Exploring Solutions with Action Inquiry–Part 10 in series

Barr & Tagg (1995) described the six areas of focus to help institutions of higher education move from an instructional paradigm to a learning paradigm (mentioned earlier). I have used the model to help interested educators facilitate change within their own institutions. Typically, I worked with 40 faculty and administrators for five and a half days over three months, and trained a core team to continue the work. Teams then went on to train many hundreds of others within their organizations. Positioning the work as a three-year process, helped teams succeed in making changes slowly, deliberately, and passionately without burning out.

I recommend also that educational change agents take an “action inquiry” approach to their work. This is a highly generative and life-informing method of simultaneously conducting action and inquiry as a practice of leadership, so that actions become increasingly effective. According to Bill Torbert (2004), Action Inquiry “helps individuals, teams, organizations, and still larger institutions become more capable of self-transformation and thus more creative, more aware, more just, and more sustainable. (p. 1)

The defining qualities of Action Inquiry are as follows:

1)      Every action and every inquiry is implicitly action inquiry.

2)      Action inquiry interweaves research and practice in the present.

3)      We almost never realize or remember in the course of the routines and the interruptions of our days that we may intentionally engage in action inquiry.

4)      Action inquiry seeks to interweave subjective, intersubjective, and objective data—subjective data about our own intent for the future, intersubjective data about what is going on at present from the divergent points of view of different participants, and objective data about what has actually been produced with which quality in the past.

5)      The special power of action inquiry—transforming power—comes from a combination of dedication to our intent or shared vision; alertness to gaps among vision, strategy, performance, and outcomes in ourselves and others; and a willingness to play a leading role with others; and a willingness to play a leading role with others in organizational or social transformations, which includes being vulnerable to transformation ourselves. (Torbert & Assoc., 2004, p. 9)

It is through the praxis of engagement, continually testing and refining, through trial-and-error, feedback-and-dialogue, that life-long learning can take place for us as educators and educational change-makers. When we keep our eyes on the prize of creating learner-centered educational approaches, we can more powerfully co-create the emergent paradigm of a world that works for everyone.

In the final post in this series, up next, I’ll summarize and conclude next steps we  can take together.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Exploring Solutions with Critical Discourse, Axiology and Praxis–Part 9 in series

What if we began to look at our global institutionalized systems of education in a postmodern light of “Critical Pedagogy” which is designed to serve the purpose of empowering teachers and teaching for empowerment? Pedagogy and culture are seen as the intersection point of human struggle for liberation. Critical Pedagogy subjects the accepted norms of everyday classroom life, the purpose of schooling, and the nature of a teacher’s work to critical forms of analysis. Axiology takes another step, of placing our discourse within the framework of ethical options that we must also consider critically.

Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted in Global Ethical Options (Carter, et al, 2001) makes a beautiful connection between critical thinking, education and moral values this way:

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society: The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the true goal of education. The complete education gives one not only the power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. (p. 21)

Certainly, every school will have unique differences in philosophy and approaches to working with students. And undoubtedly, every teacher will bring his or her own cultural history, personal perspectives, and interpersonal skills to bear on each student-teacher interaction. Yet the fact remains that education, schools, teachers, and approaches to instruction have a profound effect on societies in which they operate. The activity of “schooling” exerts profound behavioral, sociological, historical, psychological, and political influences on the citizenry of a nation. It may be that, more than any other institution—of church or state—schools and the teachers within them, are the most influential agencies in the world.

Critical Pedagogy sees that education, through its administrators and educators, influences how people relate to each other by determining and defining the imagery, story, and discourse of human relations. The approach of Critical Pedagogy encourages students and teachers to engage in the struggle to critically reflect on the ethical and political arguments that are encapsulated in the program content and instructional methodologies. Because it is from the answers to such questions that vital social, political, and moral decisions are made that will influence the fate of our society in general. As Peter McLaren puts it, “Acting as cultural ‘gatekeeper,’ schools can be said to provide the ‘moral charter’ for our society.” (2009, p.7)

Critical Pedagogy has its roots in Critical Theory which uses critique as a method of investigation, and can be traced back to Hegel. Critical Pedagogy researchers today attempt to become actively engaged in promoting social change within the education system and the culture itself. They seek to promote change by “becoming part of the self-consciousness of oppressed social groups.” (Williams, 1999)

Critical Pedagogy looks to critically interrogate the underlying assumptions to every educational policy that we initiate, implement, and ignore, because those assumptions and the actions that follow reflect our concepts of society, humanity, truth, value, and school.

