Reframing Education for the Long Now (Part IV):

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Andrea Saveri

Reflections on Cultivating a Long Now Mindset in Education

Insights about how Pace Layers contribute to a long now mindset in education

This article is Part Four of a four-part series, Reframing Education for the Long Now, based on insights from the Long Now Educators Workshop on August 1, 02017, hosted by the Long Now Foundation and KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

This series explored how as a society we might develop a long now mindset to examine and reframe education challenges. The culminating discussion of the Long Now Educator Workshop provided a time for participants to reflect on their insights about the benefits of using the pace layers and long-term thinking in education.

One theme throughout the conversation is the uncertainty about the purpose of a compulsory public education system. Public education lives in the slow layers of governance and culture, resulting in fragmentation of approaches and interventions. Promoting diversification of education reform strategies can be useful for system-wide learning as well as for identifying effective innovations. However, the lack of shared cultural guideposts to steer change is causing resistance, politics, and other obstacles to consume attention and prevent real transformation. It is also enabling the commerce layer to have undue influence over education reform. (as described earlier).

Jason Swanson, KnowledgeWorks Foundation

At first, this dynamic may seem deeply troubling. But the pace layer framework places this complex interaction in a longer timeframe. What might appear in the short view to be ossification of the public education system is in the long view really just temporary stasis. The current dynamic of education reform will shift when new pathways to change are built and are connected across the pace layers. The long now mindset cultivates the connection of the long term with the present moment to guide change. As mentioned in earlier posts, aligning expectations for change to the distinct pace of each layer might encourage more patience when change doesn’t happen quickly in the short term. It also helps to focus actions on achieving long term goals. As Stewart Brand suggests, we need to appreciate and engage the “many-leveled corrective” capability of the pace layers to stabilize negative feedback in the system.

Megan Simmons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management

Benefits of Pace Layer Thinking

The workshop participants reflected about the ways that the pace layers might contribute to their thinking about systemic transformation in education. They identified several specific benefits:

Supports systemic narratives. The pace layers encourage big storytelling across many layers and time periods that has the potential to reveal deeply embedded cultural values and their manifestation across societal dynamics. This creates the potential to shift cultural values that may no longer serve broader educational goals for society.

Encourages perspective taking across the system. A pace layer lens exposes motivations and intentions of diverse stakeholders and their deep histories. This opens up the possibility to build empathy for stakeholders and hope for the future. It also sets up education leaders, designers, decision-makers, policy-makers, and philanthropists to look for connections and opportunities to coordinate strategies for maximum impact.

Frames complexity. Big systemic narratives can help illustrate multiple cause and effect relationships of actions across the pace layers and how they connect to stakeholder intentions. Pace layer-driven narratives and analysis helps make complexity concrete. They help education decision-makers hold a complex picture of change in their minds and make sense of the apparent messiness of the system.

Clarifies expectations of outcomes. A pace layer framework for analysis can help set reasonable expectations about the scope and time frame for outcomes. Pace layers can become a shared language to form questions and discuss projects, outcomes, and partnerships. Example questions include: What layer is the focus of your program/project? What outcome can we reasonably expect from this layer? What if we focused on a different layer?

Re-contextualizes failure. Building on outcome clarification, pace layers have the potential to reframe failure and provide a richer language to discuss negative outcomes. What might have been considered a failure may just be a focus on the wrong pace layer or metric.

Diversifies innovation and problem-solving. The pace layers provide six domains of activity to explore solutions and interventions for transforming education. This allows for additional perspectives and prompts for brainstorming and prototyping new ideas.

Mark Kushner, education strategist and innovator

Now Lengtheners

To wrap up the workshop, participants playfully brainstormed and prototyped actions that might lengthen the now in education. Specifically, they considered the kinds of aspirational images, projects, or activities would shift the mindset in education to a longer term societal context.

Some compelling examples include:

The long view of human learning. What if we showed human learning in the context of the learning of the species? How would this expansive time frame influence system priorities outcomes?

Big data perspectives. What if we used big data to develop scale models and maps that let individuals put their experience into this bigger, longer perspective?

Learning legacies. What if we based our designs of education keeping mind the education needs and aspirations of our grandchildren’s children? What could be our individual and societal learning legacies to future generations?

