each other in here as well.
00:19:21
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And those projects were like the coolest.
00:19:23
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They're like the most rewarding part of school.
00:19:24
Speaker
I had kids just take them in a million different directions.
00:19:28
Speaker
And of course, they're not anything that I could have like pre-planned.
00:19:32
Speaker
I couldn't have pre-planned for a group of senior girls to want to go spend time at like the old folks retirement home and decorate it for the Christmas holiday and go spend a half day with them, talking with them, you know, doing all that.
00:19:47
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I couldn't have made that project work for them.
00:19:49
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That is something that they wanted to do.
00:19:51
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I just gave them the time and, you know, leveraged my ability to get them out for a half day to go do that stuff.
00:19:56
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A lot of kids used it as time to explore career opportunities or to...
00:20:02
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you know, bring in family connections and talk to their parents and interview them for different things or, you know, learn about.
00:20:09
Speaker
I had one group of students learn about like how economies work in video games.
00:20:14
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So they took some of the same same content things that we had learned about in economics and they took it a step further and was like, hey, how do video game economies work?
00:20:23
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Because those are yeah, it's like a whole other aspect of things.
00:20:26
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So, yeah, it was it was just a really cool way that ultimately ended up being interdisciplinary, but bringing in the world and the school and the world outside of school into that disciplinary context and giving students the freedom to stretch their legs in a little bit.
00:20:44
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I think that's such an important point because it gets to the heart of what it is that we focus on, which is systems-based thinking.
00:20:51
Speaker
Interdisciplinary learning is not a step-by-step guide.
00:20:55
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It's going to look different depending on your context, who all is involved in the process of the decision-making, and also just what the kids want.
00:21:04
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There are some contexts in which interdisciplinary learning is just an open-ended PBL project within one classroom.
00:21:10
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There's a PBL context where it's truly interdisciplinary in the sense that there's five different teachers in the same room together teaching about something and learning together.
00:21:19
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It could be super teacher-focused where the teacher is the one presenting all the information, but it's interdisciplinary in scope.
00:21:25
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Or it could just be entirely student-driven and they're the ones discovering it.
00:21:29
Speaker
There's not necessarily a gold standard for this, but there is a gold standard in terms of the
00:21:34
Speaker
elements like community driven learning, students having the ability and say to determine what it is that they're going to do.
00:21:41
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making it as hands-on and interactive as possible and inquiry-driven.
00:21:45
Speaker
And that could lead into a more teacher-centric approach or a more student-centered approach.
00:21:50
Speaker
It really just depends on what it is that everybody wants.
00:21:54
Speaker
And what I like about that is that means that no matter who you are and what circumstance you're in, there is a way to incorporate interdisciplinary learning, no matter your experience level or the context that you find yourself in.
00:22:06
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There's something there.
00:22:07
Speaker
Well, that's what's so interesting, right?
00:22:09
Speaker
To kind of pull a thread between all of this and really maybe harken back to Bista's beautiful risk of education, that the center of that interdisciplinary work
00:22:18
Speaker
Um, at the center of subjectification is a questioning attitude and like giving kids, right?
00:22:25
Speaker
Not only the opportunity, but also the tools, the toolkits, the frameworks, the, the ability, the capability to be able to do that, but also the freedom to be able to ask and answer those questions and kind of follow those roads wherever they might lead.
00:22:38
Speaker
Um, and what's so cool and powerful about that is, well, once you do that once, like you're set, you know, you've learned how to learn and there's not really a need, um,
00:22:48
Speaker
You know, outside of wanting to gain certifications and kind of in that qualification range to to, you know, to have a teacher driven learning in that context.
00:22:58
Speaker
So, yeah, it's really freeing, too.
00:23:00
Speaker
Exactly.
00:23:01
Speaker
It's all about that risk taking.
00:23:02
Speaker
We we talk about a lot in our own PD to embrace the beautiful chaos, to dive into the fact that when you first start doing this type of stuff.
00:23:11
Speaker
You have a change both in the content, so the qualification angle, if you want to use Biesta's language, where you are exposing folks to new types of things, and it means that you might not have all the answers, which is a very scary feeling as a teacher if you aren't used to that.
00:23:29
Speaker
But there's also the socialization side of things, which is if you take a bunch of kids and tell them, hey, you're going to go explore something on your own, you're going to be doing different things and it's going to be super open ended and a challenge.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's going to be difficult to manage that initially because kids are going to be all over the place.
00:23:44
Speaker
Either they're going to be not used to the freedoms.
00:23:47
Speaker
They're going to be adjusting to that.
00:23:49
Speaker
Maybe they don't have the answer right away.
00:23:52
Speaker
So they're going to be frustrated.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:55
Speaker
Maybe they are annoyed with you changing up the teaching style from other teachers in the building.
00:24:01
Speaker
But those are all normal things that over time in our experience lead to very fruitful results where kids, I mean, this is the way that people just naturally learn is by going out and tackling problems.
00:24:12
Speaker
So after that adjustment period of getting away from the very school model towards this interdisciplinary hands-on model, you'll see some awesome results.
Holistic Interdisciplinary Standards
00:24:22
Speaker
And what I think is really interesting to come back to that issue of standards is, right, I think about the course of a, in the course of a day, a student in a traditional disciplinary structured school day might have on a block schedule four or five classes on a normal schedule, maybe up to seven or eight periods a day.
00:24:40
Speaker
thinking of all the different standards they're going to have to try and hit, the amount of cognitive load that they're going to accumulate in there too.
00:24:47
Speaker
And this might be a good time to bring in our buddies, our partners, our colleagues at the holistic think tank who have actually come up with a list of interdisciplinary standards.
00:24:57
Speaker
So I don't know, Chris, if you want to talk a little bit about who they are, what's our role in that, and we can maybe talk through a couple of these interdisciplinary standards.
00:25:04
Speaker
Holistic Think Tank is a Polish nonprofit organization that was founded, I believe, in 2021, maybe 2020.
00:25:10
Speaker
They are working on what they call an interdisciplinary subject.
00:25:16
Speaker
This is a globally focused.
00:25:18
Speaker
They've sent researchers all over the world to learn about what it is that schools want and what it means to learn well.
00:25:25
Speaker
And they determined that, well, what it's going to be is going to be a human-centric interdisciplinary curriculum with the overall goal of
00:25:33
Speaker
basically destroying the silos.
00:25:35
Speaker
They're thinking really big, get rid of all of the singular subject classes and make one interdisciplinary subject course.
00:25:44
Speaker
Now they also recognize that's not necessarily feasible in the short term.
00:25:48
Speaker
So they are helping teachers out by making and providing interdisciplinary lessons, curriculums, frameworks to help schools start to take on these challenges.
00:25:58
Speaker
And then maybe perhaps in
00:26:00
Speaker
you know, the long-term transition to a more interdisciplinary approach across the entire building.
00:26:06
Speaker
And Human Restoration Project in 2021 was awarded their first grant alongside the Fab Foundation and the University of Sheffield to create interdisciplinary lessons, projects, and frameworks to contribute to this endeavor.
00:26:21
Speaker
And as a result, we created, what was it?
00:26:25
Speaker
41 lessons.
00:26:25
Speaker
Is that right now?
00:26:26
Speaker
I think it was 46.
00:26:26
Speaker
I think it was six.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:29
Speaker
So we've created 46 somewhere around there, uh, some amount of lessons that are aimed at all of the subject areas.
00:26:38
Speaker
These are big idea questions like we've been describing so far and we'll get to here in a minute, uh, that could be tackled from any subject perspective.
00:26:48
Speaker
And for each one of those lessons, they're mostly hands-on or discussion-driven activities that you could implement in your class, middle school, maybe lower high school, or maybe even upper elementary with some editing.
00:27:00
Speaker
And we've also provided frameworks for all of those subject areas to put their own spin on it.
00:27:05
Speaker
Because we know that teachers are going to end up modifying the lesson plans anyway.
00:27:09
Speaker
And we know that.
00:27:10
Speaker
So we've provided jumping off points for different subject areas, as well as jumping off points to take it further through PBL multi-week or multi-day activities, kind of depending on where you're at and what you're doing.
00:27:23
Speaker
And we're super excited for that to release.
00:27:26
Speaker
And with that said, if you're listening to this, I believe the day that this comes out the following week.
00:27:32
Speaker
So March 4th is the first holistic think tank summit in Columbus, Ohio.
00:27:38
Speaker
It's on the Ohio State University's campus, my all mater.
00:27:43
Speaker
Uh, it's from 10 to 5 PM full day, full breakfast and lunch provided entirely free conference.
00:27:49
Speaker
If you know anyone that is in the central Ohio area, it'll be super cool.
00:27:54
Speaker
Uh, we're talking about interdisciplinary subject stuff.
00:27:56
Speaker
We're talking about how teachers can get involved, what it means to teach in this way.
00:27:59
Speaker
We'll have hands-on activities for you all to try.
00:28:02
Speaker
And the keynote speaker is Pazi Solberg.
00:28:05
Speaker
the guy probably most well-known for innovating the Finnish model in the 2000s when Finland became like the hot talk of the town with their high...
00:28:14
Speaker
with their high test scores on global test averages while simultaneously being a very, I guess, human-centered school system for everything from breaking down those silos of classrooms to promoting more project-based learning to even lessening the school day and focusing on student well-being.
00:28:29
Speaker
So that'll be a pretty cool event.
00:28:31
Speaker
Again, that's Saturday, March 4th from 10 to 5 p.m.
00:28:35
Speaker
at The Ohio State University.
00:28:37
Speaker
And we will have links and everything else on the video somewhere here on the screen.
00:28:42
Speaker
And then in the podcast description there, of course, you can find the link.
00:28:45
Speaker
It's all over our social media.
00:28:46
Speaker
If you follow us anywhere at Humor as pro, it's there as well.
00:28:49
Speaker
So you can find the event bright because you need to register.
00:28:52
Speaker
It's free registration, but we have a cap.
00:28:54
Speaker
So we need to keep an eye on how many people are registering.
00:28:58
Speaker
And one more thing regarding that, the interdisciplinary subject and all the resources that Holistic Think Tank are creating alongside us is open access.