What if the themes of social justice, economic and environmental sustainability, and spiritual fulfillment were central discourses within a paradigm of learning rather than instruction? If global educational leadership was informed by the insights from advocates of critical pedagogy, and engaged in dialogue about ethical principles, perhaps we would shift the way humans are recognized by each other—not as “other”—but as brilliant and essential collaborators in one human family. What would teaching and learning begin to look, sound, and feel like when it takes place in classrooms around the world? That is the praxis required to facilitate the transformation of education.

In the introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition to Pedagogy of the Opressed, by Paulo Friere (Freire, 2000), Donaldo Macedo, Professor of Liberal Arts and Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston wrote:

Paulo Freire’s invigorating critique of the dominant banking model of education leads to his democratic proposals of problem-posing education where “men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation.” P. 12

Advocates of Critical Pedagogy want to see the classroom as a place where conflict, discourse and dialogue can take place. Dialogue, according to Freire, presents itself “as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing.” (Macedo, 1995, p. 379) As a solution-seeking approach, deep dialogue is a powerfully transformative tool. (Scharmer, 2007) (Senge, 1994)

Henry Giroux takes Freire’s work further by encouraging schools to become a place to resist the ongoing “vocationalization of higher education, the commodification of the curriculum, the increasing connection between the military and universities through joint research projects and Pentagon scholarships, and the transformation of students into consumers.” (Hudson, 2007). Giroux insists that schools need to help students develop capacities for “deliberation, reasoned arguments, and the obligations of civic responsibility.” Schools also need to offer the knowledge and skills for learning how to govern.

In the next post, we’ll explore Action Inquiry as the next potential step to make a shift in global educational.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Leading Change with Servant Leadership–Part 8 in series

My purpose in this paper has not been to indulge in a total preoccupation of criticism of formal education. We do need to keep the best of what education can do for humanity, and transform our mental models of how it is to be delivered. As Robert Greenleaf (Greenleaf & Spears, 2002) stated, “…if too many potential builders are taken in by a complete absorption with dissecting the wrong and by a zeal for instant perfection, then the movement so many of us want to see will be set back. The danger, perhaps, is to hear the analyst too much and the artist too little.” (p. 25)

Greenleaf saw a need for a change in the way leaders of education lead their organizations. Students in higher education during the 1960s began to become free thinkers, questioning authority and inquiring into the legitimacy of a government fighting an unjustifiable war in SE Asia. They used university campuses, focusing on campus ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) buildings to stage organized resistance and civil disobedience. Administrative leadership felt a need to shut things down. Sit-ins on campuses became increasingly more disruptive. Greenleaf saw the turmoil and watched “distinguished institutions show their fragility and crumble.” (p. 17)

Greenleaf created a rich model of Servant Leadership to facilitate changes in educational leadership. His work also made immense contributions to the cannons of the leadership academy as well. He saw that the principles and practices of servant leadership was a way for leaders in large and small institutions to find greater joy in making their institutions more serving of their constituents. I see that those called to education are called to a higher purpose of being of service to humanity. Perhaps, Greenleaf’s approach of Servant Leadership can help rekindle the effectiveness of educational leadership and increase the likelihood of success at attaining the highest purpose for participation in education: the liberation of humanity.

Quoting the artist Albert Camus, Greenleaf offers a ray of hope in his approach of servant leadership:

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation, others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundations of his own sufferings and joys, builds for them all. (p. 26)

Greenleaf made a good call for servant leaders that seemed exceedingly apt for the work of educators in this statement:

One is asked, then, to accept the human condition, its sufferings and its joys, and to work with its imperfections as the foundation upon which the individual will build wholeness through adventurous creative achievement. For the person with creative potential there is no wholeness except in using it. And as Camus explained, the going is rough and the respite is brief. (p. 26)

In the next post, we’ll explore Critical Pedagogy as a step to educational transformation.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Potential Solutions for the Recalcitrant Problems of Education–Part 7 in series

Let’s admit that there are no easy answers or quick fixes to the scenario posed at the beginning of this series. C. Otto Scharmer, in Theory U (2007) details the process of creating a transformational shift in a social system, through the recognition of 21 propositions about how social fields work. Although this is too much to explain in the context of this paper, his proposition #3 (p. 234-235) suggests that there are four sources of attention from which social action can emerge. Learning to direct our attention to perceive what is happening from each source and its relationship to the organizational boundary, allows us to gain access increasing levels of possibility for emergent change. Scharmer explains each source as follows:

1. I-in-me: acting from the center inside one’s organizational boundaries
2. I-in-it: acting from the periphery of one’s organizational boundaries
3. I-in-you: acting from beyond one’s organizational boundaries
4. I-in-now: acting from the emerging sphere across one’s open boundaries.

