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Schoolishness w/ Dr. Susan Blum
4 Plays9 months ago
My guest today is Dr. Susan Blum. Susan Blum is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of I Love Learning; I Hate School and My Word!, as well as the editor of Ungrading.
Her new book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education, and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning is now out on Cornell University Press. It catalogs in great detail the characteristics of a “schoolish” education, that is, school as a self-contained institution with its own logic, grammar, and rules. One that, ultimately, sets students up for difficult re-entry into the rest of their lives in an unschoolish world. Susan draws upon examples of unschoolish learning from around the world and makes a powerful case for a necessary anthropological perspective that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
“If we don't try, nothing will change,” she writes, “It's hard. Hell, it's probably impossible. Schoolishness is probably here to stay, but maybe not all of its elements are inevitable. Entrenched, yes. But inevitable? I don't think so.”
Works mentioned this episode:
Susan Hrach - Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning
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Transcript
Flaws in Education System
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And then we wonder, you know, why children aren't doing well on their tests.
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Well, the tests are bad.
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The system is bad.
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The questions we're asking are the wrong questions.
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But it doesn't have to be this way.
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It could be different.
Introduction to Episode 152
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Hello and welcome to episode 152 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
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My name is Nick Covington.
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Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Peter Kratz, Leah Kelly, and Alexander Gruber.
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With a huge shout out to all of our Conference to Restore Humanity participants for their engagement and enthusiasm.
About Human Restoration Project
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You can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Interview with Dr. Susan Bloom
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My guest today is Dr. Susan Bloom.
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Susan Bloom is professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.
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She's the author of I Love Learning, I Hate School, and My Word, as well as the editor of Ungrading.
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Her new book, Schoolishness, Alienated Education, and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, is now out on Cornell University Press.
00:01:09
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It catalogs in great detail the characteristics of a schoolish education,
00:01:13
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that is, school as a self-contained institution with its own logic, grammar, and rules, one that ultimately sets students up for a difficult re-entry into the rest of their lives in an unschoolish world.
00:01:26
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Susan draws upon examples of unschoolish learning from around the world and makes a powerful case for a necessary anthropological perspective
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that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
00:01:39
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If we don't try, nothing will change, she writes.
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It's hard.
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Hell, it's probably impossible.
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Schoolishness is probably here to stay, but maybe not all of its elements are inevitable.
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Entrenched, yes, but inevitable, I don't think so.
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Thank you so much, Susan, for joining me today.
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Thank you for having me, Nick.
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It's so exciting to be talking to you about this book because I finally had a chance after years of knowing your work to watch the video that you sent me about the Human Restoration Project.
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And I watched the whole thing and there is not a word that I disagree with about it.
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And you and I, you collectively and I are
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about the same things.
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This is a philosophical, a moral undertaking, and it isn't just technocratic, and it matters for the
Models of Education: Thorndike vs Dewey
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world.
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So there's a lot wrong, but there are a lot of great examples of things that we can do better, and there are projects like yours that are trying to actually make that happen.
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So I'm so excited to be talking to you about it.
00:02:49
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That's awesome.
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And I'll just say, just real quick, it was such a shocker to get to the end section of that book and see Human Restoration Project mentioned as one of those solutions in there, too.
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So, you know, I'm going through there.
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I have an Iliich and Neil Postman.
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And, oh, here's Human Restoration Project alongside that, too.
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So that was pretty awesome.
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Well, yeah.
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You know, I've been scouring the world for examples of people who have done it better.
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And there were the critics, you know, 50 years ago who were really trying.
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There were critics 100 years ago who were trying.
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And here we are again.
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As I said recently in a talk, there's kind of a tension between the Thorndike and the Dewey models of education.
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And schoolishness is basically the Thorndike model.
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It's the model, for those who don't know what that means, of measurement and testing and comparison and industry and breaking everything down into tiny replicable uniform units that we can then impose in every single situation, whether they fit or not.
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So if you have taken a standardized test, we have that thanks to Thorndike and his supporters.
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And in contrast to that, we have people like the philosopher John Dewey, who was active 100 years ago.
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He spoke in China for two years.
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The whole world was consumed with concern about the way education was going, and they were seeking alternatives to it, more humane, more student-centered, more learner-centered, more
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more differentiated, more active, more physical, more social, more cooperative.
Schoolishness and Control
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And in fact, what we have when we think of the kind of conventional model of schooling is exactly the Thorndike model, exactly not the Dewey model.
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So when you think about a kind of prototypical school situation, what I call a schoolish setting,
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You have uniformity of goals, uniformity of participants, uniformity of outcomes.
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Everything is controlled.
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Everything is measured.
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Everything is done because somebody told you to.
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And the goal is to have students compliant and behaving according to what some outside force has imposed on them.
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And as we know, that doesn't really suit a lot of individuals.
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It doesn't suit a lot of children.
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It used to suit me, to be honest, because I was the kind of person who could sit still and I could embrace the goals that the schoolish system gave me.
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And I could learn that way.
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I could learn by myself myself.
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In kind of competition with others, because I was good at it.
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So I was affirmed all the time, most of the time, not in gym class, but and not in other ways, but I was affirmed that I was good at this stuff.
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And so I became a teacher, right?
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Like so many teachers, school worked for me.
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This idea of a kind of uniform curriculum where the payoff is always in the future.
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And the goal is abstraction.
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So the goal is to use your mind.
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And if you use your body or your hands or whatever, it's all in the service of the mind.
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And so these are some of the dimensions of schoolishness that I think
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It became aware of kind of late because the old system had been so naturalized for
Anthropology's Insight into Education
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me.
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So using my anthropological disposition to call into question
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what I see around me all the time, I began to really ask a lot of questions.
00:06:53
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So I've been at this really about 20 years, really questioning what's going on in this institution that seems so obvious and normal.
00:07:04
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And what I have in the new book is everything I have found out and including all the projects like yours that have been also grappling with these really fundamental issues.
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And that's, I think, a great thing to discuss here is exactly that anthropological perspective.
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I mean, there's a million and one education books out there written by people with all kinds of education credentials, bona fides and all of that.