00:29:06
Speaker
It's all available for free.
00:29:07
Speaker
There's not any cost attached to any of this stuff.
00:29:10
Speaker
You'll just be able to download it.
00:29:11
Speaker
We're not sure when that download link will be made available.
00:29:13
Speaker
It will be made available soon, but they do want teachers to contribute to that as well.
00:29:18
Speaker
So if you're a teacher who does a lot of interdisciplinary subject stuff, whether that be within your own classroom or cross classroom, go on the holistic think tank website.
00:29:25
Speaker
We'll have a link for it in the show notes.
00:29:28
Speaker
They have a call for proposals to submit your ideas.
00:29:30
Speaker
You can submit things you've already done.
00:29:33
Speaker
You could submit new ideas that you maybe want to think about and they'll pay you for it.
00:29:38
Speaker
So not only is it released for free, but you can get compensated for the work that you've created.
00:29:43
Speaker
Nick, do you want to walk through a little bit of what that looks like?
Interdisciplinary Subject Ideas
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:48
Speaker
Holisticthinktank.com if you want to get involved with that.
00:29:51
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:29:52
Speaker
Essentially, when Holistic had approached us about creating this interdisciplinary curriculum, they had already sort of generated this document.
00:30:03
Speaker
It was called What Schools Ought to Teach.
00:30:05
Speaker
And as Chris had alluded to, tearing down those silos and really replacing them with these big overarching sort of themes and ideas that are really the meat of the interdisciplinary inquiry.
00:30:17
Speaker
Right.
00:30:17
Speaker
And so I'll just walk through a couple of these big picture ones, but then each one has sort of a
00:30:24
Speaker
a smaller, more detailed interdisciplinary idea in there as well.
00:30:28
Speaker
So when we say that we had designed 40 plus lessons around this, each one was really targeted towards one of the sort of sub themes or the sub standards that were in this interdisciplinary subject.
00:30:40
Speaker
So yeah, some of the IDS ideas
00:30:44
Speaker
And if you hear us refer to the IDS from now on, this is what we're talking about.
00:30:48
Speaker
We've been deep in this for well over a year now.
00:30:52
Speaker
But some of them include how to confront themselves with challenges, how to function in relation to the world and nature, the ideas of science and scholarship, how to function in society, aesthetic and cultural awareness, how to function in variable contexts and environments, how to function in relation to the state.
00:31:11
Speaker
Entrepreneurship plays a role in this as well.
00:31:14
Speaker
How do you function in an economy, particularly the predominant Western capitalist economy of the vast majority of the world?
00:31:22
Speaker
Interpersonal communication and self-development.
00:31:26
Speaker
So those big picture ideas are really the meat, the heart at what our interdisciplinary lessons we're really getting at.
00:31:37
Speaker
And that is a perfect segue only a half an hour in to actually dive in to the meat of this, which is we thought it'd be fun just to walk through our top three interdisciplinary learning ideas.
00:31:52
Speaker
What we mean by that is Nick and I have been creating these lessons over time.
00:31:56
Speaker
We also obviously were classroom teachers.
00:31:58
Speaker
We did a lot of this kind of cool stuff.
00:32:00
Speaker
And as we've been talking for the last really half year or so now that we've exited the classroom.
00:32:06
Speaker
There's not a day that goes by where Nick and I are like, damn, we could be teaching this.
00:32:10
Speaker
That sounds really cool.
00:32:11
Speaker
That sounds way cooler than what I'm doing right now.
00:32:14
Speaker
And we just want to write down a few of those things to both promote the IDS because a lot of the stuff is found in the IDS, but also perhaps to give teachers ideas on things that might be interesting to tackle with an interdisciplinary lens within their own context.
00:32:28
Speaker
So here it is.
00:32:29
Speaker
Our top three interdisciplinary learning ideas.
00:32:33
Speaker
Nick, you'll take the start.
00:32:36
Speaker
Oh God, don't bring him back.
00:32:38
Speaker
Or at least if you do, you have to include him in the sound file for once.
00:32:44
Speaker
So for me, I always seem to return to the scene of the crime for some reason.
00:32:49
Speaker
So recently we had an author and a teacher, current teacher, Sam Shane, publish a piece with us, which you can find on our writing page, about how he was not rehired at his school for quote unquote teaching politics.
00:33:03
Speaker
This was back in 2021 when he taught Eli Saslow's Rising Out of Hatred, The Awakening of a White Nationalist.
00:33:11
Speaker
And
00:33:12
Speaker
I have the book.
00:33:13
Speaker
I have not read it yet, but perhaps it's something that other people are aware of and have read.
00:33:18
Speaker
So Sam had taught this book and that sort of started this cycle that eventually led to him not being rehired at this school.
00:33:25
Speaker
And you can find his story on our site.
00:33:27
Speaker
But listeners will also know that I went through something very similar that same year when I was teaching and discussing
00:33:33
Speaker
Context of January 6th, later on white nationalism in the context of my AP course that, you know, had lingered inside this social political context in the state of Iowa, leading to my resignation in 2022.
00:33:45
Speaker
So at the end of Sam's piece, I had to pull this quote because I thought this was kind of important to situate the interdisciplinary and then my choice here.
00:33:53
Speaker
But he says, quote, we must tell our youth the truth, educate them about the world and prepare them to inherit society with a more humane and sensible vision for the future.
00:34:03
Speaker
For any future worth living depends on it, end quote.
00:34:06
Speaker
So at that intersection, I think of history, sociology, even like marketing and branding, political science is radicalization.
00:34:16
Speaker
So that would be like my, in no particular order, but I would love to just teach a lesson or a course specifically
00:34:23
Speaker
At its core, it's interdisciplinary, right?
00:34:25
Speaker
Like this topic of radicalization, because, you know, it deals with social media and algorithms and how, you know, maybe the YouTube funnel kind of, you know, channels people from more mainstream to more radicalized content, right?
00:34:38
Speaker
How Facebook radicalization works, how, you know,
00:34:42
Speaker
radical extremist groups, you know, use marketing and branding ploys at marginalized people on the outskirts of society to try to bring them into these movements.
00:34:53
Speaker
So really, we'd look at like, how does radicalization work?
00:34:56
Speaker
You know, like what's a framework that we can have for intellectually understanding that?
00:35:02
Speaker
How do we spot it in the wild?
00:35:04
Speaker
And of course, all the while, hopefully like inoculating ourselves from
00:35:08
Speaker
from extremism, dehumanization, and those kinds of things.
00:35:12
Speaker
How do you know when you're being sold on these ideas?
00:35:15
Speaker
Then, of course, the other part of this that I'm really interested in that we'll probably talk about in our edgy futurism series is de-radicalization.
00:35:23
Speaker
When you have family members, community members, et cetera, there's a whole body of research and organizations doing that work of de-radicalization, whether it's from chauvinistic, Manosphere-type Andrew Tate content, or whether it's radical religious movements from around the world.
00:35:40
Speaker
How do you integrate people back into society?
00:35:44
Speaker
of course, like racist organization or, you know, all these other kinds of things.
00:35:48
Speaker
It's just a fascinating sort of psych, there's a psychological element of this too.
00:35:53
Speaker
So I thought like along the way, we could investigate all of those ideas, but also look at it through the lens of case studies.
00:35:59
Speaker
So pick some case studies throughout the world and
00:36:02
Speaker
and look at those things, maybe bring in some people to either interview or to, we could zoom in with people who have gone through those de-radicalization experiences, whether from like prison gangs and how did they get reintegrated back into society after prison?
00:36:19
Speaker
Or if they were a member of a religious extremist organization in the United States, how did they eventually leave that and get integrated back into society?
00:36:28
Speaker
So those are kinds of the questions
00:36:30
Speaker
That I that I'm looking at and kind
Exploring Radicalization and Cults
00:36:32
Speaker
of related.
00:36:32
Speaker
This is not a separate thing, but I've always wanted to teach a standalone course that is like issues in modern nationalism.
00:36:39
Speaker
That was always like my favorite unit to teach.
00:36:41
Speaker
It's kind of a related thing.
00:36:43
Speaker
But basically bringing together humanities and current events turn that into an active investigation on those things, too.
00:36:50
Speaker
So.
00:36:50
Speaker
That's what I got for my, we'll call it the number three, radicalization and de-radicalization.
00:36:56
Speaker
What do you got?
00:36:57
Speaker
You know what's interesting?
00:36:58
Speaker
As we were talking, I think we've talked about this before, maybe off air, but it's probably my favorite thing I've ever taught.
00:37:05
Speaker
So the most successful thing I've ever taught.
00:37:07
Speaker
But my third or fourth year teaching, I remember I was assigned to teach a sociology course.
00:37:14
Speaker
Um, and I had no experience teaching sociology and this was like a, basically a no credit course.
00:37:20
Speaker
It, the standards were very flexible and I could do almost anything.
00:37:25
Speaker
And it was with, I want to say like 10 kids, maybe, um, most of whom had nowhere else to go.
00:37:31
Speaker
Like they had, like they either had completed all their credits and they were super ahead of the game and they were just like trying to get in school working hours.
00:37:39
Speaker
Or they were at the verge of being pushed out of school to various other things.
00:37:44
Speaker
The idea was like, well, talk some into Chris's class because then I don't know, there'll be more engaged.
00:37:49
Speaker
Not to like toot my own horn, but I think that was the idea.
00:37:52
Speaker
We opened up that class and I had just brainstorm a list of like, what are things people talk about when it comes to sociology?
00:37:58
Speaker
And I can't remember everything that was on there, but it all came down to the fact that I had written on there cults.
00:38:04
Speaker
And yes, that's always been super popular, especially like on Netflix and stuff.
00:38:09
Speaker
I mean, it was Jonestown.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, Jonestown and all like the various different like cult like organizations here and abroad.
00:38:17
Speaker
So the kids got super into that idea and we built, we ostensibly built the curriculum together.
00:38:24
Speaker
Speaking about interdisciplinary learning, we found a bunch of science, like science articles on like, how is it that people get like radicalized and thinking this way?
00:38:32
Speaker
Why do they think about it this way?
00:38:34
Speaker
Uh, kids researched, like, where do these things happen?
