IERG Summer Training: Hello, Vancouver!

Imaginative Education Summer Training
Vancouver, British Columbia

I know, I know ... I've just gotten my Master's, what on earth am I doing traipsing off to this education symposium in Portland and that training course in Vancouver ... ?! The eternal student within just can't help it, I suppose.

Here I am, making a switch now from thinking in terms of "emergent curriculum", "the pedagogy of listening", and "child as protagonist" - to - "cognitive tools", "binary oppositions" and "learning in depth". It may seem like a violent swing - and it is, in certain ways - but one of the precise reasons I am here is because I get the impression Reggio Emilia and Imaginative Education share several fundamental philosophies, especially regarding the image of the child. However, as their vocabularies imply, the practices that have emerged from each are quite different.

Part of this has to do with how each is choosing to respond to the traditional curriculum. IE is making far more of an effort to work with the system of established standards and curricula, not nearly as concerned with WHAT students are learning as with HOW students are learning content. Reggio is very concerned with WHAT students are learning and HOW, so out goes the traditional curriculum with the bathwater and: What happens when we redesign the school from the children upwards? (That is, building a curriculum from the interests they express, in one of several forms.)

Is there some middle ground? I don't know. That's kind of why I'm here. And already, the analyst in me is having a hey-day, let me tell you!

Here is my first predicament: Tonight, Kieran Egan opened with a lecture on "Dividing the School in Two", making the point that, since the very conception of modern Western schooling, the socializing and academic purposes of education have constantly been confused with each other. I agree. Think about it: Why do we study Social Studies? Are we primarily learning to be good, democratic citizens? Or are we studying the philosophy of human communities? (How's that for a S.S. topic, Dad?) Put in other words, do we go to school to become acculturated to our society, or for the academic benefit of our individual minds?

Both, you'd probably say. Both, says the school system. Both, as depicts a several-years-old Venn diagram I drew in my journal once of the overlapping services I perceived inherent to my position as teacher (service to society / service to students).

Both ... but how can education serve one purpose without slighting the other?

So, we brainstormed: What if we separated the socializing from the academic activities and experiences of schooling? What would that kind of structure look like? Would it be divided into morning and afternoon session? Separate "Soc" and "Ac" schools, as Kieran suggested? How do we go about re-thinking schools for this separation.

And here is where I get stuck. I'm not sure I like the idea of this kind of separation. Yes, they can begin to smother each other if we don't keep track of them, but won't an increased awareness among teachers suffice? Why the need to separate?

Let me confess: I'm an American. I went to a good old American Master's program, which means I'm well versed in our favorite American pedagogue John Dewey. And John Dewey is all about mediating the dichotomies. One extreme or the other is not the answer, it is within the tension between the two that we exist, in every realm of human existence. So it is with education: the opposing forces we often feel at odds with each other in schooling each provide essential pieces to the puzzle, and it is through their interaction that dynamic education emerges.

Kieran disagrees. When you let them interact with each other, everyone gets lost as to the point of the current activity at hand, students and teachers alike.

The other question rising inside of (the emergent curriculum thinker inside of) me in opposition to this idea is: Where are the students in this conversation? Perhaps they are not able to make the separation of social from academic aspects of the curriculum. Perhaps it is not that the social and academic are mixed, but that they are not properly acknowledged and balanced in the everyday classroom that things are so muddled.

I can't say I'm convinced either way, to tell you the truth. And, by this point, I feel I'm just trying to write my way into some profound thought that will surely not come tonight. But perhaps I can put it out to you - whoever has made it, reading this far - and invite your ideas and comments. Surely they are not as tired as mine ...