Global/generational challenges. What if we trained students to solve intergenerational problems with intergenerational solutions? Many of our most complex challenges require strategies that endure centuries. Some examples include: interstellar space travel which requires generations to complete a mission; preserving the redwoods which requires an institution and people who understand the problem to span generations.

Values shift immersive game. What if we could immerse people in future scenarios that are guided by different societal values to show long term impacts? The experience might help reveal long term benefits and consequences to education of specific decisions, actions, and inaction.

Conclusion

Nasif Iskander, San Francisco University High School

Fundamentally, the pace layer framework is a thinking tool of hope and possibility. By expanding perspective to the breadth of civilization and timeframe to include centuries, pathways for positive change become more abundant and visible. One participant summed it up well.

“Each of these layers, while they have their own pace, each have their own values and motivations. And in all our conversations about school we tend to focus on what effectively is one layer and one set of values, and wish the others didn’t exist. The realization that all of this is at work all the time, and all this is necessary, and that this is a part of a functional system of the evolution of civilization is actually quite liberating. And I start to think of these different paces and different motives and values as opportunities rather than obstacles.” — Nasif Iskander

Cake, Stories, and Imagination: Big Ideas Fest 2015

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Andrea Saveri

While the real-time adrenalin and excitement of ISKME’s Big Ideas Fest 2015 have subsided, I wanted to share some personal take-aways about how to inspire collaboration to activate change in education.

First, is that listening to feedback and being open to surprises can result in new learnings for everyones. Big Ideas Fest 2015 was ISKME’s seventh engagement with educators with the purpose of fostering collaborative, problem-solving and transformation in education through action-oriented design sessions and thoughtfully curated, rapid fire speaking panels.

The format of Big Ideas Fest has changed over the years to give participants the best possible experience in learning from education change-makers about their innovation journeys, and helping BIFniks develop a mindset and practical approach to become an active change-maker in their own areas of influence. We pay a lot of attention to participant feedback (yes, we really do read those BIFnik surveys!) and continue to iterate on the format and process so that participants feel supported and are able to take risks, leave their comfort zone, and feel okay about not knowing where their efforts may lead them.

Big Ideas Fest is intended to be a collaborative experience, with speakers and guests participating in Action Collab design sessions and participants taking ownership of their group work. And sometimes they take over the agenda, like our student BIFniks did this year in the closing session when they wanted to share their culture with the rest of the participants. They intercepted the A/V team at the Dolce Hayes Mansion and proceeded to immerse and teach us their music and dances, for a final impromptu extravaganza that had everyone up on their feet with huge smiles on their faces!

Second, we need to embrace the power of story to re-focus and re-energize a group. This showed up several times at Big Ideas Fest 2015 and in different ways. Each time it brought us to new depths of understanding and insight, preparing us to imagine and explore more. Our opening panel of storytellers kicked off our first design challenge: How might we create educational opportunities to disrupt the school to prison pipeline? Tyson Amir-Mustafa from Five Keys Charter School (who teaches at the San Francisco County Jail) spoke about his work with young men and women in prison classrooms. Ashanti Branch, Founder of the Ever Forward Club, talked about his work with middle schoolers and their need for safe spaces to identify and share their emotions in order to develop greater emotional resilience. Both sharing their personal experiences of growing up as black men in America. Shanley Rhodes, Deputy Director of the Southern Region of Five Keys Charter, described her early years as a teacher in a violent and dysfunctional school and its personal impact on her as a teacher. BIFniks listened actively and openly to capture what they heard without interpreting or rushing to rationalize and solve.

The ballroom was thick with energy and emotion. We were all brought to a new place—a new perspective on a dimension of the education system that often is not the focus of “future of education” gatherings. Our expectation was not necessarily to solve this challenge in 6 hours, but to bring BIFniks to a new place in their thinking about this critical issue—to show them the complexity and tensions from authentic, personal voices, and to feel confident that there are practical solutions that can improve lives if we allow ourselves to see the challenge with new eyes.