00:38:37
Speaker
Uh, they were very much obsessed with, I can't think of it off the top of my head right now, but there was like a Japanese, uh,
00:38:43
Speaker
cult that like ended up like blowing up this like apartment complex with a helicopter.
00:38:49
Speaker
God, I don't really know much about this anymore.
00:38:52
Speaker
It's been a while, but regardless, we did this whole thing on Colton that culminated.
00:38:56
Speaker
And again,
00:38:57
Speaker
Don't judge me on this.
00:38:58
Speaker
So I decided that, man, we should do a project where we like make a cult.
00:39:04
Speaker
But like I did it in like a really like tongue in cheek way.
00:39:07
Speaker
So not spiritual, not religious.
00:39:09
Speaker
I wanted to kind of allude to the fact that a lot of the ways in which like corporate points schemes work is very similar to cult like behaviors.
00:39:19
Speaker
So for example, like people obsessed with their Starbucks, like gold stars or Nike running points or like all those different, different things.
00:39:28
Speaker
So we made, um, I guess now I look back on it, ironically, almost a PBIS system.
00:39:35
Speaker
It was called like the positive kids club or something.
00:39:39
Speaker
And the whole idea was, is that instead of this being a sociology class, it rebranded as like this, it was like a smiley face and it was all about doing good things for other people.
00:39:49
Speaker
And you would get points that would then rake up and enter you into a raffle.
00:39:54
Speaker
And this kid brought in a box.
00:39:56
Speaker
It was an empty box with textbooks in it to make it heavier of a Nintendo Switch.
00:40:00
Speaker
And this was like when Nintendo Switch first came out.
00:40:02
Speaker
And the idea was, well, the more good things you do, the more points you have.
00:40:06
Speaker
And therefore, you can then win this Nintendo Switch.
00:40:10
Speaker
It is PBI, yeah.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah, PBIS.
00:40:13
Speaker
And they went around the school and they put up like signs and they described it.
00:40:16
Speaker
They had a QR code that like went to ads to like learn more.
00:40:19
Speaker
It went on the school announcements.
00:40:22
Speaker
Pretty much everyone got involved at some point.
00:40:24
Speaker
But amazing.
00:40:25
Speaker
In true cult like behavior, I kept pushing them like, well, how far can we make people do things within, you know, I monitor to make sure they get too weird.
00:40:34
Speaker
But like we got a kid to run around the school for points.
00:40:39
Speaker
We had the kids set up that admin did not like this, but I thought it was very funny.
00:40:43
Speaker
We had the kids set up a poker game with play money in the bathroom.
00:40:49
Speaker
And then we were like trying to like encourage kids to come in to earn extra points.
00:40:53
Speaker
Like we were just trying to push like what's the weirdest thing that's like not super shady, not super weird that we could convince kids to do just because they wanted to make more and more points.
00:41:03
Speaker
And it was almost a little too easy to the point that we never finished it because it started getting so weird that I was like, this is like actually kind of creeped me out.
00:41:12
Speaker
So we stopped it.
00:41:13
Speaker
Um, and like, you know, they, they talked about it.
00:41:15
Speaker
We had an expo night and the kids talked about how they made this like weird cult thing.
00:41:19
Speaker
And some kid ran around the school because he wanted more points because the other is going to win a Nintendo switch.
00:41:23
Speaker
Um, so yeah,
00:41:25
Speaker
All of that to say, that was like probably the most interesting thing I've ever taught.
00:41:30
Speaker
And it's all student driven.
00:41:32
Speaker
It was truly interdisciplinary learning.
00:41:34
Speaker
It was inquiry based.
00:41:37
Speaker
And yeah, it's it's a fascinating topic.
00:41:39
Speaker
Well, that's, I mean, you know, one of the favorite classes that I ended up taking in college was actually on youth gangs, which, I mean, that's another form of radicalization, right?
00:41:48
Speaker
But it maybe brings in more of like a socioeconomic, like the social incentives or the, you know, economic disincentives and those kinds of things too.
00:41:57
Speaker
And, you know, I was hearing from our professor's experience and he actually brought in gang members past and present to, you know, hear about how they, what led them to join a gang or their experiences in the gang.
00:42:07
Speaker
Um,
00:42:08
Speaker
If they left, why did they leave?
00:42:10
Speaker
How did they get out of those kinds of things?
00:42:12
Speaker
And, you know, there is just like that deep seated human sort of attachment to needing to be part of community and or the rejection of people that they perceive as having been like slighted them or something.
00:42:27
Speaker
So there's kind of a push and pull factors that lead you into that.
00:42:31
Speaker
Yeah, it just is a fascinating lens.
00:42:33
Speaker
So so cults.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:42:34
Speaker
Be part of any sort of de-radicalization.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:38
Speaker
look as well.
00:42:39
Speaker
Also, so many like good free YouTube documentaries.
00:42:42
Speaker
I remember we would just like Google these and just watch them for like weeks.
00:42:46
Speaker
It was super interesting.
00:42:48
Speaker
And it also helped kids.
00:42:49
Speaker
So one more thing about this.
00:42:51
Speaker
I remember one of the kids in the class.
00:42:53
Speaker
This is now an episode about cults.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:54
Speaker
There was a kid who emailed me
00:42:58
Speaker
Like this was years after they had graduated, whatever.
AI and Ethical Implications
00:43:02
Speaker
And they had said that that class impacted them so much because they themselves, I can't remember if it was them or one of their friends, had become involved with like basically a religious cult.
00:43:15
Speaker
There's a religious cult here in Columbus called Xenos, now called Dwellve.
00:43:21
Speaker
I think I think it's what or dwell maybe used to be called Zenos, though, and it's very similar to like a Scientology type ordeal.
00:43:31
Speaker
It's they basically recruit young people, primarily college students to live in these like just packed to the mass apartment buildings and then have them provide them with money.
00:43:42
Speaker
And they kind of ripped them off.
00:43:44
Speaker
And this kid, again, I can't remember if it was them or someone else, had gotten involved in it.
00:43:47
Speaker
And they remembered back to that lesson.
00:43:50
Speaker
And they found a documentary that we watched in that class and shared it.
00:43:53
Speaker
And that's like what stopped it.
00:43:55
Speaker
Like they de-radicalized as a result of going through de-radicalization training.
00:44:00
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:44:01
Speaker
Super, super interesting.
00:44:03
Speaker
But yeah, if you're ever in the Columbus area, it's still here as of recording.
00:44:07
Speaker
Again, I think it's called Dwell now is the rebrand.
00:44:10
Speaker
And they made it a little bit more friendly.
00:44:12
Speaker
Anyways, I'll talk about my number three so this episode doesn't go on talking about cults.
00:44:17
Speaker
So my number three in terms of interdisciplinary learning, like lessons, projects, et cetera, is it's kind of overplayed at this point for us because I feel like we're talking about it all the time and you really can't escape it if you're on social media.
00:44:30
Speaker
But it would be so interesting to talk about AI, AI ethics, chat GPT.
00:44:36
Speaker
And diving into not only how do you use the tools, because I think that is inherently interesting.
00:44:42
Speaker
You could just talk about how you use them.
00:44:44
Speaker
But I think it's a lot more interesting to talk about the philosophy of it and like what it means for society at large, how it could right now or in the future, for example, exploit workers.
00:44:56
Speaker
What does it mean to exploit AI if you want to get super weird, like Deus Ex type stuff talking about like at what point is it sentient?
00:45:04
Speaker
I think about like, could you incorporate like do androids dream of electric sheep by Philip K. Dick or like things like that?
00:45:11
Speaker
You probably wouldn't incorporate Westworld, but that's what it makes me think of.
00:45:15
Speaker
Probably not appropriate for school, but that that's a really good example of like talking about AI sentient, sentience and ethics.
00:45:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:22
Speaker
Like how interesting would it be to have an interdisciplinary learning course where you start off by talking about using AI, the practicalities of it, how it affects humans, but then twist that entirely in 180 and talk about like, well, what if the AI is sentient?
00:45:39
Speaker
Like what are the ethics then?
00:45:40
Speaker
And how do you know?
00:45:42
Speaker
It gets super weird about it.
00:45:44
Speaker
And just like leaving that question open-ended.
00:45:46
Speaker
I just think that'd be so interesting.
00:45:47
Speaker
It's honestly so prescient now, but I used to start my economics class.
00:45:52
Speaker
This was like day one.
00:45:54
Speaker
I would introduce this idea of technology and automation and AI.
00:45:59
Speaker
And it was wild because I would always use this video from Quartz.
00:46:02
Speaker
Now it came out in 2017 now.
00:46:05
Speaker
But the title was Automation and AI are Destroying Jobs, Not Work.
00:46:09
Speaker
And it was on that exact same idea of like, hey, you're going to have to learn how to work alongside and with these technologies.
00:46:17
Speaker
They're not going away.
00:46:18
Speaker
They're only going to get more advanced.
00:46:19
Speaker
And now that video, it didn't even assume to know about something like ChatGPT or MidJourney and all those other kinds of things.
00:46:29
Speaker
But I always remember a quote from one of the researchers in there where she goes, AI is just a tool.
00:46:34
Speaker
AI did not fall from the sky.
00:46:35
Speaker
We got to learn how to work alongside it.
00:46:38
Speaker
And then we would always watch this video.
00:46:40
Speaker
from the Guardian from seven years ago now, it's called The Last Job on Earth, Imagining a Fully Automated World.
00:46:47
Speaker
And I would just get kids to think like, okay, basically take everything that you know about what you think you understand about the world of work or technology or jobs outside of school right now and just throw it out the window.
00:46:58
Speaker
Let's just challenge this on day one and then use that as the framework for jumping off
00:47:03
Speaker
And the thread throughout the whole economics course ended up being interdisciplinary because we're having to think about, right, the impact of science, technology, innovation, public policy.
00:47:14
Speaker
We would bring in, hey, how does self-driving cars impact this?
00:47:17
Speaker
How does, you know, how does if this sector is automated, how do these advances in, oh, shoot, what are like the robot dogs and all the stuff that's going out of Boston, you
00:47:30
Speaker
I know what you're talking about.