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But I've kind of become obsessed with
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the quote that's at the beginning of the book from what naturalist conservationist, he's the father of the national parks, right?
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John, is it John Muir?
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And you use it to open up the book and it reads, when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
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And I think what I'm struck by is it's not an explicitly educational quote, but it offers a lot of wisdom for people who are thinking about the complex ecological systems and problems like human learning in school.
00:08:06
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And as we had mentioned, as you had just discussed here, you're a professor in the Department of
00:08:10
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anthropology.
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So what lens does that offer us in understanding education and learning that other disciplines miss if we're too lost in the sauce of educational ease and schoolishness ourselves?
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Or maybe is it like the power of the anthropological lens that it is so intensely interdisciplinary?
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That's a thing that I'm fascinated by.
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Well, welcome to anthropology.
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I love it.
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You know, what we teach our undergraduates is that anthropology is holistic in the sense that it includes all kinds of dimensions, especially American dimensions.
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anthropology, because anthropology has different flavors in different parts of the world.
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So in Britain, they tend to have social anthropology, which is really focused a lot on social relationships.
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And anthropology in the US is, we talk about a four field discipline.
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So it has biological anthropology, archaeological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, which is one of my fields,
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and cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology, which is another of my fields.
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And you can see that we, as a discipline as a whole, are interested in human evolution and how the human species fits with the entire biosphere and how our built environment and the natural environment interact with our
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cultural and social choices.
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So we look at the evolution of human communities and how different environments lend themselves to different communities.
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We look at the origins of agriculture and what settlement does in terms of inequality and competition and accumulation.
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We look at how language created us, and then we use language in ways that are both
00:10:15
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intentional and agentive.
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And also we inherit language from our forebears and our community.
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So we don't entirely create language anew on our own, but we are shaped by language and languages or communication of all sorts.
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And that's another dimension of linguistic anthropology, which is also interested in writing and visual signs and all kinds of
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what we call semiosis or meaning making.
00:10:47
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And then cultural and social anthropology are connected to human organization.
00:10:54
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What kind of social relations you have?
00:10:56
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Are you in a small scale?
00:10:58
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hunting and gathering society?
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Are you in a large-scale industrial society?
00:11:04
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Are you in a place that valorizes competition or cooperation?
00:11:09
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Is gender the primary organizing feature of life, or is race one of the, or class?
00:11:17
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What are all of the factors that are influencing any moment of human behavior?
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So,
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Anthropology, as I embrace it, is looking at everything, which of course means that we aren't very well known outside our own discipline because we always begin every answer with, it's complicated.
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But in fact, it is complicated.
00:11:45
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And just like anybody trying to address climate change or inequality, all of these huge issues are
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multi-faceted and multi-fronted.
Critique of Learning Systems
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And if you're going to solve a problem, and how you define a problem is also not obvious, but when you're trying to address a really serious, complicated problem, you really have to operate at multiple levels.
00:12:16
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So what we see in education often is kind of a narrowing of
00:12:22
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the definition of a problem, and then a narrowing of the definition of a solution.
00:12:27
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So you can get things like, in my world, the learning management system, which I have railed against and I'm writing about a little bit now.
00:12:40
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It's, for those who don't know, it is a kind of platform that allows everything about the class to be found in one digital location.
00:12:51
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which is very convenient for students and faculty.
00:12:55
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So what's not to like, right?
00:12:57
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It's a kind of educational technology solution to the fact that there's a lot going on in any particular course.
00:13:08
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The problem, of course, to me, is that it is an entirely schoolish universe that this is operating in.
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So the students get the sense that if I do this task that is due on Wednesday at 2.30, then I have finished my obligation and everything is done and I don't have to think about it anymore.
00:13:29
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And
00:13:30
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That is practical, certainly for busy students.
00:13:34
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But if you zoom out a little and ask what we're really trying to accomplish in a big sense for the students' lives as humans, as learners, as citizens, and as employees, this is really teaching them something that is not going to serve them very well.
00:13:56
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It's teaching them to really narrow the definition of learning and to make it something that somebody else is predetermined.
00:14:05
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And we know that knowledge isn't like that and learning isn't like that.
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So we're teaching them a fake version of learning, but it's convenient, it's packaged,
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It's all in one place.
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And so that's a kind of example of where I, as an anthropologist, may not be an expert at all of the educational technology, although I've learned a lot.
00:14:30
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But I am pretty good at zooming out and looking at how things are in a much broader sense in the scope of a human life in the context of a human society and knowing that we can look elsewhere and it's different.
Alienation in Education
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So one of the things that anthropologists often bring to the conversation about education is that they go to other places.
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And they look at how people learn in ways that are not so schoolish.
00:15:04
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And when you do that, our system looks really bizarre.
00:15:10
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And that is kind of the, we love to talk about making the strange familiar.
00:15:16
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So we go somewhere and you see three-year-olds with machetes and you say, oh my God, how could that be?
00:15:24
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But then you come home and then the familiar,
00:15:28
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becomes strange.
00:15:30
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So basically, schoolishness, and in some sense, my whole life's project is to make our familiar situation strange.
00:15:40
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Because once you do that, you can question it.
00:15:43
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And once you question it, you can change it.
00:15:47
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And I so appreciate that lens because, again, so often people who are trained in education essentially get a training in schoolishness and kind of take for granted, you know, the different, the various parts, the LMSs, the behavior systems, the grading systems, all of those things, and don't begin to question it.
00:16:05
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Like, it's just baked into the process.
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Whereas,
00:16:09
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through an anthropological or other disciplinary lens, we can see, no, these things didn't fall from the sky.
00:16:14
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These can be composed a lot of different ways, and they can, in fact, be composed differently to serve different ends and means.
00:16:22
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And I just think that's such a powerful way of stepping outside of ourselves and really beginning to question a lot of those assumptions.
00:16:31
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The title of the book, again, is The Schoolishness, The Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning.
00:16:37
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And alienation, or what you define as estrangement, separation, being different from and the like, seems to be that unifying theme of schoolishness.
00:16:49
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So the million dollar question, I think, is like, how do we make school less school-ish, which you frame in part as this moving from alienation to authenticity?
00:17:00
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Again, another framing I was really struck by.
