A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness
Geetha Narayanan is Principal Investigator with Project Vision at the Centre for Education Research Training and Development (CERTAD) within the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. She has dedicated her career to finding and establishing new models of education that are creative, synergistic and original in their approach to learning.
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A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness
The Dangerous Idea
Speaking at the Global Summit in Sydney, Australia, last year I had the distinct impression that the ideas I presented were perceived by the audience as both ‘dangerous’ and ‘powerful’.
Dangerous ideas, as Richards Dawkins puts it, are those that ‘…generally run counter to and cause consternation to, the majority in a particular age, who thrive on familiarity and fear change’ (Dawkins 2006, cited in Brockman 2006:304). Put simply they challenge the dominant paradigms of the time and can be described as heretic (Brockman 2006). Dangerous ideas that go beyond merely questioning fads and fashions, or even challenging memes, can be powerful ideas; ideas that foster creativity and spawn innovation in the truest sense of the word.
So what is the dangerous idea I have been exploring and why do many people across the world consider it powerful?
The dangerous idea is that school reform, in India in particular, but across the world too, is impossible.
Changing education, at the systemic level or at the institutional or school level, or educating teachers and school leaders in change can be classified as largely first order change - that of school improvement, which involves doing more of the same but doing it better (where the focus is on efficiency) and that of school re-structuring, which involves re-organising components and responsibilities (where the focus is on effectiveness).
The power behind the dangerous idea is the realisation that if one cannot reform education by improving the system or by re-structuring the schools, then the way forward must be through design. The need seemed to be to re-envision and to design a new system - one that supports both personal and social transformation and creates 21st century learning. This thinking resulted in the birth of Project Vision.
The Genesis
The view of breaking up schools into smaller units is not new and a leading contemporary advocate for this is Deborah Meier, of the Coalition of Essential Schools in New York, an organisation which is supporting and driving the small schools movement in the United States.
The CES Small Schools Project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is dedicated to creating and supporting small schools throughout the country that are instructionally powerful and sustainable and that offer challenging curricula to students who have been denied a meaningful education. The Small Schools Project is committed to effecting broader change within the public education system and meeting the needs of young people and communities who have traditionally been underserved – students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. Most of the schools are located in urban areas; however, as a whole, the body of schools is diverse, representing various geographic regions and demographics across the United States. (2004:para.1)
But small schools are again schools, and in my view can run into problems, as changing size or scale and not form is merely tinkering with the problem and ommitting to address deep rooted and structural and systemic causes of school failure. So while this might improve the quality of learning for the traditionally underserved, I doubt if it would cause liberation and transformation for the young people it serves. Again, these dissenting views on education, such as mine, are not new. Critical educators across the world, notable amongst them being Goodman (1978), Holt (1983), Illich (1972), Friere (1985 and 1987), Miller (2000) and many others, have long been advocates of more revolutionary ways of freeing education. Their list of dangerous ideas ranges from no school to free schools. But while I agree with their fundamental position that the modern school enterprise is faulty, in that it fosters and supports values that are not sustainable or transformative, I found it hard to accept their ideas in totality. Other thinkers, such as the philosopher cum architect and designer, Alexander (1977) advocated the use of a ‘pattern language’ in thinking and designing educational spaces. Alexander’s patterns of the ‘shop front’ school and ‘the network of learning’ are powerful ideas that have influenced both my design and my thinking.
Instead of building large public schools for children 7 to 12, set up tiny independent schools, one school at a time. Keep the school small, so that its overheads are low and a teacher-student ration of 1:10 can be maintained. Locate it in the public part of the community, with a shopfront and three or four rooms. (Alexander 1977: 424)
I ended my search at the Lifelong Kindergarten Research Lab of Mitch Resnick and spent considerable time studying his model of after school learning centres called the ‘Computer Clubhouses’.