Because social systems are enacted by their members in context, shifting to more expansive contexts is essential in order to address the needs within the social system. Defining the organizational boundary for each member within the field of education, students might look at the organizational boundary as the classroom within the school, interacting mostly with the teacher. Teachers could look at the classroom and their department within the school, interacting first with students, then peers, and finally, administration. Administrators could see their school within the district, interacting with students somewhat, teachers mainly, other administrators and occasionally policy makers. Educational policy makers can look at the districts within the state, nation and international educational view, and hopefully make every stakeholder the people they interact with regularly.

With increasing levels of awareness on every stakeholders part, and increasing levels of interaction and discourse (wouldn’t it make sense to have students serve on steering committees within the Board of Education?), changes could begin to emerge more frequently across all educational contexts.

Many people have their ideas about how to proceed to make a difference. Stuart Ranson (2003) suggests that overcoming the raging political rifts about education, in order to produce change, can only happen through a proper engagement of the issues:

Trust and achievement can only emerge in a framework of public accountability that enables different accounts of public purpose and practice to be deliberated in a democratic public sphere: constituted to include difference, enable participation, voice and dissent, through to collective judgment and decision, that is in turn accountable to the public. (p. 476)

Michael Apple (2004, 2005) has suggested a series of essential long term targets including:

• an honest appraisal of the limits and possibilities of what has been done before
• develop a political project that is both local yet generalizable
• make projects systematic without making Eurocentric, masculinist claims to essential and universal truths about human subjects
• develop and make widely available defensible, articulate, and fully fleshed out alternative critical and progressive policies and practices in curriculum, teaching, and evaluation
• do the above with due recognition of the changing nature of the social field of power and the importance of thinking tactically and strategically.

Although there are many educational policy makers who believe there is a “right way” to educate children, (Apple, 2006) I’m not convinced that humanity has yet found the right way for everyone on the globe to teach and learn within a compulsory model of education. However, I believe that people can come together to transform how we support each other—children and adults—in effective, life-long learning, for the evolution of humanity and the creation of a world that works for everyone. As Buckminster Fuller said, during a speech of his I attended in 1981 at the University of Minnesota, “Humanity is in its final exam. But I am absolutely convinced we can make it. It will be touch and go, but we must recognize that we are here for each other. We are here for our minds.”

I recommend three important steps to help facilitate the emergent changes that can transform education:

1. Embrace servant leadership as a way of leading from behind and encouraging students to become the leaders of change.
2. Using Critical Pedagogy and multiculturalism approaches, help to create a space for the oppressed (our students), to work out what changes need to take place. Bring the focus of our discourse to global ethical principles and praxis.
3. Follow the recommendations for creating changes in our institutions of learning, following the six critical dimensions specified by Barr & Tagg, and use action inquiry (Torbert & Cook-Greuter, 2004) to move our educational institutions at all levels into learning organizations.

Imagine what education would be like if educators began seeing the student as already brilliant with gifts to share. What if we begin re-imagining schools as places of resources and readily available models where students could take charge of their own learning, creating the classroom as a place of critical discourse and resistance pedagogy? It may sound far-fetched today, but changes are occurring everywhere, and nowhere is change needed as much as in education. I’m not advocating for educational reforms, I’m advancing the call for educational transformation.

In the next posts, we dig more deeply into each of the three proposed steps.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Insidious Forces That Prevent Change–Part 6 in series

Beyond the many possible psychological and behavioral reasons for resisting change already cited, advocates of social democracy and critical pedagogy claim something far more insidious is afoot in our society. These are the hegemonic forces that President Eisenhower made famous in his 1961 speech referencing the dangerous abuses of the “military-industrial-academic complex.” In the speech, Eisenhower said,

…the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. (Eisenhower, 1961)

Henry Giroux, in his book The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007) explains how Eisenhower’s words can only begin to describe how far things have gotten out of hand. He expounds on the deeply disturbing effects of the hegemony at work in the US. In an interview with Chris Hedges (2009), Giroux explained that the assault on education by corporate and military contracts was only one part of the dynamic at play. The fear of being fired for raising critical issues in the classroom also plagued many teachers at Penn State where he worked. His colleagues, “disappeared into discourses that threatened no one…and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere.”

Echoing Giroux’s thoughts, Peter McLaren, professor at UCLA, in the course description to his course “Critical Pedagogy, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Resistance” wrote:

Gripped by a resurgent conservatism, US schools are facing a retreat from democracy and equality. With a growing consternation, the US public faces a wide range of national debates over the decline of academic standards, the steady demise of the academy, the splintering of teachers’ unions, and the erosion of morale within the teaching profession itself. Within this climate, we are witnessing an unprecedented challenge to the survival of the traditional liberal arts, as our corporate leaders continue to speak the language of technological reification, challenging schools to rank work habits over critical thinking (2009, p. 5-6).