00:17:02
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So kind of a two-parter here, but what do you see as that relationship between school-ishness and alienation being part and parcel of one another?
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And then I guess a little bit later on, how do we work to resolve that?
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How do we move from the one to the other?
00:17:17
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Well, you are a very good reader.
00:17:19
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Those are the kind of themes of the book.
00:17:23
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And I reorganized the book a million different ways.
00:17:26
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I think I had five or six completely different structures and many, many, many titles, one of which was Alienation and Authenticity, because these have been really helpful for me to unify what appears to be a kind of hodgepodge of topics.
00:17:44
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So the central part of the book has 10
00:17:47
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different chapters about different ways that schoolish practices presume a kind of alienated relationship.
00:17:56
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And each one then includes examples of a more authentic or more humane alternative.
00:18:05
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So for example, there's a chapter on space and place that
00:18:10
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And schoolishness presumes a kind of alienation from the world and the environment with buildings.
00:18:18
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And we take for granted in a way that schools are buildings and that you are inside and you are in chairs and you are with desks and there is a chalkboard or a blackboard or a whiteboard.
00:18:33
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And nowadays, of course, there's a projector and a screen and all of this stuff presumes that
00:18:40
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that you're contained and that you can predict where the learning is going to happen and that you sort of block out the external world because you need to control everything inside.
00:18:57
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And we know there's a great, great book by Susan Rock, H-R-A-C-H, called
00:19:08
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Minding Bodies.
00:19:09
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And she talks about how powerful it is to go outside.
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Even if you're in a campus in a bad weather place or something, you can still go do a field trip.
00:19:22
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You can go outside.
00:19:23
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In my own classes, I sometimes...
00:19:26
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send students outside.
00:19:27
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You know, I teach in a regular place.
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You know, we have hours and buildings and classrooms.
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But I send them outside, go observe something in the student union and come back and report on it.
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Or go look at the languages represented in the signs outside.
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Or when I taught a class on food, we went to a farm and
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There are things you can do that break this kind of assumed frame or confinement.
Community-Based Learning Examples
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And so alienation seems to be pervasive in every sort of way.
00:20:07
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And this is a topic that many philosophers and political theorists have written a lot about.
00:20:15
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So it has many, many dimensions, including, for instance, the alienation of people from minoritized
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groups who feel alienated by the dominant paradigms that the school system is imposing on them.
00:20:31
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But alienation is pervasive in all kinds of ways.
00:20:34
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When students say, I learned it for the test and I forgot it.
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That to me is an example of alienated learning, learning that never becomes part of the learner.
00:20:43
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It's always outside.
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It's always other than.
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They don't want it.
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They don't need it.
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They don't like it.
00:20:49
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They don't care about it.
00:20:51
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That's a kind of alienated learning.
00:20:53
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You do it for the test.
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You do it for the points.
00:20:55
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You do it for the grade.
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You do it for the credential.
00:20:59
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But it's not meaningful because somebody made you do it for all kinds of
00:21:05
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extrinsic reasons.
00:21:07
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So alienation aligns with extrinsic motivation and all kinds of stuff like that.
00:21:13
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In contrast, authenticity is when anthropologists go around the world and they see people learning, they see people learning to do rituals and they learn how to cook and they learn how to identify plants and they learn how to navigate by the stars.
00:21:31
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It doesn't have to be easy.
00:21:33
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There's a book by Edwin Hutchins called Cognition in the Wild, where he has studied people navigating by the stars and learning how to operate boats in the ocean.
00:21:48
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And that is really hard technical stuff.
00:21:51
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You have to know your material.
00:21:54
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You can't just learn it in a classroom, but learn.
00:21:59
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But it matters because lives are going to depend on it.
00:22:02
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So that to me is an example of authentic learning, which is meaningful and brings authentic, intrinsic rewards.
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You don't need points if the goal is to save a life, you know, if saving a life is its own reward.
00:22:19
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So authenticity for me is when the activity itself has its own meaning.
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You don't have to go outside the activity to find a meaning.
00:22:32
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So I use the example in the book of learning a language.
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And I'm very fond of learning languages.
00:22:42
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I've studied many.
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I speak several.
00:22:46
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You can learn Spanish because you want to communicate with a relative who married
00:22:52
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somebody from a Spanish-speaking country.
00:22:54
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And so you can learn Spanish for all kinds of meaningful, authentic reasons, or you can learn Spanish because it fulfills a language requirement in your degree program.
00:23:06
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And if you're doing it for that, you might actually begin to like it or love it.
00:23:12
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You may learn it really well, but it could be Spanish or it could be Russian or it could be Arabic or it could be anything else.
00:23:19
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In some ways, they're interchangeable.
00:23:21
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So the kind of choice to choose Spanish over something else is arbitrary.
00:23:28
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And when things are arbitrary, they become more alienated.
00:23:33
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So...
00:23:35
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When things are authentic, they are necessary, not arbitrary.
00:23:41
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So there are a whole bunch of concepts that kind of line up.
00:23:45
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So you've got alienation and schoolishness and extrinsic motivation and arbitrariness on one side.
00:23:53
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And that's where all the bad stuff happens in terms of school.
00:23:57
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That's where cheating happens.
00:23:58
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That's where cutting corners happens.
00:24:01
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That's where dropping out and acting up happen.
00:24:05
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On the other side, you have authenticity and meaning and connection and real outcomes and intrinsic motivation.
00:24:15
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And that's where people feel pride and where they care.
00:24:18
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And you don't have to give them points for that.
00:24:20
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And clearly, this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation has been challenged,
00:24:28
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People now are really interested in gamification, which I also find really interesting.
00:24:35
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I do Duolingo every day and I get points for it and they remind me I have a streak.
00:24:41
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My current streak is over 11,000 days, which is, you know, it's points, right?
00:24:48
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But I also want to learn Spanish and I'm actually going to...
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the Middle East later in the summer, and I've added Arabic to my rotation, so I'm
00:25:00
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playing with that, I'm motivated for sure.
00:25:05
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But also they give me little nudges, which don't hurt, but I'm not doing it for the points.
00:25:14
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And this is something that in our schoolish system, we often have to grapple with, right?