As one BIFnik eloquently describes in her post, “listening deeply, I heard a common thread—a desire from the young people in these stories to be truly heard, known, and understood. It harkened back to the notion that it is really all about building authentic relationships and hearing someone for who they are and not who we assume them to be.” And in fact, several provocative solution ideas emerged from such insights: Mind the Gap is a board game that reveals the perspectives of different stakeholders to find common ground and connection on specific challenges; Invite to Insight is a set of invitation cards that students can use to invite a teacher to lunch for free and just talk; and BEASE is a program to overcome parent resistance to change at school by having parents “become a student” and “become a teacher” to learn the benefits of change in the classroom.

Kicking off Big Ideas Fest 2015 Action Collab work with powerful storytelling gave BIFniks permission to tell their own stories, and most of all, to create a space to listen deeply and openly to each other.

This is precisely why we use storytelling, among other techniques, as a part of ISKME’s Action Collab process. ISKME developed Action Collabs as a collaborative platform for educators problem solve creatively as peers and gain the insights and perspectives from each other’s distinctive perspectives and imaginations. By equipping teachers, principals, administrators, students, parents, and other education decision-makers with such skills, tangible change in education may become human-centered and emerge from the bottom up.

Finally, dessert helps! That BIFniks sampled a delectable assortment of cheesecakes, chocolate mousse, passion fruit cake and other sweet treats made no small contribution to the positive and open climate throughout Big Ideas Fest.

ISKME will be holding Action Collab trainings in March (28-29) and August (1-2) so that educators can develop and practice their collaborative problem solving skills and catalyze transformation in their own organizations. For more information on Action Collab trainings click here.

Originally posted on January 26, 2016 at http://www.iskme.org/our-ideas/cake-stories-and-imagination

Unleashing Innovation in Teachers

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Andrea Saveri

“In the future I am going to do something that scares me more often.”
Big Ideas Fest 2014 Participant

Reflections like the one above are what keep me coming back every year as a designer and facilitator of ISKME’s Big Ideas Fest — an annual immersion in collaboration and design for educators around the world looking to make meaningful change in teaching and learning.

As someone who works behind the scenes, as well as in the midst of the action, I am always thrilled to see the diverse collection of educators arrive with enthusiasm, some with a degree of healthy skepticism, and leave Big Ideas Fest as experienced BIFniks— open, collaborative, and hopeful education change makers, equipped with new tools and concepts, and inspired to put them into practice in their own learning environments.

The Action Collab—ISKME’s design thinking process— frames the Big Ideas Fest experience as it gives BIFniks a chance to immerse themselves in an innovation and collaboration experience in order to learn it and apply it to real world education challenges. It provides a common language for the way we interact, pose questions, and look ahead to post BIF engagements.

We asked BIFiks to reflect on their Big Ideas Fest experience at its conclusion to learn about the impact of the BIF and Action Collabs on their work. Three important outcomes, listed below, emerged from their comments about their Action Collab experience.

It demystifies and democratizes innovation by breaking it down into practical activities
BIFniks leave with a grounded experience in creative problem-solving and with an understanding of how to set themselves up for innovating at home. They learn to become open collaborators less concerned about perfection and more focused on generating possibilities to explore.

Today I learned:
“How to move forward from a juicy question to a specific innovative solution.”
“Letting go of my own outcome leads to new discoveries.”
“The design process is messy but generative.”

It instills fearlessness and confidence in their own abilities as creative problem-solvers
They learn how to trust their own creative instinct and gain an appreciation for the uncertainty and surprise factor that accompanies true innovation.

My biggest take-away is:
“There’s something productive behind frustration!”
“You can’t predict where an idea will go.”
“I can’t be wrong, my ideas matter.”

It gives them skills and practices to act on right away
BIFniks walk away with clear, practical tools for collaborating and unlocking creativity in themselves and their colleagues.

In the future I’m going to:
“Live ‘Yes, And’ more often.”
“Resist suppressing my creativity.”
“Listen in order to receive”
“Use student collaboration right away in my own work.”

I’m looking forward to our upcoming Facilitator Training for Action Collabs on April 27-28, 2015 in San Francisco. If you want to learn how to facilitate an Action Collab process in your own organization, ISKME is offering a 2-day immersive training where you will learn the Action Collab process and its rationale, by participating in an Action Collab, and learning how to set up Action Collab modules for your own groups. Check out the following announcement for more details, and email andrea@iskme.org if you have additional questions.