00:47:32
Speaker
I can't think of what I'm talking about.
00:47:33
Speaker
Yeah, all those things.
00:47:34
Speaker
So I would bring those out because it has connections everywhere.
00:47:37
Speaker
But it's like the ultimate interdisciplinary thing because it's like how does science, technology, innovation change the way that we live, change the way that we work, interact, change the way that our political system functions?
00:47:49
Speaker
How does it do all those things?
00:47:51
Speaker
So I always felt like now it feels, I feel vindicated, but like that was just such an important lens to put on top of the class.
00:47:59
Speaker
It's like, we're not here to learn about these economic standards.
00:48:02
Speaker
Those are going to be a means for us to understand our relationship to all these multivarious factors.
00:48:07
Speaker
It's changing all the time.
00:48:09
Speaker
Right.
00:48:09
Speaker
It blends together STEM and the humanities.
00:48:12
Speaker
Like that truly is bringing together math, science, English, social studies, and even like philosophy, economics.
00:48:18
Speaker
Like you're, you're diving into other like off branches of all these different concepts.
00:48:22
Speaker
I remember I did, I'll describe this briefly.
00:48:26
Speaker
We used to have these things called breakouts, which were primarily teacher driven.
00:48:31
Speaker
Um, um,
00:48:32
Speaker
Things that we would just explore throughout the day.
00:48:34
Speaker
So we'd have like a 45 minute breakout where we would just come up with a bunch of random ideas and we teach about it.
00:48:39
Speaker
So some of the breakouts were like very silly, like someone taught about the WWE and like they watch matches and talk about like how it mirrors soap operas.
00:48:47
Speaker
I actually did a soap opera breakout.
00:48:49
Speaker
That's a story for another day.
00:48:50
Speaker
That's cool.
00:48:50
Speaker
It was so much fun where the kids made a soap opera, but yeah,
00:48:54
Speaker
One of the ones that I loved, and to be honest with you, it didn't work very well because maybe I just didn't know what I was doing and just like the formula of it.
00:49:02
Speaker
But I did science fiction and philosophy.
00:49:05
Speaker
And it's interesting to know how much kids are interested in talking about these types of like existential ideas about AI, about humans, about like the future of the world.
00:49:16
Speaker
Kids love to dive into this stuff and they're willing to tackle some pretty complex and nuanced stuff.
00:49:21
Speaker
We read Baudrillard when we were talking about the matrix.
00:49:26
Speaker
I'm pretty sure I showed clips from the matrix and show clips from the animatrix, which
00:49:30
Speaker
the prequel that kind of explains the whole thing, the school friendly clips.
00:49:35
Speaker
And we talked about like, well, what does like there's a scene in the animatrix where basically like the AI rise up because of how they're exploited by workers for taking their jobs.
00:49:47
Speaker
And we talked about like, well, what is that parallel today?
00:49:50
Speaker
Because that's in and of itself interesting from a social studies angle.
00:49:53
Speaker
But then the philosophy again of like, what does it mean for something to be sentient and to think on its own?
00:49:57
Speaker
And kids love that kind of stuff.
00:49:59
Speaker
Yeah.
Conspiracy Theories and Media Literacy
00:50:00
Speaker
And you could do that.
00:50:01
Speaker
That's a no brainer.
00:50:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:02
Speaker
All right.
00:50:03
Speaker
Cool.
00:50:05
Speaker
Now you'll notice a pretty common theme here amongst all of my things, but this actually came from watching a Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve.
00:50:12
Speaker
Have you watched this, Chris?
00:50:15
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:50:17
Speaker
It's about flat earthers.
00:50:19
Speaker
And it came out, I don't know, maybe like 2018, 2019 or whatever.
00:50:22
Speaker
But the premise is so awesome because it's like a humanized view on why people believe weird things.
00:50:28
Speaker
And they follow one of the more prominent flat earthers of that time period and a bunch of other conspiracy theorists.
00:50:34
Speaker
And really, they are the subject of the documentary, like their lives, how they got into it, the relationships that they've built as they've moved through this are really a central theme.
00:50:44
Speaker
you know, the, the conferences that they host and all of the, the wacky characters kind of along the way.
00:50:49
Speaker
But the point is not to make fun of these people, right.
00:50:52
Speaker
For being flat earthers or being conspiracy theorists and all these things really like humanize and help us understand that, that fundamental question.
00:50:59
Speaker
Again, that big picture theme, why do people believe weird things?
00:51:03
Speaker
And along the way they have scientists and other people too, who obviously, you know, be on the other side of the flat earth issue, but the,
00:51:11
Speaker
we understand that the way to get someone to change their mind isn't to beat them over the head with facts and figures and all those other kinds of things, right?
00:51:17
Speaker
So really their role in this is to, you know, how do we help build the relationship?
00:51:22
Speaker
How do we help provide these counter narratives?
00:51:25
Speaker
And so I think it's an offshoot of that radicalization part because I think those are kind of,
00:51:31
Speaker
Those are different, but they're not mutually exclusive, right?
00:51:34
Speaker
Because when I think of flat-eartherism or when I think of hollow earth or any of these other, we didn't land on the moon, some of those other things are kind of like harmless conspiracies, but they get at some of those same fundamental things.
00:51:48
Speaker
So with this, I kind of imagined it would be like an open inquiry into maybe more of those cognitive traps and like our own biases and
00:51:56
Speaker
some of the things that, uh, that cause us the social incentives, media literacy, you know, that cause us to believe any number of political conspiracy theories, um, you know, about JFK assassinations and all these, it kind of be a more lighthearted.
00:52:10
Speaker
I mean, I just said the JFK is that it's not lighthearted, but you know what I'm saying?
00:52:13
Speaker
Like, like it's not, you know, dealing with extremism and radicalization and violence.
00:52:19
Speaker
Um, um,
00:52:20
Speaker
But it would be more than just a lesson on like how to create debate bros.
00:52:24
Speaker
Because again, we know that that stuff doesn't work.
00:52:26
Speaker
So it's like, how do we actually engage in these conversations and dialogues?
00:52:32
Speaker
How do we, how do we humanize other people and recognize we're all vulnerable as humans to conspiratorial ways of thinking about anything in our lives?
00:52:40
Speaker
Cause we're, we're pattern making machines and, you know, we try to apply heuristics to a variety of different situations where they may not be applicable, but yeah,
00:52:48
Speaker
What if anything should or could we do about it?
00:52:51
Speaker
And I just think it kind of comes out of I would always offer at the end of the AP testing kind of like a range of options for kids to choose from, you know, like, hey, we're done with the test.
00:53:01
Speaker
We don't have anything else AP related to learn about.
00:53:03
Speaker
So like, what can we choose from?
00:53:04
Speaker
So after I watch that behind the curve documentary,
00:53:07
Speaker
I totally, I built like a little mini unit that kids could choose.
00:53:10
Speaker
And there was one year where kids loved it.
00:53:12
Speaker
Like we dove into, we watched the full documentary.
00:53:16
Speaker
Um, you know, we, we learned about the backfire effect.
00:53:19
Speaker
We learned about all these other, you know, cognitive biases that were kind of rooted in it.
00:53:22
Speaker
We looked at Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit.
00:53:26
Speaker
Um, and it kind of is like an introduction to all of those factors.
00:53:30
Speaker
Um,
00:53:31
Speaker
And it was really cool.
00:53:32
Speaker
And really the ultimate, the kind of end goal with that, because with all those end of year projects, you have to have like a product was really just like writing a synthesis of really a paper on that question.
00:53:43
Speaker
Hey, why do people believe weird things?
00:53:46
Speaker
And really like,
00:53:48
Speaker
I remember, too, like being real vulnerable and like talking about like, what are the weird things?
00:53:52
Speaker
Let's talk about the weird things that we believe.
00:53:54
Speaker
You know, we're putting these flat earthers on blast, but what are like the weird things that we would be, you know, super vulnerable about in our stuff?
00:54:01
Speaker
And how can we kind of see through these and how could we be dehumanized?
00:54:04
Speaker
How could we fall deeper into those holes?
00:54:06
Speaker
And I'll be really, I'll be vulnerable with you in this moment as well.
00:54:09
Speaker
And say like the thing I always shared with students is like, it's, it's, it always has been kind of mind blowing to me and maybe just shows my ignorance, but like to believe that we, that like time is a, is a finite thing, right?
00:54:21
Speaker
We're constantly getting more of it in the universe, right?
00:54:23
Speaker
Like we're always living on the frontier edge of time and the universe is always acquiring more time.
00:54:29
Speaker
I just think that that's such a, an odd thing.
00:54:31
Speaker
Of course we know time is also relative.
00:54:33
Speaker
So yeah,
00:54:33
Speaker
The linearity of time in our experience of it is not really like a conspiracy theory, but that might be a weird thing that just doesn't fit into most people's experiences of the world.
00:54:43
Speaker
I'm constantly thinking about how could we possibly be living at the frontier of time, or what's the relationship of time to our experience in the universe in the grand scheme?
00:54:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:54
Speaker
You know, that just opens up a big conversation about all kinds of, you know, weird stuff with kids.
00:54:57
Speaker
You're like, hey, human beings are weird.
00:54:59
Speaker
Like, let's celebrate that weirdness and let's recognize when, you know, when we're kind of taking this too far, when we're being dehumanizing, when's all this and kind of it's a celebration and, you know, an investigation into why we believe weird things.
00:55:13
Speaker
There you go.
00:55:14
Speaker
Spin off of that.
00:55:16
Speaker
Um, shout out to Jennifer, one of my co-teachers.
00:55:18
Speaker
I didn't teach this, but, but she teaches it and I always thought it was super cool.
00:55:22
Speaker
Um, which is what happens when you take the conspiracies too far and you start to act on them.
00:55:27
Speaker
Um, she, as a biotechnology teacher teaches about biohacking, uh, which is a, there's a documentary about this on Netflix as well.
00:55:35
Speaker
I think there's a YouTube one too.
00:55:36
Speaker
That's pretty good.
00:55:37
Speaker
Where, um,
00:55:38
Speaker
Essentially, people who are professional chemists many of the times, like these are like
Urban Planning and Community Design
00:55:44
Speaker
high level folks who have studied a really long time to do these things.