00:25:19
Speaker
We are not in utopia.
00:25:21
Speaker
And so how do we deal with the actual students we actually have in our classrooms?
00:25:26
Speaker
And sometimes some of these other tactics
00:25:29
Speaker
which a lot of education developers talk about all the time, can be useful.
00:25:35
Speaker
But you don't need to give people points for cooking a meal for their family.
00:25:42
Speaker
That has its own intrinsic goals.
00:25:45
Speaker
So you can use points and gamification and stuff in our schoolish system, but in the dream system that I'm envisioning, we don't need them.
Ungrading and Authentic Learning
00:25:58
Speaker
And you mentioned the connections to ungrading as well as like an entree into shifting away from that alienated system.
00:26:06
Speaker
Because as mentioned with the John Muir quote, right, once you find grading is connected to assessment systems and motivation systems and LMS and all these things, you slowly realize, well, if I'm moving towards ungrading, I need a different way for students to show their learning.
00:26:22
Speaker
So now your assessment changes.
00:26:23
Speaker
And then when you change your assessment, you realize, oh, I can't teach the same way that I used to before.
00:26:28
Speaker
So your instruction changes.
00:26:30
Speaker
And then those behavior systems that you're relying on, suddenly those things change too.
00:26:34
Speaker
And everything is all kind of connected together.
00:26:37
Speaker
But in the schoolish system, it all is there to reinforce those schoolish attitudes, habits,
00:26:46
Speaker
abilities and really like sort students by how well they play in that schoolish environment.
00:26:53
Speaker
And in the book, you actually make a case study kind of for the authentic space that you, I think that that space that you'd like us to move into.
00:27:02
Speaker
So let's talk about that Bowman Creek educational ecosystem as the, as that case study for the kind of authentic unschoolish project that
00:27:12
Speaker
we should be doing more of.
00:27:13
Speaker
So could you just describe that program in a nutshell, what you observed and particularly how participants felt about that experience?
00:27:21
Speaker
I love the data reporting on that too.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:24
Speaker
And I only gave a little tiny hint of the data.
00:27:28
Speaker
We have so much data, but I don't know how to use it all.
00:27:32
Speaker
But so this is a project that still exists, but with a different name now.
00:27:39
Speaker
It was begun almost 10 years ago by student engineers at my university, the University of Notre Dame, and it was actually the Society of Women Engineers who wanted to clean up a local polluted creek.
00:27:56
Speaker
And so they began to work on the engineering side.
00:28:00
Speaker
This project grew quickly over time, and it became championed by one of our
00:28:07
Speaker
engineering faculty, and then somebody, he partnered with a city engineer, and they created this project.
00:28:15
Speaker
I was brought on in about year two or three with some other social scientists because they wanted us to study it a little bit.
00:28:25
Speaker
I worked on it for three years, and I
00:28:30
Speaker
Somewhere between the first and second year, I realized I could study the learning and they wanted us to study something else.
00:28:38
Speaker
But I thought this is a perfect example of how people are learning.
00:28:43
Speaker
outside a schoolish structure.
00:28:46
Speaker
So the year I write most about was 2017, when we had 30 interns, five of them were ethnographic interns, that means they were hired as anthropologists embedded in this project.
00:29:02
Speaker
And there were eight or nine projects that these teams were doing out in the community.
00:29:09
Speaker
The goal was to work with the community, not on the community, as so many other community-based projects do.
00:29:17
Speaker
And it had an engineering core, but it became clear that there were social and political and economic issues.
00:29:25
Speaker
and aesthetic dimensions to it even.
00:29:28
Speaker
They built rain gardens and
00:29:34
Speaker
tree nurseries, and they fixed up a playground, and they got lamps in neighborhoods, street lamps.
00:29:42
Speaker
They did all kinds of things.
00:29:43
Speaker
So they came in with whatever academic training they'd had.
00:29:48
Speaker
And one of the things that the project was really proud of was that they had multidimensional diversity.
00:29:54
Speaker
So there were students who went from age 15 in high school to people in a community college who were 50 years old, and then people at
00:30:03
Speaker
highly selective colleges, regional colleges, all kinds of things.
00:30:08
Speaker
We had a bunch of mentors from the community, including high school teachers who were helping the groups.
00:30:16
Speaker
The students had
00:30:18
Speaker
backgrounds in math, computer science, civil engineering, economics, sociology, psychology.
00:30:29
Speaker
Anyway, what they had was they had to define projects.
00:30:34
Speaker
And these projects drove their work for the whole summer.
00:30:38
Speaker
They've now shortened the summer, but at the time, it was 10 weeks long or eight weeks long.
00:30:49
Speaker
The goal was to complete a project.
00:30:51
Speaker
So whatever it took to complete this real project was what they did.
00:30:56
Speaker
They went in every day, eight to five, and they worked on their project.
00:31:01
Speaker
They reported to the group so they had accountability, which meant they had authentic audiences for what they were doing.
00:31:08
Speaker
They had to learn to make presentations, which made them really, really nervous.
00:31:13
Speaker
but that is something that engineers apparently do all the time.
00:31:16
Speaker
They have to present their work and their work in progress to stakeholders, but they also had to learn a lot of technical stuff.
00:31:24
Speaker
So they had to learn programming.
00:31:26
Speaker
They had to learn about
00:31:29
Speaker
water chemistry.
00:31:30
Speaker
They had to learn how plants grow.
00:31:32
Speaker
They also had to learn technical, political stuff.
00:31:36
Speaker
They had to learn who has jurisdiction over this empty lot, and how do you get permission to enter somebody's house to fix their pipes?
00:31:46
Speaker
And there were so many dimensions that they had to learn, and nobody was telling them to do it except the need of the project.
00:31:56
Speaker
So the thing that was the most extraordinary was how meaningful this was for all of them.
00:32:02
Speaker
And when we did our interviews at the end or focus groups or anonymous surveys or their own reflections on their project, most of the people said this was the most important thing they had ever done in their lives.
00:32:18
Speaker
They came to work every Monday morning at eight o'clock in the morning, and they were so excited to work on this.
00:32:25
Speaker
They formed close relationships with everybody in the project.