Notes on Conversations of Education Transformation: Frames Shaping the Stories and Solutions

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Andrea Saveri

As I participate in discussions about the future of education, I listen for how the conversations get framed. Underlying most discussions about innovation and transformation in education are assumptions that tend to set the boundaries of discussions. Sometimes these frames are overt, sometimes hidden, but in any case they influence the kinds of questions that get asked and shape the solution space. They highlight some players over others and may orient towards particular solutions. Ultimately they shape how we view opportunity and visions of what is possible.

Here are three frames that I have noticed. I’m sure there are others out there too. When I sense that we are moving into one of these frames, I draw it out so that we can be explicit, work the frame to deepen our conversation, then move to another frame.

The performance frame is typically technology driven. It frames discussions by focusing on innovations that drive what teaching and learning could look like. (Time on the x-axis and performance on the y-axis.) These conversations tend to focus on what is possible from innovative ideas and new technologies. Questions focus on how emerging technology clusters and new conceptual paradigms enable improved system functionality and value. The key here is how performance is measured. It could be increased access (as with MOOCs) or greater affordability and relevance (as with competency-based education programs). Over time, as incremental gains decline and are exhausted a new set of technologies comes along and boosts performance to a new level. The benefit of this frame is that it can serve as a springboard for imagining new constellations of innovations that collectively could increase the performance of the system. It also focuses on highlighting definitions, measures, and values for system performance.

The adoption frame originates from Everett Rogers’ early work on the diffusion of innovation and recently is described as the “two curve” challenge, in Ian Morrison’s book, The Second Curve. (Time is on the x-axis and penetration rate is on the y-axis.) This frame is more human, and organization centered. It focuses on the threats and opportunities of innovations to specific users and stakeholders. It helps orient conversations around what might enable or inhibit adoption of innovations. For example, who doesn’t want to move to the new curve and what economic or political drivers may be the reason? Are there other barriers in the market or within an organization? This frame also is a good way to discuss what kinds of risks emerge, and when, from remaining on the existing curve too long or leaving it too early.

The concept of the adaptive cycle is at the root of the ecosystem frame. This lens on change in education helps us look at the breakdown and disruption of the traditional education system as part of an adaptive process to a newer system that is better aligned to its context and conditions. After a mature forest experiences breakdown and loss from fire, it re-generates itself by opening itself to unknown possibilities from potentially new species and relationships among plants, insects, wildlife, and nutrient flows. Productive relationships thrive and over time the ecosystem rebuilds itself in response to its new conditions.

The ecosystem frame is particularly useful for orienting education system discussions around new opportunities, potential value, and relationships. The frame highlights the generative dynamic of relationships and novel responses to threats and disruptions. Rather than resist disruptions (such as new technologies and innovative organizational models) or fall back on existing (ineffective) responses, the ecosystem frame points out adaptive responses by examining opportunities created by the release of resources, re-organization of relationships, and exploitation (leverage) of new niches in the ecosystem.

We’re currently in the early period of exploitation in which novel combinations of players are testing the ground and seeing what kind of sustainable value they can create. Content and curriculum development is proliferating among open educational resource spaces that support new combinations of teachers, experts, and learning agents like librarians. New ideas like blended learning and competency-based assessment are attracting experimentation and pilots. The most damaging action to the education ecosystem now would be to stifle experimentation (the exploitation of opportunities presented by new ideas, technologies, and players) and the learning obtained from successful and failed initiatives.

The adaptive cycle is nature’s learning process that supports its resilience over time. For this reason, the ecosystem frame is a useful one for challenging the rhetoric around experimentation and failure (as in “don’t experiment with my children”) and creating a more productive conversation focused on learning and system improvement.

See my earlier post for a detailed explanation of the adaptive cycle.

Benefits of an Ecosystem Frame for Understanding the Future of Education

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Andrea Saveri

Using the adaptive cycle to imagine sustainable transformation of teaching and learning systems

The word ecosystem is used a lot in education today to talk about new ways of organizing teaching and learning. Often the term is used to refer to more network-styled relationships (rather than hierarchy) among a diversity of players and roles (rather than a single bureaucratic system) using various modes of organizing learning experiences (rather than one-size fits all approaches).