How do behaviors of the culture in power operate to keep it in power? Philomena Essed in her book Understanding Everyday Racism (Essed, 1991), depicts the structure of how a culture in power perpetuates the centralization of power. In the figure shown below, we can substitute a few words to see how this could apply to compulsory education, schools, teachers, and the academic hierarchy. Change these words as you review the chart:

racism                   =          oppression in schools

Blacks                  =          students

Whites                  =          teachers/administrators/educational policy makers

Race purism         =          traditional, conservative values

Sexual pathology =          learning disability, ADHD, behavior problems

Fig. from Everyday Racism by P. Essed

Without a discourse of resistance, as Critical Pedagogy advocates suggest, students will continue to submit to the domination and oppression they receive in schools. Clearly, the academic hierarchy of administrators, educators, and teachers, perpetuate the current “culture in power” in order to maintain the status quo and keep their jobs. In addition, they are also strongly insular, keeping innovation down and the theory-in-use well anchored. This is what historian Page Smith describes as “academic fundamentalism,” or the refusal to acknowledge ideas that do not fit their own agenda (Smith, 1990).

John Tagg (2007), claims that most innovations in institutions of higher education, including the ones that definitively show good results, fail to transform institutions. This is because innovations usually alter action strategies without moving on to make the institution reexamine the governing values that kept outmoded practices in place. Tagg cites the work of Argyris and Schon (1978) to explain the built-in defensive routines that organizations use to prevent experiencing negative surprises, embarrassment, or threat. While those defense routines work, they also prevent the organization from reducing or eliminating the causes of those surprises and threats.

Given the number of ways that change can be resisted, and the insidious hegemonic issues at work in public education, what is the likelihood of re-inventing education with a learning paradigm where we give education over to the learner? Based on history, it would be highly unlikely. Henry Giroux calls to educators to make the change.

For these forces to be challenged by existing and future generations, higher education should provide the modes of critical education and pedagogy that expose students to a genuine intellectual culture, one that is equally pleasurable, stimulating, and empowering. (Hudson, 2007)

So where do we begin to facilitate that shift? Let’s explore a few options in the next post.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Uncovering the Hidden Reasons for Recalcitrance to Change–Part 5 in series

Michael W. Apple, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin is highly regarded as an important voice in progressive education. He says that we must not vilify the teachers. When he was a classroom teacher, he blamed himself for the failures of students, as do many teachers, in spite of the hard work they and curriculum workers put in. In his words,

Indeed, few groups of people work harder and in more uncertain, difficult, and complex circumstances than teachers and administrators. Rather, it became clearer that the institution itself and the connections it had to other powerful social agencies generated the dominant rules and practices of educators’ lives. Blaming teachers, castigating individuals, was less than helpful. (Rage & Hope Website, 1999)

The major battle ground for pedagogical philosophy is in public education. Americans seem quick to politicize any discourse on education. Take as example, when President Obama chose to address students on the first day of school in a televised motivational speech on September 8, 2009. Parents, pundits, educators, and our Republican Minnesota Governor had to weigh in on the appropriateness of asking schools to show the televised speech. The most heated battles seem to make exception for the exemplary private institutions built on unique philosophies of teaching and learning such as Montessori or Waldorf schools. The parochial schools and charter schools within state education get their share of concerned citizens raising issues because they tend to vie for some state funds that might otherwise be directed to public schools.

As the battles wage on, sides are taken. Staunch advocacy for education as a means of liberating humanity can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, Donaldo Macedo, Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux and others. We will look more closely at these works later in this paper. Others fight for more conservative, traditional values and skills.

In her book, The Future and its Enemies, Virginia Postrel (1998) reframes the commonly held dialectic between “right wing conservatism” and “left wing liberalism” by adding a different, less politicized distinction. She argues that there are two opposing world-views—“stasis” and “dynamism.” Those interested in stasis attempt to maintain the status quo for fear that the future is a dangerous and out of control set of forces. Unless we precisely govern the forces of change, we risk disaster.

Diane Ravitch is an example of those committed to stasis. Her book Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (2000) is a call for a more traditional, academically focused education. Her views, like the “back to the basics” movement of the 1980s, represent a trend that the Bush administration helped spread throughout the nation at large as well as in education (Sagg, 2009).