00:32:31
Speaker
They said they had more genuine relationships with people here than they had ever had in their lives or than they had ever had in college.
00:32:40
Speaker
And their learning was magnificent, but we didn't
00:32:44
Speaker
predict what the learning was.
00:32:46
Speaker
There was no curriculum.
00:32:48
Speaker
There was no learning outcome that was predetermined.
00:32:53
Speaker
The learning was part of the
00:32:57
Speaker
project which dictated what they had to do.
00:32:59
Speaker
So if they were a technical team, but they had to learn some of the social stuff, then they had to learn it.
00:33:05
Speaker
And not only did they have to learn it, but they had to figure out how to learn it.
00:33:10
Speaker
So nobody was saying, here's the textbook.
00:33:13
Speaker
There might be a textbook.
00:33:15
Speaker
There might be a website.
00:33:16
Speaker
There might be an expert.
00:33:18
Speaker
They had to learn in whatever way made sense for their needs.
00:33:23
Speaker
So in that sense, it was
00:33:26
Speaker
real life, you know, it was contained within this academic structure because they were getting paid, but an institution got the permissions and the first entree into the community, but basically it was real life.
00:33:46
Speaker
So for me, this was an example of a completely authentic, completely unalienated society
00:33:54
Speaker
example of learning.
Barriers to Authentic Learning
00:33:56
Speaker
So they had headquarters, but they weren't confined to headquarters.
00:34:00
Speaker
Headquarters was this messy, human, ever-changing, old, repurposed building, but they didn't have to be in the building.
00:34:11
Speaker
They could go out on their own.
00:34:13
Speaker
Nobody was
00:34:14
Speaker
policing them.
00:34:15
Speaker
Nobody was surveilling them.
00:34:16
Speaker
They didn't have time cards.
00:34:18
Speaker
They did have to tell people where they were going because they wanted to know where they were for safety, for, you know, practical reasons, the same way a family wants to know where the kids are, because you just need to know where the kids are.
00:34:33
Speaker
But it was
00:34:35
Speaker
free.
00:34:35
Speaker
They were free agents with a lot of support, and they learned in ways that they will never forget in their entire lives.
00:34:44
Speaker
They didn't learn it for the test and forget it.
00:34:46
Speaker
They learned it because it was meaningful and mattered.
00:34:50
Speaker
So I could go on for hours about this project because it was such an amazing contrast with all of the schoolish learning that I had become so familiar with throughout my lifetime.
00:35:04
Speaker
And that's what is so powerful.
00:35:05
Speaker
It's like the antidote to all of the alien, because you do spend that middle part of the book.
00:35:10
Speaker
It's like this facet, this facet, this facet.
00:35:12
Speaker
Here's how it's alienated.
00:35:13
Speaker
And by the time you get to the,
00:35:15
Speaker
the Bowman project, it is like, whoa, here's this breath of fresh air.
00:35:18
Speaker
And I'll just highlight for listeners who are obviously going to go get the book and read it for themselves.
00:35:23
Speaker
But since you said you had this pile of data, not quite sure what to do with it, but you do focus on these three data sets, which I thought were really striking.
00:35:31
Speaker
And the one is, do you feel comfortable speaking in public about your work?
00:35:35
Speaker
And those numbers, there's not anybody who rated it less than a seven out of 10 in the post-internship world.
00:35:42
Speaker
And it was kind of
00:35:43
Speaker
all over the map in the pre-internship place.
00:35:47
Speaker
So the students in the project left feeling more comfortable speaking in public about that work, which again, for technical people or for engineers, it is certainly a skill that may not be emphasized in a technical education program.
00:35:59
Speaker
The question, do you prefer learning by doing rather than learning abstractly,
00:36:04
Speaker
huge increase in this, right?
00:36:05
Speaker
So like the mode here is a 10 out of 10 as far as students strongly agreeing in preferring learning by doing.
00:36:14
Speaker
But I think the most striking one that I found, especially as it relates to those community connections, was on this question, do you feel a connection to the Bowman Creek neighborhood?
00:36:26
Speaker
So
00:36:26
Speaker
in the pre-internship data set, the most frequent response was a two out of 10.
00:36:32
Speaker
And then on the post-internship, the most frequent response was a 10 out of 10 on that.
00:36:38
Speaker
And that's not the kind of thing that you can get within the four walls of the classroom, right?
00:36:42
Speaker
Talk about
00:36:43
Speaker
like an anti-alienating thing.
00:36:45
Speaker
It's actually building community connections.
00:36:48
Speaker
People feel in community, a responsibility, right?
00:36:52
Speaker
A shared communion with the people in that community afterwards.
00:36:58
Speaker
And that was just really incredible.
00:36:59
Speaker
I was going to read one quote from one of the participants.
00:37:02
Speaker
Here we go.
00:37:03
Speaker
Who went by...
00:37:04
Speaker
these awesome pseudonyms that you got.
00:37:06
Speaker
But one of the students wrote, in classrooms, students rarely have the opportunity to be truly responsible, not just punctual or obedient, but to have others actually count on them for something meaningful.
00:37:18
Speaker
And as you said, it wasn't points or a grade or anything else, but knowing that now I know and I'm in relationship with the people in this community, right, that sets us up for this series of important human obligations, you know, that I now have to navigate.
00:37:31
Speaker
I can't just
00:37:32
Speaker
extricate myself and go focus on cramming for the test, I'm responsible and obligated now to other people just as they are to me.
00:37:41
Speaker
moving into a broader context here.
00:37:43
Speaker
Like, I don't know if you've seen this too.
00:37:45
Speaker
You're kind of in the same, similar social media spaces as me, I suppose, for better or worse.
00:37:50
Speaker
But in the last few years, I feel like the social media discourse has really shifted and there's risen to prominence.
00:37:57
Speaker
You had mentioned Thorndike earlier on, and obviously there's been a pendulum swing back and forth.
00:38:01
Speaker
And perhaps we're part of a pendulum swing that's going back towards like high management, uh,
00:38:08
Speaker
efficiency, maximization, reducing risk, and all those kinds of things.