00:55:47
Speaker
Some of them are not.
00:55:50
Speaker
They basically are like manipulating genes, different types of proteins.
00:55:54
Speaker
Like I don't really understand it, but they they're using injections to shape the way at which their body produces things, whether that be through cybernetics.
00:56:03
Speaker
So like controlling electronic devices or like controlling their health and well-being with the idea like I won't get cancer.
00:56:11
Speaker
I'll live longer.
00:56:13
Speaker
There was a YouTube video that just came out by this this billionaire who's trying to extend his life.
00:56:19
Speaker
I don't know if you've seen this.
00:56:21
Speaker
It's like a five minute thing.
00:56:22
Speaker
He produced it, which makes it even more funny to me.
00:56:25
Speaker
But he's like awesome, basically dedicating hours of his life every single day to being anti aging with the idea that he'll always be 30 years old.
00:56:34
Speaker
I think he's 50 and he looks 50, but he says his body is like he's 30.
00:56:39
Speaker
And he thinks that this is like cutting-edge research where he'll live, he'll be immortal using his vast swath of funds.
00:56:46
Speaker
And biohacking in general is a really interesting concept to explore because it gets to the extremes of the conspiracy, but it's rooted in some actual scientific theory.
00:56:56
Speaker
And it dives into why is it that regulation is a good thing?
00:57:02
Speaker
and how like the, the concept of big government is not always a bad thing.
00:57:06
Speaker
There are reasons why we have, um, procedures and regulations and, um,
00:57:11
Speaker
and things of that nature.
00:57:13
Speaker
While simultaneously, it also gets an interesting discussion about like distributions of wealth and what you can afford to do to yourself and how like you can experiment if you have the ability in nature to.
00:57:24
Speaker
Well, there's there on the sci-fi extreme of that, that movie Elysium with Matt Dana, right?
00:57:31
Speaker
Where they, where they keep that technology and like an off world, off world kind of thing.
00:57:35
Speaker
And then of course all the poor people are left on earth to kind of fend for themselves.
00:57:38
Speaker
I taught that.
00:57:39
Speaker
That's fascinating.
00:57:39
Speaker
FYI.
00:57:40
Speaker
I taught that every year in government.
00:57:42
Speaker
I showed the first like 15 minutes because it's perfect.
00:57:44
Speaker
I mean, the movie is literally about immigration and like border crossing.
00:57:49
Speaker
Just told the sci-fi one.
00:57:51
Speaker
Yeah, there's like an action.
00:57:52
Speaker
Yeah, sci-fi action film embedded in there.
00:57:54
Speaker
But I think too, like at this most human element, right?
00:57:57
Speaker
Policy stuff aside, it's like those conspiracies really speak to our anxieties.
00:58:01
Speaker
Right.
00:58:01
Speaker
It's like we're scared of getting old and scared of dying and we're scared of not being in control or we're scared of just like these capricious forces having enormous amounts of control over our lives that we push up against if we try to deviate from them.
00:58:17
Speaker
Right.
00:58:17
Speaker
So some of that stuff is just built into the ways societies and economies are organized.
00:58:22
Speaker
There doesn't have to be a grand conspiracy to explain that.
00:58:26
Speaker
But, you know, it's an easy solution to say that it's X, Y and Z people.
00:58:31
Speaker
You know, members of a certain religion or members of a certain race or members of a certain political party.
00:58:35
Speaker
Right.
00:58:36
Speaker
Have all been blamed throughout history for, you know, controlling the puppet strings of all these grandmasters.
00:58:41
Speaker
It's the Illuminati.
00:58:42
Speaker
It's the whatever.
00:58:43
Speaker
You know, so people want to feel like they're pulling behind the curtain and saying, I know, I know really what the secret is.
00:58:49
Speaker
I'm not, you know, just some disempowered person who's kind of on the recipient of this crappy thing.
00:58:54
Speaker
you know, social, economic, political system.
00:58:57
Speaker
I'm in, I'm the grand master.
00:58:59
Speaker
I figured out the grand plan.
00:59:00
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know.
00:59:01
Speaker
I just think there's something kind of, it's almost like a lighthearted kind of thing that kind of is more unifying than, than I think dividing, but sure.
00:59:10
Speaker
And before I mentioned that, just briefly, I think it's worth noting that,
00:59:14
Speaker
A lot of folks used to ask me all the time, like, well, where do you come up with all these crazy ideas?
00:59:19
Speaker
And really, it's just a matter of starting with the interesting thing first.
00:59:24
Speaker
Forget the content standards for a second.
00:59:25
Speaker
I don't think about the content standards.
00:59:27
Speaker
I watched a documentary.
00:59:28
Speaker
I played a video game.
00:59:29
Speaker
I went and saw a play.
00:59:31
Speaker
I went to an art museum and I was like, man, that's super cool.
00:59:34
Speaker
I want to do that and talk about that.
00:59:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:36
Speaker
And then I would take it to the kids and ask them like, Hey, is this cool?
00:59:40
Speaker
And nine times out of 10, they'd say yes.
00:59:43
Speaker
Um, I was never a big fan of like attempting just to do what they were interested in because I wasn't always interested.
00:59:48
Speaker
I couldn't make a unit about Fortnite.
00:59:50
Speaker
I've even when it was like super popular.
00:59:52
Speaker
Cause I don't like Fortnite.
00:59:53
Speaker
I don't think it's fun.
00:59:55
Speaker
It's a partnership.
00:59:56
Speaker
Um, and certainly I would let things like they would bring things to the table as well.
00:59:59
Speaker
And I'd be like, Oh, that's kind of cool.
00:59:59
Speaker
Let's talk about that.
01:00:01
Speaker
Um, yeah,
01:00:02
Speaker
But it was about starting with that and then pairing the content standards in later.
01:00:05
Speaker
Because at the end of the day, your content standards are only as relevant as what the real world things are out there.
01:00:12
Speaker
And at least in my experience, it was relatively easy to take especially like the big overarching standards and apply them and fit them into the
01:00:22
Speaker
the interdisciplinary stuff.
01:00:24
Speaker
For example, if we were teaching something about biohackers, I would just bring in all of the standard social studies stuff and toss it in.
01:00:32
Speaker
We could talk about Luddites.
01:00:34
Speaker
We could talk about the industrial revolution and growth of technology.
01:00:37
Speaker
We could talk about healthcare and why it is that people are turning to these types of things and why it's so expensive, that kind of stuff.
01:00:47
Speaker
Um, it's very easy to integrate the content standards once you have an interesting premise, um, because it builds into something greater.
01:00:55
Speaker
And that way you can say like, Hey, this is going to help you out with whatever it is, the, whatever project you're working on.
01:00:59
Speaker
Let's talk about this for like 20 minutes and then chances are kids will learn more.
01:01:03
Speaker
Or like, yeah, like with the conspiracism, it's not like, say, if you had a psychology class and you're just like, well, today we're going to memorize the parts of the brain, right?
01:01:10
Speaker
That's going to be a huge lift.
01:01:12
Speaker
But if you frame it in like an interesting, right, inquiry-based way, why do people believe weird things?
01:01:19
Speaker
Then you can explore all of the bigger context and then say like, well, what is it about the human brain that causes us to want things to be this way?
01:01:26
Speaker
And you're like, okay, here's the elements of that.
01:01:28
Speaker
That's going to be much more likely to stick and be a lot more
01:01:31
Speaker
you know, enjoyable and engaging experience for kids than the one where it's like, just take the map of the brain, remove it from all of its, you know, situated context, et cetera.
01:01:41
Speaker
And just be like, memorize the parts, kids.
01:01:43
Speaker
It's going to be on the test.
01:01:44
Speaker
Like, exactly.
01:01:44
Speaker
It's, it's weird.
01:01:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:46
Speaker
The research tells you that kids that take tests that are,
01:01:51
Speaker
that are learning in an inquiry-based way do the same or better in terms of points, but they get more of the higher level questions correct.
Creativity within Boundaries
01:02:00
Speaker
The critical thinking questions as opposed to the memorization questions because they drilled less, so they don't know if maybe as many of those things that you could just look up, but they do a lot better when they need to interpret something or think in a deep critical manner, which in my opinion is much more important to the real world.
01:02:17
Speaker
Let me share my number two.
01:02:19
Speaker
So my number two, which is actually an IDS lesson.
01:02:24
Speaker
So I just...
01:02:25
Speaker
completely took this out of there because I I've done this project actually multiple times within our own classroom.
01:02:31
Speaker
One time, this is a very cool lesson.
01:02:33
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:33
Speaker
Right before COVID shut down and caused us to go online, which we were like building this project as it happened.
01:02:40
Speaker
And then we did it again.
01:02:43
Speaker
My last year teaching, which is talking about city planning and community designs.
01:02:48
Speaker
That's something that personally interests me a lot.
01:02:51
Speaker
I was always like SimCity was my game.
01:02:54
Speaker
I still love SimCity, Cities Skylines.
01:02:56
Speaker
I love simulation games.
01:02:58
Speaker
I always find it fascinating to travel to a new place and see how the roads are laid out, how the sidewalks work, or if there's a lack of sidewalks and why that is.
01:03:06
Speaker
You guys got to drive with Chris in a new place.
01:03:08
Speaker
It's a whole experience.
01:03:09
Speaker
It's wonderful.
01:03:11
Speaker
So it's really interesting.
01:03:13
Speaker
And it just released, there's a Netflix series called The Future Of, which is okay, but it's perfect for a classroom environment.
01:03:20
Speaker
It's like 15 to 20 minutes.
01:03:21
Speaker
I'm just talking about what is like the near future, far future, current future of a topic.
01:03:27
Speaker
And they talk about city design in there.
01:03:29
Speaker
And they talk about how like, well, maybe eventually we'll grow our city like out of like fungi or trees.
01:03:35
Speaker
And it just gets like really crazy.
01:03:37
Speaker
And that kind of stuff is just inherently interesting to me.
01:03:39
Speaker
And I found that when I talk about with kids, because many kids grew up on Minecraft, Terraria, even like Roblox and things of that nature, they're building Lego like back in the day.