Postrel distinguishes the stasist view further:

Stasists claim fear as an ally: fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of comfortable routines thrown into confusion. They promise to make the world safe and predictable, if only we will trust them to design the future, if only they can impose their uniform plans. Those promises may be false, but they are also appealing. The open-ended future can be genuinely scary, the turmoil it creates genuinely painful. (p. 216)

On the other side of the dialectic are those in favor of dynamism. They believe that progress and human betterment depend not on conformity but on creativity and decentralized, open-ended trial and error. Dynamists fear stagnation, poverty, and pain. They believe stasist prescriptions stifle the very processes through which people improve their lives. Postrel explains,

…the dynamist promise is not of a particular, carefully outlined future. The future will be as grand, and as particular, as we are. We cannot build a single bridge from here to there, for neither here nor there is a single point. And there is no abyss to cross. (p. 218)

Michael W. Appel responded to Ravitch and others who believe that tightening control over curriculum, teaching and students will restore lost traditions, make education more disciplined and competitive, and give us effective schools in the journal Educational Policy (Apple, 2004):

Not only are these policies based on a romanticized pastoral past but these reforms also have not been notable for their grounding in research findings. Indeed, when research has been used, it has often either served as a rhetoric of justification for preconceived beliefs about the supposed efficacy of markets or regimes of tight accountability or they have been based…on quite flawed research. (p. 17)

I witnessed many enthusiastic teachers, eager to bring in a learning paradigm to their schools, being shot down by administrators and peers who were far more interested in controlling the status quo. To help them gain perspective, I explained that if you stand in a line with a hundred other people, and take one step forward, everyone else feels as though they are behind, and will actively work to pull you back. Stasists are actually acting in a very reasonable way. But as George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Shaw, 1903)

Even the Declaration of Independence expresses and understanding of resistance to change in the statement,

And, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Although the dynamics involved in resisting change are certainly too numerous to track down in the context of this paper, there may be good reason to assume it is a natural act of humans. Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, in their book Immunity to Change (2009) explain why resistance to change is normal. Operating within all of us are three forces: entropy, in which everything is winding down and becoming more random, negentropy, which is our attempt to put energy into a system to keep it from running down, and equilibrium, which is the attempt to hold everything stable. The function of equilibrium is to maintain the status quo at any cost. Because change naturally creates a sense of dis-equilibrium, we naturally attempt to avoid it and keep things the same.

In the next post, I describe more insidious forces at play to prevent change.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Working to Change the Paradigm–Part 4 in series

My work in the field of education began with learning-how-to-learn workshops for students in 1977. In a meeting with Dr. Alton Raygor, the director of the Study Skills Center for the University of Minnesota, he agreed that most students had not adequately learned how to learn by the time they reach the University, and are underprepared for the rigors of University studies. Using mind development strategies involving self-hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), I helped students in my off-campus seminars to improve study skills, reduce anxiety, and increase test taking abilities. After establishing my company Learning Strategies Corporation in 1981, I began working directly with educators when hired by the University of Minnesota to give a stress management in-service training program using NLP. At the time, education was still fairly confident in its ability to handle the challenges it faced. But in the coming decade, a catastrophic decline in the performance of education in the US began taking its toll on educator’s confidence and educational administration was taking the blame. The national “failure of education” became more widely publicized, and alternatives were highly sought after (Alden, 1996) (Kozol, 1991).

In the mid 1990s, I worked more directly to shift the educational paradigm, offering faculty development workshops to educators across the US, Mexico, and Europe. I developed the Accelements workshop (now published as Scheele, 1996) to work with administrators and faculty in K-12 institutions, state colleges and universities, the US Military, and regional governments in Mexico. I spent many years focusing my consulting work with two-year institutions of higher education (community and technical colleges). At one point the Accelements workshop earned my company the distinction of being the “preferred provider for accelerative learning faculty training” for the Colleges of the US Air Force.

Throughout the 1990s I also became a frequent keynote speaker at national and international educational conferences advocating a shift from the “instructional paradigm” to a “learning paradigm” and emphasizing new approaches to curriculum design, learning environment creation, and facilitation skills for teachers. Evaluations indicated significant results that included the renewal of teacher creativity and effectiveness, improved student participation and learning scores, and raised graduation rates. (Amborn, 2002)

In January of 1999, I spoke at The Learning Paradigm Conference, sponsored by Palomar Colleges, in San Diego, California. The conference had developed from the 1995 article Robert Barr and John Tagg had written while teaching at Palomar College. Speaking with John Tagg at the conference (nearly five years after the article was written), he said, disappointingly, that his own school had made little or no progress in moving toward a learning paradigm.

It was clear to me that a shift toward the learning paradigm would solve many of the problems that plagued education globally. But this shift represents more than incremental change in an institution’s practices. It is a system-wide change from the instructional paradigm and the organizational structures that support it. The learning paradigm places learning as the first priority in every policy, program, and practice in higher education. It literally overhauls the structures that sustain traditional education (Schuyler, 1997).