The concept of the adaptive cycle is at the root of an ecosystem frame and worth exploring to understand more deeply the possibilities for transformation in education. The ecosystem lens on change in education helps us examine disruption and breakdown of the traditional education system as part of an adaptive process to a newer system that is better aligned to its context and conditions.

Source: Saveri Consulting, derived from Hollings, Radford, Weeks, Rodriguez, and Blakeslee.

Mature, tightly connected ecosystems can become rigid as they accumulate resources in their conservation phase. And while they may be efficient in their exchange of resources, they are inflexible and susceptible to breakdown when confronted by threats and disruptions, such as fires, invasive pests, drought, and pollution. These shocks drive a release of energy and nutrients as trees and plants burn, wildlife scatters, soil erodes (or floods), and resources become disconnected from their traditional relationships. Release leads to re-organization as gaps in the ecosystem invite new species and resources. Loss of low growing, dense plants may allow more circulation and sunshine to penetrate a forest and sets the stage for new plant species. New plants species may attract new kinds of wildlife—perhaps new insects and other creatures that create new relationships and resource connections. Re-organization of existing ecosystem inhabitants and new entrants enables a period of exploitation—a time of rapid experimentation by ecosystem inhabitants to learn what relationships are most productive and sustainable. Some new species fare better than others. Some may get crowded out by invasive species (weeds) while others may benefit from the stabilizing effects they have on the soil. As successful combinations form, they grow and accumulate more resources and reach and begin to define the transformation of the ecosystem over time. (see this for a detailed explanation of the adaptive cycle).

Shocks to the traditional bureaucratic education system in the past few decades include disruptive technologies, increasingly diverse learning populations, new workforce requirements, soaring costs, and economic crisis (declining budgets).

Traditional responses from existing players seem to have only driven greater breakdown and release in the system, as student and new teacher dropout rates have increased, schools apply for charter waivers and reduce connection to the public system, and neighborhood schools close. This may not be a bad thing as breakdown and release have created openings for new ideas and players. Ed tech innovators have entered the teaching and learning ecosystem, as have community organizations such as libraries and museums. Venture capital firms, crowdsourced funding platforms, and employers are playing new roles as funders and partners. New individuals are finding their way into the teaching and learning field as professionals or para-professionals in new kinds of spaces of learning like media labs, techshops, maker centers, and learning hives. New school models are attracting new providers.

We’re currently in the early period of exploitation in which novel combinations of players are testing the ground and seeing what kind of sustainable value they can create. Content and curriculum development is proliferating among open educational resource spaces that support new combinations of teachers, experts, and learning agents like librarians. Foundations are seeding more cross-boundary partnerships and novel pilot projects. New ideas like blended learning and competency-based assessment are attracting experimentation and pilots. And schools themselves are beginning to open to more experimentation among its faculty and staff. The most damaging action to the education ecosystem now would be to stifle experimentation (the exploitation of opportunities presented by new ideas, technologies, and players) and the learning obtained from successful and failed initiatives.

Making the Future of Education Actionable Today

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Andrea Saveri

One of the challenges of foresight work is to make new insights about the future relevant to our own situations and actionable in meaningful ways. Foresight needs to be matched with processes that help leaders move past “This is interesting, but what does it have to do with my organization?” towards something more like “This reframes our professional development needs (or choices for strategic partners, etc.) and here are 3 things I can do now!”

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation recently released a new toolkit that is intended to help education stakeholders do just this. Creating a New World of Learning: A Toolkit for Change Makers is an action planning guide that helps leaders design and facilitate customized learning experiences that help them think long in order to take action now. The toolkit supports the forecast content that KWF have been developing and sharing for the past several years, such as their 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning and Learning Agents of 2025.

I worked with KWF to develop the toolkit and one of my goals was to make sure that education stakeholders had an opportunity to engage creatively and play with ideas about the future of education. Rather than look for proven answers, it seemed important to create opportunities for leaders and groups to ask “What if?” and explore possibilities, even if they seem a little crazy or silly. With this in mind we broke out the activities into four sections:Imagine, Learn, Apply, and Prioritize.