01:03:49
Speaker
Yes.
01:03:50
Speaker
It's something that is kind of interesting to build stuff, right?
01:03:54
Speaker
So we always crafted projects or units or lessons about building that city of the future.
01:04:03
Speaker
Last year I taught, we did a project where we found a bunch of Lego and we had kids learn from city planners.
01:04:11
Speaker
One of our co-teachers knew a city planner and she came in and answered a bunch of questions.
01:04:15
Speaker
We
01:04:16
Speaker
We researched what cities look like around the world, and we looked at future city plans from the past as well as the future.
01:04:24
Speaker
So what people thought future cities were going to look like in the 1850s, what they think that's going to look like now.
01:04:29
Speaker
A lot of circles.
01:04:31
Speaker
People really like their circles.
01:04:33
Speaker
And we took all those concepts and said, well, what would it look like if you build a city like this?
01:04:37
Speaker
We had the kids build these cities, but then we would present them with various scenarios.
01:04:41
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:42
Speaker
co-teacher and I would sit down and we would like analyze the cities and go like, well, what would happen?
01:04:46
Speaker
Like they don't have like any police force.
01:04:48
Speaker
They don't have any community rehabilitation.
01:04:50
Speaker
Like they have nothing if someone does something wrong.
01:04:54
Speaker
So we would go in and say like, well, here's your scenario.
01:04:57
Speaker
Someone murdered someone super dark, but it's true.
01:05:00
Speaker
Like this just happened.
01:05:00
Speaker
What do you do?
01:05:02
Speaker
And then like, maybe like, well, we'll sentence them to death.
01:05:05
Speaker
They're like, don't look, we'll say something like super extreme.
01:05:07
Speaker
And over time,
01:05:10
Speaker
they built these dystopian, terrible places to live, which gets into a really interesting philosophical question of if you build a utopia, you'd get a dystopia.
01:05:21
Speaker
But also, some of the groups didn't take it as far, and they would research how do people deal with these things.
01:05:27
Speaker
It makes people question why does the United States do some of the things the way that they do them.
01:05:32
Speaker
And we also talked about gentrification, which is a big part of it.
01:05:35
Speaker
Well, what used to be there?
01:05:37
Speaker
You can walk around your own community.
01:05:38
Speaker
I taught in a school that was gentrified.
01:05:40
Speaker
It was literally like a gentrified building.
01:05:44
Speaker
And talking about how do you do gentrification well?
01:05:46
Speaker
Can you do it well?
01:05:48
Speaker
How do you invite folks to those conversations, et cetera?
01:05:50
Speaker
So that was always just a really interesting thing.
01:05:52
Speaker
And there's things you can do on one day with that, and there's things that you could spend an entire year building stuff with.
01:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, because urban planning is, again, at the intersection of technology.
01:06:03
Speaker
Like, what do we have, the materials, the tools, the ability to create?
01:06:07
Speaker
And then there's the social thing, too.
01:06:08
Speaker
Like, who is displaced if we build this thing here?
01:06:11
Speaker
Or what part of the community does this serve or that other building?
01:06:15
Speaker
What is the role of, you know, government in providing public services?
01:06:19
Speaker
Those are policy questions or ideological questions.
01:06:22
Speaker
Those are social questions.
01:06:24
Speaker
And yes, like urban planning has has all those things.
01:06:27
Speaker
You look at the outcome of how cities are built and ask questions about what they value or who they value or, you know, all those things, too.
01:06:35
Speaker
We're kind of seeing that now with this walkable cities kind of movement and.
01:06:39
Speaker
you know, the future of what e-bikes and electric cars and things and kind of asking those questions about what we want the future to look like.
01:06:49
Speaker
Since we can see that the one that's dominated by combustion engines and car infrastructure is a dead end.
01:06:55
Speaker
Just one more lane.
01:06:56
Speaker
Just come on.
01:06:57
Speaker
Just give us one more lane.
01:06:59
Speaker
It's going to grow to infinity.
01:07:01
Speaker
So, yeah, kids, it's you couldn't you could find an article from the last 24 hours that deals with that topic to situate it in the real world.
01:07:10
Speaker
And then, right, get kids working to understand that.
01:07:14
Speaker
And plus there's careers in that.
01:07:15
Speaker
You know, there's careers in the technological aspect.
01:07:17
Speaker
You can get a career in public policy.
01:07:20
Speaker
You can become an urban planner.
01:07:22
Speaker
You can, you know, be in construction.
01:07:24
Speaker
You can be in all those kinds of things.
01:07:25
Speaker
So it gives kids a future to see themselves as well.
01:07:28
Speaker
So getting that into that reflective space.
01:07:31
Speaker
Right.
01:07:31
Speaker
In terms of college and career readiness, I mean, it's much more applicable to understanding the concepts that you're going to tackle in college and in your career than anything that you would in a more traditional unit by unit class.
01:07:43
Speaker
Let's move into...
01:07:47
Speaker
Now, speaking of college and career readiness, this is actually something that I've got a lot of feedback on from former students of mine.
01:07:55
Speaker
You know, when I have them as seniors or sophomores, they're only, you know, a few years out of college, if they're at all, who will either come back and had come back and talk to me or emailed me later on to say, like, Covington, this thing that you did in your class was
01:08:08
Speaker
was exactly like my college experiences now.
01:08:10
Speaker
Like this prepared me, this is their words, this prepared me to be in college more than any kind of content would.
01:08:18
Speaker
And that's exactly what I was talking about when you had asked me about the way that I had approached PBL in my class, which again,
01:08:26
Speaker
not intentionally interdisciplinary, but, you know, had the effect of being that because it opened up the world to kids to, you know, a way of thinking and a way of inquiry, which we had mentioned at the beginning with that framework is all of those factors, critical thinking, collaboration, and reflection all create a questioning attitude.
01:08:44
Speaker
And so really when I opened up my, my classrooms for project-based learning, it was really with that framework in mind, they could learn and do whatever they wanted to do.
01:08:53
Speaker
All right.
01:08:54
Speaker
But they just had to answer a basic series of questions, right?
01:08:57
Speaker
What do you want to do?
01:08:58
Speaker
How are you going to do it?
01:08:59
Speaker
With whom, right?
01:09:00
Speaker
Are you going to collaborate or not?
01:09:02
Speaker
Do you need to collaborate or not?
01:09:03
Speaker
For whom are you going to do this?
01:09:05
Speaker
You know, it's just, just for, you know, your own personal curiosity.
01:09:08
Speaker
Does it connect to some future thing that you want to do?
01:09:09
Speaker
Do you want to help build a better world for, you know, a disadvantaged,
01:09:14
Speaker
kids?
01:09:14
Speaker
Or, you know, do you want to help out homeless veterans?
01:09:16
Speaker
Whatever the case might be.
01:09:17
Speaker
What will the impact be?
01:09:19
Speaker
So kind of evaluating on the future of the project, what tools or resources will you need to be successful?
01:09:24
Speaker
And how will you know when you've gotten there?
01:09:26
Speaker
Like, that's a lens of thinking about the world that you can apply to anything from
01:09:32
Speaker
Baking cookies.
01:09:33
Speaker
You know, like I want to make cookies.
01:09:34
Speaker
I don't know how to make cookies.
01:09:36
Speaker
Okay.
01:09:36
Speaker
Well, what kind of cookies do I want to make?
01:09:39
Speaker
Do I need somebody to help me make the cookies?
01:09:40
Speaker
Am I making them for me?
01:09:41
Speaker
And am I making them for my friends, for my kids, for my parents?
01:09:46
Speaker
You know, what tools or resources am I going to need to make the cookies?
01:09:49
Speaker
How will I know what I've gotten to, you know, apply it to any culinary lens, apply it to any technological lens, apply it to, you know, any kind of sociological lens.
01:09:59
Speaker
That's it.
01:09:59
Speaker
But I think like in my ideal, that's what that huge open-ended inquiry would be because it's necessarily, again, it's preparation for the rest of your life outside of school where you're not going to have a day-to-day kind of structure in what it is that you're doing.
01:10:14
Speaker
I mean, the nonprofit work that we do now is...
01:10:16
Speaker
we're constantly shifting gears and taking on tasks that, you know, we normally would not otherwise do.
01:10:23
Speaker
But we're like, hey, yeah, I think we could do that.
01:10:24
Speaker
Let's learn about what it is that we're doing.
01:10:27
Speaker
How is it that we're going to be able to meet these people's needs?
01:10:31
Speaker
You know, how can we do all that?
01:10:32
Speaker
So we've stepped into a million different directions.
01:10:34
Speaker
We weren't
01:10:35
Speaker
YouTubers before this, and now we create YouTube content.
01:10:39
Speaker
We weren't a lot of things we've learned by doing in that moment.
01:10:43
Speaker
And so again, I come back to the feedback that I got from my graduated students to say like, that was more preparation than the content.
01:10:50
Speaker
it was a way of thinking about challenges and an inquiry-based mindset that allowed them to be more successful in the open-ended world of college, university, where you're not led around by the wrist and told what to do and when and how, kind of have to think on your feet a little bit, or you're given more opportunity to explore more inquiry.
01:11:11
Speaker
I still remember a lot of the really cool work that I did in my career
01:11:16
Speaker
for my history degree, was a lot more of that open-ended stuff.
01:11:19
Speaker
I remember I had a Chinese history course, and we had to pick a topic to research that got us working in archives and working with primary and secondary sources, which I'm not a reader of any Asian languages.
01:11:34
Speaker
So that was kind of the interesting part was bringing that back to my professor, that collaboration there.
01:11:39
Speaker
But I still remember I wanted to look into the rise of brewing beer in Asian countries because that's like a European thing.
01:11:48
Speaker
How did that arrive?
01:11:50
Speaker
The question for me was how did that arrive now?
01:11:53
Speaker
In Japan, there's Japanese breweries, there's Chinese breweries that brew their own beer for their own local markets and then for markets abroad.
01:12:01
Speaker
What's up with that?
01:12:01
Speaker
So I had to learn about the history.
01:12:03
Speaker
How did brewing beer get to these places?
01:12:08
Speaker
How do they make that?