00:38:13
Speaker
I don't know if that's a response to the high stakes of schooling after 2020, learning loss crises, or whatever, but why do you think that the stakes are so high, and why have these high-control pedagogies and systems come to prominence, and what are the greatest barriers to achieving this?
00:38:34
Speaker
this example, right, that you write this stunning case study, what is a barrier for having schools do more of that as opposed to the opposite?
00:38:44
Speaker
I think the biggest barrier is social inequality and economic inequality in the U.S., which is contrasted, let's say, with Finland, where the Finnish educational system is quite different from the U.S. educational system and
00:39:03
Speaker
Their economic system is also quite different.
00:39:06
Speaker
In the U.S., we have this perception that if you get the right credential and you rank a certain way, then you are going to be safe economically.
00:39:19
Speaker
You will not be in the situation most Americans are in, which is of economic precarity and the fact that your health insurance could be taken away any minute and all of that.
00:39:35
Speaker
a sense that you need something sure fired to make sure that you can either maintain your class status or improve your class status, even though evidence shows in the US that movement among social classes is very, very low in the contemporary moment.
00:39:56
Speaker
So this is not something that schools can actually solve, but everybody's looking to the schools to solve it anyway.
00:40:03
Speaker
So schools are
00:40:05
Speaker
being asked to do everything.
00:40:08
Speaker
And there's so much uncertainty out in the world that people want a place of guaranteed success.
00:40:19
Speaker
And so this management of behavior and management of learning looks as if it's the way.
00:40:28
Speaker
If you do all of these things, you follow the rules, you get your points, you get your credits, you graduate from high school with this certain rank, you can get into a certain college and you can then with certain majors and those majors now are almost all practical.
00:40:47
Speaker
You know, there's a perceived crisis in the liberal arts because students in colleges aren't
00:40:56
Speaker
majoring in the liberal arts so much.
00:40:59
Speaker
In fact, they're minoring in them.
00:41:01
Speaker
They're majoring in practical fields for their parents or for their livelihood.
00:41:06
Speaker
And they're taking other classes like mine for fun for themselves and all of that.
00:41:11
Speaker
But this movement toward efficiency and management, I mean, in some ways, I don't really have an answer to you.
00:41:19
Speaker
I'm trying to come up with an explanation of
00:41:26
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of management in our world.
00:41:30
Speaker
I just saw a post about the top jobs in the United States right now.
00:41:38
Speaker
And the top jobs are home health care aid,
00:41:42
Speaker
food counter clerk.
00:41:46
Speaker
And in this top ranking, most of them had salaries in the $30,000 range per year.
00:41:54
Speaker
The one exception was management, which had a salary of $100,000 a year.
00:42:00
Speaker
And there are a lot of managers.
00:42:03
Speaker
And this looks like the way, you know, we have this kind of scientific metric-focused
00:42:10
Speaker
outlook in our healthcare, in our economy, in our food system, in our education system, as if we have figured everything out.
Impact of Metrics on Learning
00:42:22
Speaker
And if you just crank everything through this uniform system, you will have proper outputs.
00:42:31
Speaker
And I teach classes.
00:42:33
Speaker
I have taught classes for 30 some years about the food system.
00:42:37
Speaker
And it's also important
00:42:39
Speaker
an avocation of mine to know about this, but it's the same model.
00:42:44
Speaker
The industrial food system and the industrial education system and the industrial health system all have the same assumption, which is that everybody is the same.
00:42:54
Speaker
And if you can break everything down into its tiny...
00:42:58
Speaker
components and then just put them back together artificially.
00:43:02
Speaker
You sort of alienate everything and then you artificially reconnect them, then you will get the output you want.
00:43:10
Speaker
So in, for instance, in agriculture,
00:43:14
Speaker
We have destroyed the topsoil, but we have been able to add fertilizer, which can artificially produce food in great quantity, even though the food isn't as nutritious and it certainly doesn't taste as good.
00:43:29
Speaker
And it continues to require more and more inputs of fertilizer.
00:43:35
Speaker
pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, energy, but it produces something that resembles food.
00:43:45
Speaker
And I think in education, it's exactly the same.
00:43:48
Speaker
If you constrain your testing, for instance, there's this thing about something called direct instruction in education.
00:43:56
Speaker
If you assume that the measure of learning is a standardized test,
00:44:03
Speaker
And you are committed to the notion that you can test in a meaningful way through these uniform tests.
00:44:11
Speaker
And you compare two different methods of learning.
00:44:14
Speaker
Let's call one curiosity-driven learning, and let's call the other one direct instruction.
00:44:20
Speaker
Direct instruction will often produce better results on those standardized tests because they're basically the same thing.
00:44:28
Speaker
One is just at a different moment in the cycle.
00:44:31
Speaker
But the curiosity-based learning doesn't do things that way.
00:44:36
Speaker
It may be that you
00:44:37
Speaker
create somebody who goes home and spreads this curiosity to their family and it has an effect on their younger cousin or they go out and invent something or they go into the community and they have a relationship with an older person who can tell them something.
00:44:52
Speaker
So that's not measurable on a standardized test.
00:44:56
Speaker
It's impossible to get metrics.
00:44:59
Speaker
if you are actually looking at things that are more meaningful.
00:45:04
Speaker
So if you're going to test the deliciousness of food, you can test a strawberry that's produced to be huge and red and transportable and look like a strawberry
00:45:19
Speaker
And you can get one in January in Indiana, but it will have no taste.
00:45:24
Speaker
And it has put all these chemicals on the soil and it has been transported 1500 miles, but it looks like a strawberry.
Industrial Models in Education
00:45:34
Speaker
But the one I get for two weeks in June that was...
00:45:37
Speaker
grown down the street that was fertilized by the compost, that strawberry is delicious.
00:45:44
Speaker
But depending on what you're testing, the first one, the big red one that you can get in January looks like
00:45:53
Speaker
you've produced something amazing through your industrial agriculture.
00:45:57
Speaker
And in education, it's the same thing.
00:46:00
Speaker
You can get high test scores if you teach to the test.
00:46:05
Speaker
And we know that so well.
00:46:06
Speaker
But for instance, I taught a class this past spring on food.
00:46:12
Speaker
And basically the class was one question, what should we eat?
