Action research & KPS

I hang out on too many email-based discussion lists (yeah I know... indicates how bad habits are hard to kick). And I am mulling about links between what we've been calling the KPS agenda and action research. The mulling being prompted by some writing I am trying to do with Leonie. Back to the lists. One of these lists, XMCA (eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity-- runs out of U Cal San Diego via Michael Cole) has been chatting about AR and the focus of the list, which is pretty broad ranging - sociocultural ideas, activity theory etc. etc. In a long series of annotated exchanges, you know those emails with multiple replies to replies, Jam Lemke, one of my favourite thinkers in the educational space wrote (21 Jan 07):

Action Research is about solving immediate problems, but one of its strategies is to get people talking about what those problems really are. In the course of which they often re-define the key problems as being larger than their immediate symptoms. When you then start to collaboratively investigate these bigger issues, you almost always find that history has played a role in getting us into the mess we're in. And that understanding how to get out of it often depends on figuring out a way around the path that historically got us where we are.

Why are school classes only 40 minutes long? why are students segregated by age in schools? why don't teacher-student relationships in schools last more than a few months to less than one year? why are curriculum subjects separated? why is curriculum content dictated to be uniform? why do we use pencil-and-paper testing? why don't students get to learn from non-teacher mentors? why can't I take my students on a field trip outside the school? why can't they learn by participating/observing in other institutions?

Why can't we talk about the topics we're really interested in? why can't we spend more than 2 weeks on this? why can't I learn basic biology over 2 years instead of one? why can't we talk about human sexuality? or famous gay figures in history? why can't we learn about law, religion, economics, politics? why can't we discuss the causes of violence in my neighborhood? Why don't I get paid for all the work the school requires me to do?

The causes of most social headaches are institutional and structural, and the timescales across which we need to look to understand how they came to cause our headaches expand in historical time as we probe these networks of causes.

Remember: give a man a fish, he eats today; teach him to fish, he eats tomorrow too? Action research, and the CHAT perspective, is about learning new ways to eat, about looking across longer relevant timescales for alternatives and solutions, not about eating the first fish to come our way (though if you're really hungry, why not?).

JAY.

PS. Short-term solutions can give us the breathing space to seek longer-term ones. But they can also exacerbate longer-term problems, or disguise them until they get even worse.

I'd like to think that a good deal of KPS work is driven by kids/teachers asking similar kinds of questions. I can recall Trudy talking about how her students at Warraburra were puzzling about water usage in the school. Don't recall the exact history but it's that sense that it's ok to ask tough, interesting questions even when there is perhaps no immediate prospect of a solution. Which brings me to related point made by James Wilkinson in the Menzies Oration last year. He was speaking about undergraduate education and making, what I thought was a strong case for students learning about the process of inquiry. He wrote:

The skill that would be of most practical value to our undergraduate students, in my opinion, as well as the key to what we mean when we speak of educated men and women, is the ability to ask good questions and to work at seeking answers based on evidence.

As I read his carefully argued presentation (you can get text and or an MP3) I kept thinking that, with a little adjusting, the same argument could and most likely should be applied to schools. I then started thinking about the early thinking around schools as sites of serious knowledge production and how research/systematic inquiry might be the way to break the interminable "kids ought to know this stuff" arguments.

The origins of KPS go back to mulling over the so-called "middle school" problem, i.e. student disengagement, troublesome teens etc. And it occurred to me that if these kids were trained up to do systematic inquiry you could hit a number of spots: one they would likely respond to moving beyond the "pretend curriculum" that they had all seen through a long time ago, they could contribute usefully to local community, they would develop skills, habits of mind that were not all that amenable to curriculum check lists and they'd produce something in which they could genuinely take some pride.

I also recall how I was chatting to a primary teacher about these ideas over the phone (in those days, distance ed. we worked with amazing teachers...never met em face to face..but I was always in awe of their energy, passion and commitment) and suggesting that this approach would work in middle school but unlikely in primary school. She berated me for about 15 minutes, telling me all the inquiry stuff that goes on in a lot of primary schools but it is not taken very seriously. It is interesting that now, some years down the track, almost all the KPS stuff has spun out of primary schools.

Just some thinking out aloud about a bunch of questions.

With friends like these

I went back to the Escola Lumiar site and stumbled over the school's council of friends:

William Ury Antropólogo social pela Yale, professor da Harvard Business School e Harvard Law School, diretor do Harvard Negotiation Project, negociador do Carter Center e autor do livro "Getting to Yes"

Charles Handy Professor da London Business School, consultor em negócios e educação

David Perkins Diretor do Project Zero e professor da Harvard School of Education

Seymour Pappert Diretor do Media Lab do MIT, autor da linguagem Logo e vários livros de referência em educação

Henry Mintzberg Professor de Management e educação, Vice-Reitor da McGill University no Canadá

If I was setting up a school and could claim these folk as friends.... sure Semler has access to these folk by virtue of his business/management practices but this is a classy list of folk by any measure.