One more

Came across this nice piece from Education Week. One of the author's (at least) is connected to the work described in the previous post. The article begins with two lovely quotes:

“So between odd and the same, you got to be rooting for odd.”
—Adam Sandler, in the movie “Spanglish”

“We are in an Age of High Standard Deviation.”
—Tom Peters, in his book Re-Imagine!

Well worth a read.

I've never suggested that any of the stuff we are interested in in terms of a KPS agenda is particularly new or unique. It's just one of many instances of what I think is important at this time on the planet, doing experiments in doing school differently. I stumbled across some cool folk who appear to be doing similar stuff in the US among what Tom Peters calls his "cool friends". Well worth a look. Might drop 'em an eline.

This little scribble comes via Leonie who was talking to child #3 (of 6) who is female, 15 and, imho, very savvy. A discussion about school, what it was like produced a response along these lines.

School is a place where you run a lot of mazes, like rats. So you are put in a maze and asked to find the cheese. So you set off and and run and eventually get through the maze only to find that there is no cheese, only this machine that generates the smell of cheese. Your reward for completing the maze is to do another one.

I think I like this rat.

Welcome a new recruit

I am conscious of not making this "thing" some of us call KPS too much of a thing. In any event, I've been working with a talented woman who has opted to do her Masters research in this area, Sue de Vincentis (spde@deakin.edu.au). Sue is planning on having students make an orientation DVD to a school, something similar to Carmel's work in mt Isa. Sue's research question is: How will a group of students independently execute a school community task which requires specialised knowledge? I've added Sue to the blog list.

On the talking wireless

Leonie and Trudy "appeared" on Radio National this morning talking to Kate Evans about KPS-related stuff. Lots of labels were tossed about including future-proofing kids, engaged learning, real life learning etc. It went well. Kate asked lots of challenging questions and got good thoughtful replies. I'll see if i can pop an MP3 onto the KPS site sometime if folk are interested.

Why football is better than school

A colleague passed this short piece by Herb Childress on to me. While it is written about High School, much of the commentary could apply to schools generally. I know there is a lot of this kind of material about but if I have learned anything about formal systems of education it is that winning a battle never means you have won. Just as in a war, you have to maintain your position, reinforce it, repeat it, rework it and sell, sell, sell it. There is a way to think about this that can be derived from my weird little interest in actor-network theory but I don't want to muddy the simple notion which is about vigilance and the policing of wins and boundaries.

Herb's piece reminded me of the terrific checklist of questions that Trudy has developed in relation to good learning.

In any event, I thought the article useful grist.