The Computer Clubhouse provides a creative and safe after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities work with adult mentors to explore their own ideas, develop skills, and build confidence in themselves through the use of technology. Established in 1993 by The Computer Museum (now part of the Museum of Science, Boston) in collaboration with the MIT Media Laboratory, the Computer Clubhouse helps youth acquire the tools necessary for personal and professional success. (Computer Clubhouse 2006:para.1)
The Computer Clubhouse, in its original thinking and as conceptualised by Mitch Resnick and Natalie Rusk at the MIT Media Lab., based its programs on the following four core principles:
- supporting learning through design experiences
- helping youth build on their own interests
- creating an emergent learning community, and
- working always in a climate of trust and respect.
The Project Vision hypothesis was finally conceived in Boston, at long meetings between Mitch, Natalie and myself. It translated ideas normally associated with the after-school movement or not-school movements into the potential of a full day learning project.
The Project Vision hypothesis breaks the form of schools, moving from that of a cathedral and/or large corporate monolith into small places eg. shop fronts.They are not purpose built but occupy spaces/crevices that integrate with, and operate, at various levels of scale in a city. The structural form advocated is that of community learning centres and ateliers or studios, not that of the contemporary modern schools.
The context of the project, similar to that of the Clubhouse and of the Small Schools Project in New York and Washington state, are the underserved, the marginalised children of the rapidly growing slums of world cities of today, such as the one I live in – Bangalore, India.
Children who live in the squalor of urban slums are deprived of many freedoms; those of space, of health and of childhood. The urban slum is indeed a grim environment and the children who live, play and grow up in these neighbourhoods see little to fill them with the hope of a fairer, more equitable future. Their lives are devoid of the most fundamental freedoms -those of health and hygiene, those of learning and laughter and those of security and choice. More often than not, they are victims of abuse, violence and injustice arising from caste, class and gender based factors.
Project Vision addressed these fundamental inequities by shifting the notion of a school from a fixed place to a set of spaces that exist and operate simultaneously within and without the community. It does this in a way where flows of knowledge and understanding are created at and through many levels - physical, emotional, cognitive and psychological – in ways that interact, making the end transformative.
The Re-Designed Concept - Places and Spaces
The Project Vision Learning System is dynamic and is made up of four distinct, distributed, interactive and inter-related components that work in coordination with one another.
- The Community Learning Centres (Spokes-located within each slum community)
- The Idea-Media Centres (Hubs or Workshops-which serve different purposes and are common and shared spaces)
- The Expedition (Using the complexity of the real and the natural as sites for introspection, contemplation and active, participatory learning)
- The Network (Wired/wireless- links that integrate the Drishya Community members with each other and with the outside world)
The first component in this model of learning is the community and is represented as a space in terms of interactions and experiences, and as a place in terms of a community learning centre (see Figure 1). In most cases it is not more than a room and here is where the learning is integrated into the life and needs of the community. This is where the key goal of transformation through literacy takes place - literacy not in a narrow sense of learning letters and numbers - but in a broader Freirian sense - of learning to develop the capacity to transform oneself and one’s life (Freire & Shor 1987).
Figure 2: Hubs or Idea-Media Centres
The second components are hubs for learning which is specialised (see Figure 2). The hubs represent the spirit of the commons and constitute facilities that can be shared with many communities and which can serve several purposes in different ways. They could be community media centres, community museums, ateliers, or laboratories. At these hubs or idea-media centres students can access resources, materials and tools, with which they can think, create, design and invent. As a space they are represented as opportunities and materials and as a place as studios, workshops and labs.
The hubs/centres tagged in green are studios; labs or ateliers that are owned by non-governmental agencies and which are open to young people from different backgrounds and with differing learning needs/styles. The hubs/centres tagged in yellow are those owned by the urban poor communities or by other communities of learners – such as after-school learning centres, located at local high schools/colleges.