00:46:17
Speaker
And
00:46:18
Speaker
The class also emphasized speaking, and it was a fun class, and I love teaching it.
00:46:24
Speaker
But at the end, one of my students said to me, for most of my classes, I forget everything I learn as fast as I can because I don't really care about it.
00:46:35
Speaker
But in this class, I learn things that I will know forever.
00:46:41
Speaker
And for me, that's validation of the fact that he got interested in something and then he went and learned about it.
00:46:51
Speaker
He and his team did a TikTok about it and that was their learning.
00:46:56
Speaker
So they learned skills and they learned to ask a question, to answer a question, and it mattered to them.
00:47:02
Speaker
So everybody wants to know the answer.
00:47:08
Speaker
We have...
00:47:10
Speaker
NGOs and governments that depend on metrics.
00:47:13
Speaker
And if you want metrics, if your whole system depends on metrics, then you have to produce these metrics.
00:47:21
Speaker
And so for students to use the LMS, they can see I have a
00:47:26
Speaker
97% completion rate on time in the window when the assignment is available.
00:47:33
Speaker
And then an administrator could come in and see how long are the students engaging with the LMS, which as we all know is meaningless because people turn on a program and then they go and they exercise and they come back and it shows that they've been on it for two hours, but they haven't.
00:47:53
Speaker
But I think
00:47:56
Speaker
I don't really know why this moment is producing so much of this, but it certainly is.
00:48:04
Speaker
And the example of learning loss is one of those great examples.
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah, it took me far too long, like in my own classroom teaching career to realize like the things that made me a good educator were the things that made me a bad teacher in like the bureaucratic management sense.
00:48:22
Speaker
And then the more that I did more of the educator things, kind of the worst teacher I became.
00:48:27
Speaker
And then eventually, like the system kind of rejected me for those reasons.
00:48:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker
And I would always try to tell my seniors in particular, you know, as I made room for more authentic learning for my high school seniors,
00:48:44
Speaker
at the cost, frankly, of like teaching core curricular content for my econ class, for example.
00:48:49
Speaker
So I would say like, I don't really care if you know about the price elasticity of demand, right?
00:48:53
Speaker
That's go ask, go poll 100 adults and 99 of them aren't even going to know what you're talking about, okay?
00:49:00
Speaker
But I want you to start something here that you're not going to finish until five years from now or 10 years from now, right?
00:49:06
Speaker
So again, to come back to these metrics, that's not anything that was reflected in a final course grade or in,
00:49:14
Speaker
I guess on an ACT score or anything else that'd be relevant to college admissions.
00:49:18
Speaker
But, you know, they're the things that kids would come back to me when they were in college or like beyond and say like, hey, this thing that I started in your class or got thinking about really motivated me later on.
00:49:29
Speaker
And, you know, they'd email or touch base with me on social media about all those.
00:49:32
Speaker
And those are validating, certainly, but they're not captured, as you say, in those metrics.
00:49:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:37
Speaker
And, you know, it really is just kind of this alienated system on top of alienated system.
00:49:43
Speaker
Thinking
Integrating Real-World Issues
00:49:44
Speaker
back to that econ class and on the notion of alienated labor, it was really an interesting revelation for them to see.
00:49:51
Speaker
We were looking at like, hey, where does all this stuff come from?
00:49:53
Speaker
Right.
00:49:54
Speaker
Like our Chromebooks are, you know, what's the supply?
00:49:57
Speaker
You know, it was like a really econ focused thing.
00:49:59
Speaker
And we learned that the desks and the chairs and all of the school supplies were built and supplied by Iowa Prison Industries.
00:50:07
Speaker
And so there was this huge kind of like, whoa, right?
00:50:11
Speaker
Revelation where the connection to cheap alienated labor on the one hand to supply schools for, again, you know, these alienated learning to set up in desks and chairs and rows and things that presume, again, a certain outcome for a lot of kids.
00:50:27
Speaker
You know, it was like quiet and stairs in the room as I pulled up the Iowa Prison Industries website to showcase the
00:50:33
Speaker
These are the desks that you're sitting at.
00:50:35
Speaker
These are the chairs that you're sitting in built by prison labor for cheap.
00:50:39
Speaker
And again, one of those kind of, I don't know, authentic learning moment that really helped shine a light on that whole system.
00:50:44
Speaker
But yeah, as you were talking, I'm just, I'm having all of these moments and connecting to those ecological systems, alienated agriculture, alienated labor, alienated learning.
00:50:57
Speaker
So connecting all of those things back to those various perspectives, as I went through your book, one of the biggest takeaways, again, for me, was the insight that you had shared into all those perspectives that informed your own.
00:51:10
Speaker
You know, you draw very liberally from citations and quote from other works that help inform that perspective.
00:51:17
Speaker
And I've bought many of them.
00:51:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:19
Speaker
including David Lancey's Anthropology of Childhood, which I'm excited to dig into.
00:51:24
Speaker
So I kind of appreciate how your book is like a syllabus on how to think more like Susan Bloom.
00:51:32
Speaker
So I think in addition to that, obviously, having listeners buy and read your book, is there like a top tier, kind of top three books where you would say, hey, if you want to learn to think more like an anthropologist on these topics of childhood and education, what are some of the works that you would point people in the direction towards?
00:51:54
Speaker
Well, certainly David Lancey's work on the anthropology of childhood, which is now in its third edition,
00:52:02
Speaker
And it's a book I use when I teach the anthropology of childhood and education because it really does talk about education.
00:52:17
Speaker
what we used to call socialization, how children become members of their societies, which involves learning, some of which is directed and much of which isn't directed.
00:52:30
Speaker
So that is one work that I certainly always recommend.
00:52:37
Speaker
I think Jean Lave's work
00:52:41
Speaker
Jean Laave and Etienne Wenger have a book about communities of practice, but Jean Laave and Barbara Rogoff and several other, Suzanne Gaskins, Ruth Paradise, these are some names of people who have gone to field sites for decades and decades and decades, and they have shown the way people learn in
00:53:08
Speaker
often indigenous communities, but Leif's work is not in indigenous communities necessarily.
00:53:15
Speaker
Some of it is and some of it isn't.