I had a wonderful opportunity to do a case study on helping change the educational paradigm of the University of Transformational Studies and Leadership at Agape, in Los Angeles, California. The process of accomplishing this was detailed in my paper for Antioch University (Scheele, 2008), and showed that it could be done in two to three years for a committed institution.

In working with a number of Wisconsin Technical Colleges, I saw that progress was slow for the few innovators that strove to bring about change, taking from four to ten years of haggling and political wrangling to bring in a faculty development workshop that offered learner-centered teaching methodologies. Once the programs occurred, the overhaul to the Learning Paradigm could be accomplished in departments within three years. The results were excellent and well received (Amborn, 2002). As for larger institutions, who knows? I never did see that happen, even though I worked with 16 schools in 9 districts within the Wisconsin Technical College System. As one dean of instruction told me at the Milwaukee Area Technical Colleges, “This institution is 150 years old. It is not likely that you or I will see this place change system-wide. We will support innovations (like Accelements) that take hold in a grassroots way, but don’t expect that the institution will change.”

John Tagg’s disappointment at Palomar College mirrored my own in seeing how slowly institutions adopted innovations in education. A partial explanation was offered in 2000, when I spoke at the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning Annual Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One of the other speakers, Dr. Paul C. Light from the Brookings Institute, described that there were numerous and tremendously effective innovations in education throughout the country (Light, 1998). However, most of them met with a catastrophic demise within 3 to 5 years after their inception. He pointed to two reasons for this. First, adequate measurements are usually not taken to demonstrate the efficacy of the innovations. Second, the innovations are generally carried on the shoulders of a lone champion or two who burn out for lack of support in sharing the load.

At the University of Minnesota, the world-famous brothers promoting cooperative learning David W. and Roger T. Johnson established the Cooperative Learning Center (http://www.co-operation.org/). Cooperative learning is an effective methodology to facilitate students working together to accomplish shared learning goals (Johnson et al, 2000). When I attended a workshop sponsored by them back in the mid-1990s, Dr. Roger Johnson mentioned that there were over 800 studies indicating that cooperative learning was more effective than traditional lecture format courses, but less than five percent of teachers use collaborative learning in their classrooms.

The big question remains. Why is education so slow to make a paradigm shift, in spite of the best efforts of visionary leaders throughout the world? It is not for lack of effective alternatives. It is also not for lack of urgency. In fact, looking to the future, education globally is becoming increasingly more strenuous. Professor Gajaraj Dhanarajan, President of The Commonwealth of Learning in Vancouver, citing research by the 1996 Human Development Index (Dhanarajan, 1996) stated:

While the poorer countries face the challenge of illiteracy, under education, under supply of education and quality of education, on the other end of the scale the challenges of the richer nations are equally daunting. Their major (educational) concerns are centered around unemployment of the young, under employment, the long-term unemployed, functional illiteracy, new migrants, isolated and marginalized communities and provisions for the chronologically old but mentally alert parts of their population.

Post modernist societies globally cannot settle for training a labor force that will only be capable of entering stable industrial or agricultural jobs. There is a growing need for a quality labor force of individuals who are innovative, and able to adapt to work in a technologically advancing global economy that is rapidly changing. This need puts additional strain on educational institutions that have not yet broken free into the learning paradigm. Strapped to outmoded and largely irrelevant methods of teaching to a new generation of students, schools struggle to maintain the attention of students, let alone their performance (Richman, 1995).

Dhanarajan described that the future will require a different approach to distributing education, stating:

More than any other continent, the nations of sub-Saharan Africa present the most glaring evidence of the gaps between those who are educationally well provided for and those who are not. In the 1996 Human Development Report, it was stated that roughly half the children who entered Grade 1 finished Grade 5 (a 50% wastage rate) and some 80 million boys and girls are still out of school; at the tertiary level in the well-off parts of Africa there are perhaps 2,100 university students per 100,000 head of population and in the worst-off less than 16. It is therefore inconceivable that neither local resources nor international assistance will be able to meet the demand for education using conventional delivery methods.

If the slowness to change the educational paradigm is not a result of urgent need, and not for a lack of innovative strategies, or visionary leaders to facilitate the changes, what are the forces involved?

I’ll explore this in the next post.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

Shifting to a Learning Paradigm–Part 3 in series

Writing in the field of undergraduate education, Alan Guskin in his article for the journal Change (1994), described a need to shift from teaching to learning. He poignantly focuses the issue for educators stating, “…the issue is not how many courses faculty teach, but how much students learn.” He described that the passive learning environments of lecture and discussion that so typically play out in college classrooms is mostly limited to faculty talking and students listening. Guskin says that such a format is “contrary to almost every principle of optimal settings for student learning.”