01:12:10
Speaker
What is the impact on the market here today?
01:12:12
Speaker
And do all of that.
01:12:13
Speaker
So I don't know.
01:12:14
Speaker
It's such a natural way of thinking about the world, but
01:12:19
Speaker
The framing in education is so much like, you know, like kids need to practice all of these skills and all of these abilities and kids need to practice their math facts and kids need to practice, you know, the retrieval practice for all that.
01:12:31
Speaker
When do they get to practice this lens of inquiry?
01:12:34
Speaker
Right.
01:12:34
Speaker
Like when do they have the space and time to be able to do that?
01:12:36
Speaker
We always that's always pushed aside later on.
01:12:39
Speaker
Later on, they can do the inquiry.
01:12:40
Speaker
Later on, they can do the PBL.
01:12:41
Speaker
Later on, they can do all that.
01:12:42
Speaker
But they run out of time.
01:12:44
Speaker
Um, so I would just open up the space for them to just ask and answer self-generated questions, right?
01:12:51
Speaker
Open it up.
01:12:51
Speaker
And it doesn't even have to be successful.
01:12:53
Speaker
Oftentimes kids would get too ambitious.
01:12:55
Speaker
You know, oftentimes as we do as adults, um, they tried to bite off more than they could chew.
01:13:00
Speaker
They had to settle for a little bit less.
01:13:02
Speaker
And it was the start of something that was in, they planted a seed that was interesting for them to answer later on.
01:13:07
Speaker
So maybe they weren't super successful now, but that's a reflective moment for them to say, oh, I'm
01:13:12
Speaker
Well, now I know for the next time I enter this big project, here's actually what I might need to start off with and do.
01:13:17
Speaker
Right.
01:13:17
Speaker
So I don't know.
01:13:18
Speaker
It's more it's more like practicing and flexing that those inquiry mindset, those inquiry muscles, then really it is about any amount of content.
01:13:26
Speaker
You can do that anywhere at any time.
01:13:29
Speaker
So just pure open ended wild stuff.
01:13:31
Speaker
Same.
01:13:32
Speaker
And I found that over time, I don't know if it's the same for you, but I really came to appreciate creative confines when it came to those open-ended projects.
01:13:41
Speaker
When I first started trying those within my own context, I said you could do actually anything.
01:13:47
Speaker
Like there was actually no confines whatsoever because sometimes when you read like self-directed learning theory, the implication is like, like, like some very school type stuff where you just do whatever.
01:14:01
Speaker
And I thought, well, that sounds great.
01:14:03
Speaker
But the wall that I would always run into is, is that at a certain point I can no longer have value steering that because I don't like, I don't even like know where to go with it.
01:14:14
Speaker
Like there isn't enough constraints on it that I can help steer them and help guide them towards a certain pathway.
01:14:20
Speaker
Even if it's something I didn't predict beforehand, I don't have the proper knowledge to even understand.
01:14:25
Speaker
even know where to go from there.
01:14:27
Speaker
And I think it's interesting to note that creative confines tend to actually have kids learn more.
01:14:33
Speaker
For example, like when I was teaching digital design, we would do something with a certain theme or certain genre, but that you could do whatever you wanted within that genre without being, without taking it too far, which is you have so many creative confines that it's like, pick what color paper you have, or, you know, you could have three, but you could also have five pictures in your collage.
01:14:54
Speaker
But instead it's like, hey, we're going to make a collage.
01:14:57
Speaker
I don't care what kind of collage it is.
01:14:58
Speaker
Here's a bunch of different examples of different types of collages.
01:15:00
Speaker
It could be a movie.
01:15:01
Speaker
It could be, but it needs to be a collage.
01:15:03
Speaker
It needs to have some kind of like mood or concept.
01:15:08
Speaker
And I want an artist statement.
01:15:10
Speaker
Okay, good luck.
01:15:11
Speaker
And then we would go through how different artists do that certain thing.
01:15:16
Speaker
We would learn how to do that.
01:15:17
Speaker
And then you would blend and kind of play with those rules, but you still had to meet the rules.
01:15:22
Speaker
And when you do that effectively, first off, you're probably going to learn more stuff because you're pushing yourself to think creatively around a boundary and it just helps focus you a little bit more.
01:15:33
Speaker
But also when it comes to the product, whatever it is that kids made, because that product is going to be relatively the same across different things, like they have the same framework, they have the same concepts.
01:15:46
Speaker
When you go to present it, it just looks a lot better.
01:15:49
Speaker
Um, and I, I, I always appreciated how it looked at the end, the aesthetic of it.
01:15:54
Speaker
Um, yeah.
01:15:56
Speaker
And there's, there's the thing too.
01:15:57
Speaker
I'm, I'm making a connection now to what John Warner writes about in the writer's practice with writing is, you know, a lot of those prescriptive things that we put in place, um, it has to have this many paragraphs or it has to have this many pictures.
01:16:09
Speaker
It has to have a
01:16:10
Speaker
it really takes away the ability for students to understand why and how they're going to answer those questions and develop like their authentic voice as writers in the context of writing, right?
01:16:21
Speaker
So there are certain questions that you have to answer as a writer to like put yourselves in communion with your audience, right?
01:16:27
Speaker
How am I going to express this idea?
01:16:30
Speaker
Does it, you know, what punctuation would best, you know,
01:16:35
Speaker
Harry, the emotional weight that I want to look at here, what word choice, what, you know, does it need, how long does it need to be?
01:16:41
Speaker
And certainly there are these confines, but, but we're trying to, you know, get a message across.
01:16:45
Speaker
And often the, the prescriptions that we put in place are like faking it, you know, like, like Warner calls them writing related simulations.
01:16:54
Speaker
Well, that take that concept and apply it writ large to everything that you're saying in like, you know, an art class, it has to have this many pictures.
01:17:00
Speaker
Well,
01:17:01
Speaker
maybe you're answering a question that an artist necessarily needs, you know, in the moment to do that, that might be a,
01:17:09
Speaker
a short term like thing to get kids to the next level, but then actually causes them to fail at the next step because then they won't have, they won't have gone through the hard part of figuring out why are three to five paragraphs important, you know, if they are, I don't know, or why are this many pictures, you know, an important barrier.
01:17:27
Speaker
They don't understand why, you know, necessarily artists take in those limits.
01:17:30
Speaker
So it's like having to kind of play within those really just help us understand, help kind of pull back the curtain and
01:17:37
Speaker
you know, to mention Baudrillard and the, uh, and the matrix maybe there earlier, but like, why, why is writing like this?
01:17:43
Speaker
Why is art like this?
01:17:44
Speaker
Why is music like this?
01:17:46
Speaker
Why?
01:17:46
Speaker
And again, that's that big interdisciplinary concepts, you know, like, Hey, why does music have 12 notes?
01:17:51
Speaker
Does it always have 12 notes?
01:17:53
Speaker
What about, you know, all these other ways in between.
01:17:55
Speaker
And then you start to have kids maybe write some music and be like, see, sounds like crap.
01:17:59
Speaker
Like, why don't we put some, why does this major key sound happy?
01:18:02
Speaker
Why does the minor key sound sad?
01:18:04
Speaker
Why,
01:18:05
Speaker
You start to just play around with the fundamentals and those are building blocks are going to help kids more in the long run than just saying, memorize these seven scales and then you'll pass because then they have no purpose for why those things exist or what they're meant to express in the first place.
01:18:19
Speaker
Tangent, but I was going to say it relates really heavily to something that a lot of kids would tell me in feedback forms initially made them very frustrated about my course, but over time they grew to appreciate, which is it allows you to discuss the minimums.
01:18:33
Speaker
Because I would sometimes put on there, speaking about the collages example, like you need to have a minimum of three pictures.
01:18:39
Speaker
So some kids would put three pictures and go like, well, it's done.
01:18:43
Speaker
And then I would give them feedback.
01:18:45
Speaker
I wouldn't write it like this, but I basically say it looks bad.
01:18:48
Speaker
Like it sucks.
01:18:49
Speaker
It's not good because making a good collage out of three pictures is very difficult.
01:18:53
Speaker
So like a kid would like write back or come see me and be like, well, McNutt, you told me.
01:18:57
Speaker
I only needed three pictures.
01:18:58
Speaker
I was like, yeah, you only need three pictures, but like, it's not, doesn't look very good.
01:19:02
Speaker
Like we're going to work on and make it better.
01:19:04
Speaker
Like we need to improve upon it.
01:19:06
Speaker
And then they go like, well, I mean, I was like, most of these don't have three pictures in the example.
01:19:10
Speaker
So like you might need to add a few more to make them look good.
01:19:13
Speaker
But were there a few kids that made some three picture collages that worked because they were all cut up and weirdly modulated?
01:19:20
Speaker
Sure.
01:19:21
Speaker
And over time, kids get that.
01:19:24
Speaker
Over time, they're like, oh, my goal isn't necessarily to...
01:19:28
Speaker
obsess about the minimum guidelines.
01:19:31
Speaker
It's to use these as rules that when I'm crafting something, I know some boundaries.
01:19:36
Speaker
But at the end of the day, the ultimate purpose in a digital design class is does it look good and communicate a message?
01:19:42
Speaker
Yes or no?
01:19:43
Speaker
And it's highly subjective, but we kind of worked around that.
01:19:47
Speaker
And I kind of made that work.
01:19:48
Speaker
Well, and I mean, adults work within those those limitations as well.
01:19:52
Speaker
Right.
01:19:52
Speaker
So it's like the conversations like this between you and I are fairly rare on our content because they just are kind of seemingly ambling.
01:19:59
Speaker
We try to have much more tighter, you know, or scripted sort of interactions and content that we release because we know like, hey, our content has to have an audience.
01:20:08
Speaker
They want to be engaged with that.
01:20:09
Speaker
So let's you know, let's kind of beat them halfway on what we want to do and what they want to want to learn about.
01:20:15
Speaker
Same with like writing.
01:20:16
Speaker
You know, like it's very rare that you and I will contribute writing to other forums other than our own, where, again, it's a lot more loose and unlimited because it's our own platform.
01:20:25
Speaker
But where they're like, yeah, just write about whatever.