00:53:17
Speaker
Some of it's in industry, how people learn, let's say, in companies in ways that are not directed by an all-powerful teacher, but how people learn in what she and Wenger call communities of practice.
00:53:36
Speaker
So,
00:53:38
Speaker
There are a lot of people there doing incredible work that will really blow your readers' minds.
00:53:46
Speaker
When you see how people are learning to weave or to cook or to set, to light fires or to
00:53:58
Speaker
use knives or to do all kinds of things.
00:54:01
Speaker
And I can hear your reader, your listeners saying, but that's simpler stuff.
00:54:08
Speaker
It's not the complicated stuff that our students have to learn in school.
00:54:12
Speaker
It's not math.
00:54:14
Speaker
Much of it is math, and in fact, Leiv has talked a lot about how people learn math in everyday life.
00:54:22
Speaker
They can do incredibly difficult math calculations when they're doing real work, and then you come back and you give them a worksheet and they can't do the worksheet that is attempting to teach the skill that they can actually do.
00:54:38
Speaker
So,
00:54:40
Speaker
I think there's so much work in the field of anthropology, the anthropology of learning, the anthropology of childhood, socialization, showing how children are socialized without schools.
00:54:55
Speaker
Another person that people could read
00:54:58
Speaker
Eleanor Oaks, O-C-H-S, who has, she and Bambi Shefflin have basically invented or named a field called language socialization.
00:55:10
Speaker
And that is
00:55:13
Speaker
a field that shows that children are learning language not by being taught, but by being meaningful members of
Potential for Change in Education
00:55:22
Speaker
their society.
00:55:22
Speaker
So all of this has been incredibly influential on my thinking.
00:55:27
Speaker
And when you go and you look at how people are learning language or skills or to be members of their society, they're doing it not by points, not by being punished for
00:55:39
Speaker
mistakes, although some mistakes might be punished, but some mistakes also have authentic consequences.
00:55:46
Speaker
So you learn from that.
00:55:47
Speaker
When I see how that works and nobody is exhausting themselves teaching, they're maybe exhausting themselves doing work, but not through the process of teaching.
00:55:58
Speaker
And you see how hard it is for our children to learn in school.
00:56:02
Speaker
You wonder what is wrong, you know,
00:56:05
Speaker
If you actually observe, and this is something that anthropologists also bring to this conversation, if you observe
00:56:14
Speaker
how people are acting and feeling about being in school, you find that by late elementary school, for sure, many of them don't like it.
00:56:27
Speaker
They are completely alienated.
00:56:29
Speaker
They have stomach aches.
00:56:31
Speaker
They get sick.
00:56:32
Speaker
They have headaches.
00:56:33
Speaker
They have all kinds of behavior problems.
00:56:37
Speaker
You mentioned prison.
00:56:39
Speaker
The school to prison pipeline is no joke.
00:56:42
Speaker
And you have people with all kinds of energy and all kinds of curiosity and physical power, and they're being forced to sit still in chairs, learning something that doesn't mean anything to them, that they forget really quickly.
00:57:01
Speaker
And then we wonder...
00:57:05
Speaker
why children aren't doing well on their tests.
00:57:07
Speaker
Well, the tests are bad.
00:57:08
Speaker
The system is bad.
00:57:10
Speaker
The questions we're asking are the wrong questions, but it doesn't have to be this way.
00:57:15
Speaker
It could be different.
Self-Directed Education
00:57:16
Speaker
So I'd like to suggest something I've only recently been deeply involved in or more deeply involved in is something called the Association for Self-Directed Education.
00:57:30
Speaker
And
00:57:30
Speaker
Peter Gray is one of the big names here.
00:57:34
Speaker
He has a book called, I think, Play to Learn.
00:57:38
Speaker
And he's all about looking at, he's not an anthropologist, he's a psychologist, but looking at indigenous communities and what kinds of lessons we can learn from them about what
00:57:51
Speaker
how people are learning and what he finds is they're not learning in confined spaces with somebody telling them what to do, but they're learning.
00:57:58
Speaker
He says by play, David Lancy makes it more complicated.
00:58:02
Speaker
It's not all play.
00:58:03
Speaker
Um, but, but the self-directed education work, um, people like Gina Riley, who has written about this and, um,
00:58:15
Speaker
several others, Helen Reese, they've looked at self-directed education, unschooling the Sudbury schools, which began in the Sudbury Valley in Massachusetts, but a long time ago.
00:58:31
Speaker
These are places, not only elite places, where the students, and these are children, you know, I mostly teach adults, but these are children who go to this place and they
00:58:42
Speaker
the question is, what do you want to learn?
00:58:44
Speaker
What do you want to know?
00:58:45
Speaker
What do you want to do?
00:58:46
Speaker
And they figure it out.
00:58:47
Speaker
And they end up literate.
00:58:49
Speaker
Most of them learn math.
00:58:51
Speaker
Some of them don't.
00:58:52
Speaker
And that's one of the regrets that some of them have later in life, that when they were children, nobody made them learn math.
00:59:01
Speaker
And so now it's hard to become a doctor because they missed out on some of the early math thinking.
00:59:09
Speaker
But
00:59:10
Speaker
There are lots of ways to learn lots of things.
00:59:13
Speaker
And clearly, as I say to people when I talk about ungrading, if what you're doing is working in terms of your students learning well and thriving, then fine.
Closing Remarks and Call to Action
00:59:27
Speaker
Don't change anything.
00:59:28
Speaker
But if they're not learning and they're not thriving, then maybe what we're doing isn't working.
00:59:34
Speaker
And then maybe looking somewhere else is a good idea.
00:59:39
Speaker
I think that's a perfect place to leave it.
00:59:41
Speaker
The book is Schoolishness, Alienated Education, and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, which I would highly, highly recommend.
00:59:49
Speaker
Available everywhere.
00:59:50
Speaker
Thank you so much, Susan, for taking the time to share your work with us today.
00:59:54
Speaker
Thank you so much, Nick, for inviting me and for asking great questions and for all of your work beyond the podcast.
01:00:04
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
01:00:07
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
01:00:11
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
01:00:15
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
01:00:22
Speaker
Thank you.