The next year in the same journal, a ground-breaking article by two Palomar College professors, Robert Barr and John Tagg was published titled, “From teaching to learning—a new paradigm for undergraduate education” (1995). They described how the dominant educational paradigm confuses the means with the ends. The means, called “instruction” or “teaching” becomes the end purpose of the institution, namely, to provide instruction. But that, Barr and Tagg say, “is like saying that General Motors’ business is to operate assembly lines or that the purpose of medical care is to fill hospital beds.” Rather, they explain that the true mission of an educational institution is to produce learning “with every student by whatever means work best.”

In their article, Barr & Tagg show that transitioning from an Instructional Paradigm to a Learning Paradigm requires a change in six salient dimensions. These include, mission and purposes, criteria for success, teaching/learning structures, learning theory, productivity and funding, and nature of roles.

Given the chasm between paradigms, what will help make the transition from teaching to learning? Is this merely a leadership problem? Is it a faculty problem? Is it a bigger social problem?

Let’s go back to the opening scenario. The norms of traditional education naturally go unquestioned by most people. By its design, compulsory education instills unquestioning obedience. In order for practicing teachers to have survived and thrived under an oppressive and dehumanizing paradigm of instruction, they would have had to absorb those models into their own unconscious behavior. Once they were the instructed ones, and now they are the instructors—once they were the oppressed, and now they have become the oppressors.

Without our knowing it, our social system absorbs us, and in the process, dehumanizes our very nature as gifted learners. As part of our absorption, we learned to accept segregation by age, class, and gender. We were forced to sit up straight, pay attention, give up our natural tendencies and stop learning by exploring our natural world, and begin learning through instruction. Gradually, we accepted that the experience of the learner was to be subordinate to the oppression of instruction.

Today, instruction and teaching have become so inextricably fused in our unconscious mental models, that we are blinded to the true purpose of teaching and learning: the liberation of humanity to attain its highest evolutionary potential. If the emancipation of people from oppression is a goal of education, how can a culture that is focused on subordination of its citizenry to the authority of the culture in power possibly accomplish this? Having been thoroughly “cultured” themselves, teachers are mostly numbed to the dehumanization that occurs in a culture of instruction every day in their classrooms. Their instructing is, in fact, largely designed to carry on the enculturation of the next generation.

If we fail to learn, would it ever occur to our teacher to say, “I am so sorry that in this school year I have been unable to reach you, to figure out how to help you learn this subject I teach. I must be teaching disabled, and I wonder if you would be willing to work with me so that I can improve my teaching skills, and so that you could gain the benefit of learning this subject?” Not likely! But why? What has our teacher so blind and us so obedient, that the mention of such an idea creates an immediate burst of laughter from people when they hear it? Is it an outrageous proposal or merely as Paulo Friere suggested in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), an “untested feasibility.”

Personally, I am interested in forwarding “untested feasibilities” to ensure that education stands squarely on a moral and ethical imperative of service to humanity: for the liberation of individuals, the evolution of the human mind, and the perpetuation of one human family in a world that works for everyone.

In the next post, I’ll explore the work that’s been done to shift the paradigm.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

A Brief History on the Instructional Paradigm — Part 2 in series

The prevailing paradigm in public education is compulsory instruction through age 16. It appears that American societal elites, the commanders of industry, and the protestant church all play into the origins of the American public school system in the mid-1800s.

Prussian education had done a spectacular job at converting a largely agrarian culture into one of the most successful militaristic nations in the world. After their defeat by Napoleon in 1806, the Prussians dramatically changed their approach to education. The result was the stunning defeat of the French in 1815 (Holder & Murray, 1998). Other European nations began adopting their own versions of the Prussian model of compulsory education. German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a key influence on their education said, “The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.” (Wikipedia, 2009)

Corresponding with Dr. Edward Sass, Professor of Education at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University (2009), I requested further information on the historical connection of the American educational system to the Prussian model. A number of references indicated a very strong connection. Interestingly, Horace Mann was cited as being one of the key figures in the process of adopting the model for American public education.

When French philosopher Victor Cousins published his Report on the State of Public Education in Prussia in 1833, American educators Calvin E. Stowe, Henry Barnard, Horace Mann, George Bancroft and Joseph Cogswell all developed a vigorous interest in German education. In 1843 Mann, the first Secretary of Education for the State of Massachusetts, traveled to Germany, including Prussia, and investigated how their educational process worked. Returning to the US, he and other educators lobbied strongly to have the Prussian model adopted.