01:20:27
Speaker
And it doesn't matter how long or short or whatever it is, you know, or that you won't have feedback, even if you do meet those minimum requirements, you know.
01:20:34
Speaker
So, you know, you have to.
01:20:36
Speaker
you have to really go through that practice of like saying, look, what is it really that I'm trying to do and communicate?
01:20:43
Speaker
And how can I communicate that the best that I know how to do while maintaining, you know, like my voice, my integrity and meeting the needs of the audience that, you know, without them, I don't have an outlet for the things that I'm trying to do.
01:20:57
Speaker
So it's like, if I need to do that in 500 words, sometimes you have to do that.
01:21:00
Speaker
But sometimes in schools, we overdo that and we skip the part where then kids become critical, you know,
01:21:07
Speaker
thinkers about media and its production and how those barriers kind of play a role in what makes it work.
01:21:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:14
Speaker
They don't understand that we preclude the why and just give them rules.
01:21:17
Speaker
Um, so that's, again, an interesting part of the interdisciplinary lens to bring it back to the subject of this video and this podcast is, you know, like, Hey, let's actually just look at the rules.
01:21:28
Speaker
You know, why do people believe weird things?
01:21:30
Speaker
Why
01:21:30
Speaker
Why does music have 12 notes?
01:21:32
Speaker
Why, why does, why can you not make a collage with two pictures?
01:21:37
Speaker
And why is a collage with a thousand pictures generally a terrible idea?
01:21:40
Speaker
Why, you know, why would you maybe not want to make a YouTube video?
01:21:44
Speaker
That's an hour and 20 minutes of two dudes talking like,
01:21:47
Speaker
You know, it just, it is what it is.
01:21:50
Speaker
You just, you just explore those things.
01:21:52
Speaker
And sometimes you take those
Philosophical Concepts in Math
01:21:53
Speaker
risks and other times you don't, but you learn about all along the way, you know, you're iterating on that why, or you're adding to the next time that you try something out, why you, or why not, you might want to do that thing.
01:22:05
Speaker
So let me wrap up with my number one.
01:22:07
Speaker
We finally made it.
01:22:08
Speaker
Oh, you haven't even gotten to yours.
01:22:09
Speaker
I haven't said my number one yet.
01:22:10
Speaker
So yours was open-ended, which I feel like is kind of cheating.
01:22:13
Speaker
So I'm going to use mine as an actual content area thing, which is something I alluded to earlier in the conversation at some point.
01:22:21
Speaker
And this is something I have not done.
01:22:23
Speaker
Some of my coworkers explored this, and I was always fascinated doing it in my own class, and I just never had a chance to do it.
01:22:29
Speaker
Because honestly, I didn't really know much about it until like relatively recently, which are tackling philosophical concepts in mathematics.
01:22:37
Speaker
I think that math and to an extent science tends to get left out of the conversation and interdisciplinary learning PBL context, not because it's not there, but because when we talk about things, it's just like, well, yeah, I can talk about that in social studies class.
01:22:51
Speaker
And it's like super easy.
01:22:53
Speaker
Um, Matt has so many different applicability applicabilities to the things that we've been talking about, but also has its own things that you could start with that are inherently interesting that dive into the other subject area.
01:23:06
Speaker
So what I'm thinking about are things like, um, there's this fascinating book I read, I think late last year, it's called zero, the biography of a dangerous idea.
01:23:16
Speaker
I read it actually after we had done a lesson on the concept of infinity for the IDS.
01:23:21
Speaker
And we found that book and we recommended it based off of just like all the reviews and everything.
01:23:25
Speaker
So I read that book and it is so interesting.
01:23:27
Speaker
It's all about how the concept or theory of zero is like got you persecuted by faith-based organizations because like how can zero exist?
01:23:40
Speaker
It like broke a bunch of code and concepts and previous formulas because it's very hard to explain.
01:23:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:49
Speaker
Like it literally is hard for me to explain it.
01:23:52
Speaker
Um, in the exact same way that like explaining infinity is very difficult to explain.
01:23:55
Speaker
Like it, it kind of goes beyond our human rationale for a thing existing, but it's one of those things that people love to talk about in the exact same way that
01:24:04
Speaker
like math-based concepts of like when you're next to like a gigantic building, like interstellar style and like time slows down and like time is relative to the different paces, going back to what you were talking about before.
01:24:16
Speaker
When you dive into infinity, you're getting into parallel universe theory.
01:24:22
Speaker
Like if you have an infinite concept, then eventually you would duplicate and there would be infinite versions of every single thing that you ever do.
01:24:29
Speaker
There's so many different interesting concepts
01:24:31
Speaker
concepts when it comes to math and when you dive into the existential parts of it.
01:24:37
Speaker
Another good book that was co-taught at my school was always The Drunkard's Walk, which is a math philosophy book.
01:24:44
Speaker
It's like a pop-sci, like an Adam Grant type thing.
01:24:48
Speaker
Randomness rules our lives.
01:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's all about how like people piece together.
01:24:53
Speaker
Can I speak into your conspiracy idea?
01:24:54
Speaker
People piece together a bunch of like random things that they learn throughout time.
01:25:01
Speaker
And that's how they come to conclusions about the way things are, even if they are completely inaccurate.
01:25:07
Speaker
And sometimes like randomness leads us to having like brilliant ideas that completely change the world.
01:25:12
Speaker
And sometimes they lead us to just being like ignorant people.
01:25:17
Speaker
That book dives into like the why and how of the concept of randomness.
01:25:23
Speaker
Everything from like a gambler's fallacy to conspiracy theories to just like how science works and like experimentation.
01:25:33
Speaker
So all those concepts, like all that to say, interdisciplinary learning, starting with math as the basis has very interesting implications for the humanities, for science experiments and the like, where instead of going to the math teacher and saying, hey, can you make a math lesson out of
01:25:52
Speaker
But the problem is now, like, I know you could do this, but like, let's say that you were doing it on city planning.
01:25:58
Speaker
There might be a leap there to say, well, like I teach algebra two.
01:26:01
Speaker
I'm not really sure how to do that.
01:26:02
Speaker
You can.
01:26:03
Speaker
Right.
01:26:03
Speaker
You might because we already made the lesson, but it might be a bigger leap in saying like, hey, can we make a lesson about the concept of infinity?
01:26:11
Speaker
Because that is inherently a math based thing.
01:26:13
Speaker
And there's probably ways that we can tackle that together.
01:26:15
Speaker
Mm hmm.
01:26:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:16
Speaker
And I know our friend, colleague, Sunil Singh would certainly put his stamp of approval on this idea, right?
01:26:22
Speaker
But it's like teaching math as a humanities class.
01:26:25
Speaker
Like, what does that look like?
01:26:26
Speaker
What is the human element of mathematics?
01:26:28
Speaker
You know, it's not, to some extent, it is, you know, an abstract thing that just exists out in the world and, you know, human beings are discovering it, but it also has, you know, huge, as you were just talking about zero, cultural implications.
01:26:40
Speaker
And
01:26:41
Speaker
implications that go into our architecture, our sense of religion, our sense of self, and of course, the story and the history of invention and all of that across time too, and still what is yet to be found.
01:26:57
Speaker
So we are constantly, if we are experiencing and expressing the world through mathematics, like that story is not done.
01:27:02
Speaker
There's not a period at the end of that.
01:27:04
Speaker
Like what is left to be told in that part as well?
01:27:06
Speaker
So yeah, like who are the people and the peoples and the cultures and the communities and all that they came up with?
01:27:12
Speaker
with these ideas, not to bring it back to social studies, which I'm totally, I'm totally doing, but you know what I'm saying?
01:27:17
Speaker
Like there, there is an interdisciplinary story to be told there that, yeah, I did not, I did not experience, I experienced that primarily through physics.
01:27:24
Speaker
Like I really loved, I, I almost did not graduate high school because I was lacking in my math credits, but I had an A in physics and I,
01:27:32
Speaker
My lowest grade throughout my entire college experience was in my required math class that I had to take because I was so lacking in, you know, I couldn't like test out of any of those things.
01:27:42
Speaker
But then I also took intro like physics class, a couple of physics class from my gen eds, some of my best classes.
01:27:48
Speaker
I just like the concept, thinking conceptually about those things was much more powerful to me than, you know, the raw algebra, which has always seemed like it was always taught just from like the
01:27:58
Speaker
the perspective of formulas and all and, you know, doing the worksheets and things that were not particularly engaging for me, but attach that to a story or attach it to, right, the question of like, what happens if I drop this thing, right?
01:28:12
Speaker
It's on a wire here.
01:28:15
Speaker
What's it going to do?
01:28:16
Speaker
Like, right, kind of tell the story of these objects and how those impact our world.
01:28:21
Speaker
It's like so much more fascinating.
01:28:22
Speaker
And there's math to describe all of that stuff.
01:28:24
Speaker
So yeah, that's, that, that would be, I would take that class or I would, I would appreciate that lesson, Chris, about philosophical concepts in that.
01:28:33
Speaker
So yeah, if you never wanted a 90 minute conversation between two teachers about interdisciplinary learning, I think you've gotten it, but this might be also be one of the shorter MindFood episodes.
01:28:43
Speaker
So thank you
Event Invitation and Conclusion
01:28:45
Speaker
so much if you made it this far for joining us for this episode of MindFood.
01:28:49
Speaker
And of course...
01:28:50
Speaker
If you want to join us in Columbus on March 4th to continue the conversation, to really get into the weeds with an international cohort, an international group of educators, of researchers, of high schoolers,
01:29:06
Speaker
higher ed, you know, K-12 from the UK, from across the United States.
01:29:13
Speaker
Join us in Columbus at The Ohio State University on March 4th.
01:29:16
Speaker
And you can register for that event on a link that's either somewhere in this video, somewhere in the link in the show description there.
01:29:23
Speaker
And of course, be on the lookout for materials that we released related to the IDS, that interdisciplinary subject, those lessons that we talked about throughout the rest of this episode.
01:29:32
Speaker
And of course, thank you so much for listening.
01:29:35
Speaker
Yep.
01:29:35
Speaker
Thanks all.
01:29:35
Speaker
Let's restore humanity together.