Imagine and Learn sections focus on expanding the visions of what is possible in the future of education and developing a shared language and set of concepts to talk about future possibilities. The Apply and Prioritize sections focus on applying new concepts and possibilities to a group’s organization and identifying opportunities for action.

The toolkit works a bit like a Chinese menu. Each section has multiple activities that facilitators can pick from to structure their learning experience. The document is web-enabled so viewers can jump around and check out each section, the resources in the back, end even sample agendas.

There is also a rich set of audio, video, and text based resources to support activities. There are audio and video clip stories in which future learners and learning agents describe their teaching and learning experiences. There are text-based scenarios about future learning systems that describe how stakeholders might interact and how resource might be allocated. And education artifacts from the future provide an opportunity for practicing a bit of future focused archeology. Participants can explore new ideas through hands on activities such as card games, prototyping, storytelling, and news headline generation. And ultimately, there are opportunities for participants to use their new insights to identify new goals and actions for change.

Since the activities are modular, sessions can be flexibly planned to last 2 hours or as longer half or full day sessions. The hope is that this toolkit brings some fun and safe risk taking, and thoughtful play to the education transformation process.

The Future of Public Service Media

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Andrea Saveri

The European Broadcast Union held its annual Eurovision TV Summit in May 2011 at the gorgeous KKL Luzern Culture and Convention Centre in Lucerne, Switzerland. (Photos don’t do it justice!)

KKL Luzern Culture and Convention Centre

View opposite the KKL convention centre across Lake Lucerne

I was delighted to participate in this year’s program as a speaker in their Common Focus day (a mini TedX-like conference held on the 3^rd day of the Summit. The theme for Common Focus was the future of public service broadcasting—something I have been doing research on as a part of my work in education and youth, digital media, and civic engagement. As the EBU described it: “This year the Common Focus Day will have a revamped format and will focus on the future of public service broadcasting, delving into how to engage and entertain new generations in an immersive way.”

I followed 14 year- old Adora Svitak, poet, student, and teacher – who provided the living proof to broadcasters that young people really do inhabit a vibrant digital media ecology and that television has to learn how to find its niche in this world if they want to be relevant in the lives of young people now and in the future.

My task was to talk about youth (the “new” generation)—in the bigger context of digital media and public service. I focused on how young people are experimenting with new forms of active citizenship and social engagement with digital media. I shared some stories about the Harry Potter Alliance and the Prospect Sierra School student Carrot Mobs as examples of young people learning how to push their own boundaries, find the extent of their civic powers, and participate in social transformation using social, digital media. If the European public broadcasters truly want to be public service broadcasters, they need to help young people redefine public service and civic engagement through digital media. The broadcasters need to stop “paving the cow paths” by repurposing broadcast content for the web or add a web-based voting component to their programming and really embrace the digital media ecology and enable young people to create new kinds of publics, citizenship, and new forms of civic action. If public broadcasters do this, they will be a critical part of the future civic infrastructure.

The organizer of the event, the dynamic Nicoletta Iacobacci, and I discussed the profound role that public broadcasters could have in defining what “socially responsible media” could be and how it could drive more widespread social change. Nicoletta is organizing a TedX conference in Rome around the links between socially responsible media and transmedia. It is going to be fantastic so check it out.

Here is a link to all the EBU Eurovision Summit 2011 common focus speaker presentations.

Some highlights for me:

Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, CEO of Layar showed several applications of mobile augmented reality and explained how the opening up of new “layers” of reality is creating a new digital and interactive frontier.

Rob McIntosh provided a really nice framework for thinking about the ecology of screens: small (smart phone), medium (tablet), large (PC), extra large (HDTV). He described how broadcasters need to think about how their content moves across this ecology and how the experience of socialness changes, or can change. He raised some good questions about what high immersion or high interaction can look like and what it can mean for an individual’s or group’s experience.

Ian Ginn (Hubbub Media/Transmedia Learning Network) reminded us that storytelling has always been immersive. The new thing is that the boundaries and scope of the story world has exploded. Broadcasters need to understand how they can help people become storytellers in communities online and how they can support the development and evolution of stories across media platforms in meaningful ways.