In 1852, Mann collaborated with Massachusetts Governor Edward Everett (America’s first PhD, earned in a Prussian University) to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Shortly after, the Governor of New York set up the same method in twelve different New York schools on a trial basis. The model was mandated and adopted through governmental decree.

Imbedded deeply within the model is the need for obedience and strict instruction. According to Sheldon Richman (Richman & Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995)

The aim of the public schools at the macro, or social, level was the creation of a homogeneous, national, Protestant culture: the Americanization and Protestantization of the disparate groups that made up the United States. At the micro, or individual, level the aim was the creation of the Good Citizen, someone who trusted and deferred to government in all areas it claimed as its own. Obviously, the two levels are linked, because a certain culture cannot be brought about without remaking the individuals who comprise it. (p. 39)

John Taylor Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), explained that three major ideas were imported from Prussia. First, that state schooling was for the conditioning of children “to obedience, subordination, and collective life” and not for intellectual training. Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented subjects and school days divided into fixed periods “so that the self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.” And third, the state was “posited as the true parent of children.”

With such historical underpinnings to public education, it isn’t surprising for education to feel like an oppressor and for a child to feel like the oppressed (Freire, 2000).

Next up…Shifting the Paradigm

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com

A Scenario of Classroom Education Today–Part 1 in Series

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.

—Horace Mann

A culture of domination demands of all its citizens self-negation. The more marginalized, the more intense the demand.

—bell hooks

A Scenario to Consider

Imagine we are in the fifth grade and we enter our new classroom. Our teacher has been teaching students just like us for the last ten years. He believes he knows a lot about how we are supposed to learn from his instruction. In his classroom, he is in control. Vested in him is the power to order and prescribe our behavior. Our teacher represents part of a vast unconscious dynamic of hegemony playing through the academic hierarchy which in turn serves as an instrument for the culture in power within our society. (Giroux, 1981) In this classroom setting, within this school where he teaches, our teacher is the authority of what is normal and what is not—what is good learning and what is good teaching. He determines what the “norms” look like and sound like. We must sit down, be quiet, pay attention, do our homework, and get good grades.

Of course, we must accept the domination of this oppressive “schooling” that comes our way. We learned the rules of appropriate conduct at school by the second grade and figured out that it wasn’t going to get any better than this for the next 10 years until we graduate from High School. We have accepted our roles, because if we do not tacitly accept what is given, our resistance is treated as a behavioral problem that will be swiftly and systematically dealt with through increasingly severe interventions. Ultimately, as the Borg culture said in the Star Trek series of the 1990s, “Resistance is futile. Assimilation is inevitable.” The communication of assimilation is mediated through a number of forms including textbooks, assumptions that guide teacher behaviors, meanings we must take on in order to get passing grades, through the content of subjects we study, and through the manner in which they are delivered. (Giroux, 1981) (Hudson, 1999)

If we fail to learn the subjects our teacher instructs, he would be justified in accusing us of being at fault. Depending on the severity of our failure to learn, he could easily defend that we should be given the label, “learning disabled”. If we cannot sit still or pay attention, he could be instrumental in putting us on pharmacological therapies intended to make us more tractable in his classroom—justifying that it is “for your own good.” Even though there is tremendous controversy about the practice of prescribing Ritalin, the frequency has been increasing steadily (Breggin, 2001). A special-education teacher in McCall, Idaho, described to me the dynamic of the parent-teacher-student relationship after attention deficit hyper activity disorder is suggested. She said that parents are often pleased to comply with a recommendation to put a child on Ritalin, because parents do not like the “difference” label placed on their child, nor dealing with the unique difficulties of raising a child with such a “condition.” The diagnosis of ADHD at least gives them an outlet for dealing with their frustration (Armstrong, 1995). At the time I spoke to this teacher, Idaho was the highest per capita prescriber of Ritalin, yet she admitted she saw no net positive gain in her students over the twenty years she served in her position.

Our fifth grade teacher in the scenario was probably idealistic at one time, and felt that teaching was a noble profession, with a high value to society, caring for the future stewards of the human race inheriting our society and planet. Now, burn-out has taken its toll. What he has encountered in the last decade includes: bigger schools, chronic underfunding, an increasingly diverse multicultural student population weighted heavily toward working-class students of color with marginal English skills, work overload, school violence, professional isolation, and the continuous de-skilling and de-valuing of the teaching profession. In the mid 1990s, the average career of a teacher was about five years. (Hudson, 1999)

Still, the pressure is on. We have to provide education that works. It makes sense to look at how we got ourselves into this mess. I’ll get into that in the next post.

Paul R. Scheele

www.ReclaimYourGenius.com