Orvar Safstrom (Videogame journalist and writer) did a nice wrap up for broadcasters. He started with a comparison to the trench warfare of World War I as an example of technology and innovation outpacing strategy– perhaps a shock to the broadcasters but an apt analogy. A nice statement of his that stuck with me was “let your users take content into their hearts and out into their lives.”

From Pedagogy to Sociogogy

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Andrea Saveri

I recently watched the video of the Independent Project and caught some of the commentary like this and this from the NYT .

I don’t know the back story of the project, but I have to say it made me very excited to see a collaborative and supportive model of learning in action. It boiled down to responsibility and trust for me.

The discussion of the Independent Project’s significance brings me to the term pedagogy and how we have built a system of learning around a very old concept of learning that hasn’t changed much since the Greeks. A few years ago my colleague Matt Chwierut and I forecast the need to develop social learning platforms and practices that enable “sociogogy” – leading one another. (The forecast was for KnowledgeWorks Foundation).

The term pedagogy comes from the ancient Greek practice of assigning a slave—literally a leader (agagos in Greek) of children—to escort boys to school and generally supervise them as they prepared for life in Greek society. This paternal teacher-student relationship, of an adult leading a child through a course of study has persisted in basic form since then. The diffusion of Internet connectivity, mobile devices, and participatory media is disrupting this long tradition. The connected, open, and social media context is creating a new context for cultivating relationships among learners and teachers. Like the Internet itself, the structure of learning relationships is flattening, becoming more peer-based and networked than hierarchical, expert dependent, and “command and control” driven. Educator-learner relationships are becoming
more co-creative and self-initiated by individual learners. Many have referred to this learning relationship shift as a move from the “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” but in fact the transformation is more fundamental. Indeed the experimentation with networked, co-creative, peer-based relationships among learners suggests a shift from “pedagogy” to “sociogogy”—in which teachers and students are learning “companions” (from the Latin “socius”) leading one
another.

In the video, the principal remarks how the students moved themselves through learning experiences vs being on a conveyor belt of lessons. I hope the video sparks new ideas, pilots, and more research so that we can move toward a more sociogogical (ugh, combersome word) system of learning.

Leicester Experiments with Amplification

Posted on May 4, 2010 by Andrea Saveri

It is always gratifying to see ideas put into action and to witness experiments unfold and produce unexpected results. The folks who produced Amplified Leicester just spent the past year in a community-based prototyping project that provided the city of Leicester with some great learning about using digital media to expand the sharing, collaboration, innovation capacities of its residents.

The project was born from the vision of Professor Sue Thomas at DeMontfort University and her work in transliteracy at DMU’s Institute of Creative Technologies and NLab. Two years ago I spoke at NLab’s small business conference and discussed how digital media can amplify individual social and collaborative capacities and ultimately reshape and amplify groups at a larger scale like organizations and communities. A year ago I addressed the Nlab group about how amplified organizations can begin to develop more flexible social and economic platforms that infuse resilience into community infrastructures.

This year, Amplified Leicester put it all into practice and engaged a group of Leicester residents in a process of learning how to become amplified through digital media and then use that knowledge to innovate at a grassroots level and develop practical applications of collaborative media in Leicester. The participants included artists, moms, local politicians, city service employees, non-profit directors, a librarian, and even a police inspector.

On April 15, 2010 Amplified Leicester welcomed the public to a showcase of all the projects that included various workshops and presentations by the participants and their team. The archive (linked to above) includes my keynote presentation about community response to the resilience imperative, remarks by Project Director, Professor Sue Thomas and Thilo Boeck, Sr. Research Fellow at DMU’s Centre for Social Action, and descriptions of the participants’ projects.

The showcase, while marking a milestone for the project and celebrating a lot of hard work, was just the beginning. It kicked off an ongoing engagement with the broader community of Leicester about amplifying for innovation and resilience. Every two weeks the Amplified Leicester community meets to discuss questions, ideas, and lessons about how digital media can help them sense their world, create shared resources, and act collaboratively.

Looking for WalMart Effects in Education

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Andrea Saveri

Daniel Goleman spoke at the beautiful new David Brower Center in Berkeley on August 13th (as part of a seminar hosted by the Center for EcoLiteracy) about his new book Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. Two big ideas that stuck with me were (1) the emergence of new tools and techniques for achieving radical transparency of products—a deep accounting of a products biological and ecological risks across its life cycle and across its supply chain, communicated in easy to understand rating systems and indices like the GoodGuide; and (2) the need for introducing ecological intelligence into the K-12 school curriculum to develop a generation of globally and ecologically empathic individuals. Radical transparency combined with ecological intelligence provides the data and the collective human capacity to turn empathy for the planet into meaningful action.

Goleman explained that ecological intelligence is the capacity to live well in our ecosystem. It is an extension of our emotional and social intelligence to a planetary level in which our collective empathy is put into action globally. With emotional intelligence we learn how to identify, assess, and manage our own emotions. With social intelligence we learn how to manage relationships and develop empathy. According to Goleman, ecological intelligence “lets us apply what we learn about how human activity impinges on ecosystems so as to do less harm and once again live sustainably in our niche—these days the entire planet.” Many native groups do this well, like the tiny Sher village in Tibet that has sustained itself on a steep mountainside for over a thousand years. We don’t. Our modern routines and industrial systems have disconnected us from our adverse impacts on the world. We need to change this if we are to create significant and lasting positive impacts on the health of the planet and preserve the human species.

Goleman proposes that with ecological intelligence and radical transparency we will relate more empathically to information about human risks (like exposure to harmful pesticides) and ecological damage (like destruction of coral reefs from chemicals in sunscreen) and make different consumer decisions. As companies respond to new market choices and demands driven by ecological intelligence and radical transparency (and potential cost savings) they will innovate business and industrial practices that are less destructive to human and ecological wellbeing. Goleman sees the supply chain as the point of leverage and points to WalMart’s new sustainability index as a way for their suppliers to compete for shelf space. With 200 million customers and 60,000 suppliers, the impact is huge.

Developing ecological intelligence in the school age population is necessary for nurturing an ecologically empathic future generation of leaders, consumers, voters, innovators, and community members. And Goleman is hopeful because there seems to be an emerging track record here. He stated that a new study is about to be released, a meta analysis, (he didn’t cite it in his talk so I have no reference unfortunately! I’m trying to track it down.) that reviews research on classrooms that implemented social-emotional learning (SEL) in the school curriculum. Those classes that were exposed to SEL reported lower rates of antisocial behavior (e.g. bullying), high rates of pro-social behaviors (e.g. cooperation), and higher levels of academic outcomes. Introducing ecological intelligence into K-12 curriculum could extend those positive results to our behaviors regarding human-natural ecosystems and raise student achievement at the same time. That is exciting.

Goleman mentioned that there is discussion about having some form of ecological intelligence curriculum included as part of a revised No Child Left Behind bill. That is one way to diffuse ecological intelligence, but it might just be perceived as one more requirement added to teachers’ load and could become watered down and scripted curriculum by the time is reaches the classroom. Perhaps we should look at the supply chain in education to think about other ways to catalyze ecological intelligence in schools. WalMart acts as a de facto regulator and has huge impact on changing behaviors of manufacturing and industrial processes because of its size and leverage on supply chains.

Where in education is there that kind of catalyzing effect without going to the federal government? Another player in the education ecosystem with big leverage is higher education—colleges and universities. Imagine if they required applicants to demonstrate ecological intelligence. Just as suppliers are intent on getting their product on a WalMart shelf, families and schools are increasingly focused on getting their kids into college. Foundations have built initiatives on facilitating entry to college, K-8^th grade and high schools have oriented curriculum around college entrance, and a thriving market of commercial providers has targeted college acceptance to design an array products and services.

The University of California and California State University systems together serve over 670,000 students. Imagine if they required applicants to demonstrate proficiency or a certain number of course credits in ecological intelligence. What if their application included an essay question or description of a project that dealt with ecological intelligence? What are other levers in the education supply chain? There may be other creative ways to stimulate the states into finding ways of diffusing ecological intelligence into curriculum, service learning opportunities, and even internships with businesses. Focusing in the education supply chain may provide ideas for some useful strategies.

andrea saveri

making the future actionable

Category Archives: design