The third component (see Figure 3) is an outward bound one - where students get the opportunity to walk, to climb, to trek and to seek and work through challenges that are both physically challenging and emotionally satisfying. Learning through expeditions and in an experiential manner brings a sense of wholeness and harmony to those who rarely move out of the squalor of the inner city ghettos.
The last component and perhaps the most critical one is of networking and community (see Figure 4). This would involve looking at space in a critical way - looking for both fear spaces and collaborative spaces within the individual children, and in terms of place it would alternate between wired communities and the wider world in a recursive and self referential manner.
Summarised, the project conceives of learning happening, not in a fixed place such as a traditional school, but in a set of dynamic interactions that occur in different places and spaces. It consists of a set of hubs, which are ateliers – with a studio, lab or a workshop philosophy and spokes, which are learning and knowledge centres located within the urban poor community. The learning opportunities offered within this project are not fixed –but emerge continuously in dialogue and negotiation with the community and students. Therefore, in contrast to conventional pedagogy, which aims to be child-centered and teacher driven, this pedagogy, is child-negotiated and teacher-framed. Beauty and rhythm, aesthetics and ethics form a core to a process of learning that is design based and project driven. Learning by and through design; using the arts as ways of seeing, looking and telling, form valuable approaches to this vision.
The Powerful Idea
Breaking the form of conventional schooling, thereby investing in the future, is not a dangerous idea but a powerful one. But changes in structure and form are meaningless without corresponding changes in pedagogy. It is here that Project Vision has achieved significant breakthroughs. Building on and developing the ideas of Holt (2000), Fuad Luke (2002), Manzini (cited in Thackara 2005) and Capra (2002) and by consciously embracing the core value of slowness – both as way of being and as a way of learning - has created the real capability for substantive change.
The concept of Slow emerged from the Slow Food and Slow Design movement in Europe and the United States and builds and develops on ideas of sustainable living as a desirable future. Slowness as a pedagogy allows students to learn not at the metronome of the school day or the school bell, but at the metronome of nature, giving them time to absorb, to introspect and contemplate, to argue and rebut and to enjoy.
Learning about metamorphosis and about the web of life in real time, by maintaining a butterfly garden, growing larval plants and simultaneously engaging in reflection, role play and scientific observation is powerful indeed. The short flash presentation that accompanies this article illustrates the power of slow pedagogy as a counter to the current culture of acceleration, which is necessitating the rapid learning of more content in less time.
In this small case study, I present the learning about metamorphosis and change and show how it can only happen in synchronicity with the actual real life processes being observed. The anticipation and the inquiry that resulted from this were very, very powerful and technology served only, here, to document and to create stories of the process.
The learning opportunities which foster slowness are created in such a way that they operate on three levels which are not discrete, linear or sequential. Taken together they enable experiences which foster genuine and sophisticated understanding.
The layers are:
- looking and listening
- exploring and thinking
- making and being.
The goal of our slowness pedagogy is to generate more creative, more lyrical and the playful aspects of learning and represent it in the many languages of children - the languages of movement or music; the languages of colours or shapes; the languages of images and of forms; the language of sounds and of feelings. In order to do this we arrange learning differently, because we are not-school.
The learning arrangements that we find foster and promote slowness are:
- the circle which represents symbolically the spirit of unity and equality within the learning community
- grouping learners in collaborative, vertical heterogeneous teams
- using large blocks of time
- themes or topics for study are not prescribed but are emergent. The topics are selected from student talk, through dialogue with the community or based on the individual experiences of a family or the interests of a child. It is not static and a given but is the constant subject of negotiation.
- the learning is organised into projects - some seem to go on for as long as a term and others last just a few weeks. The facilitators at the centres help the learners frame their learning plan, research the topic and make decisions on the representational medium that will demonstrate and showcase their learning.
- the learning materials are made using local content, in ways that allow them to be re-used and to be produced within the community at low cost
- all learning is the result of direct first person conscious experience. This method or tool focuses on the transformation of the self and the awakening of the mind rather than on the transfer of knowledge and the acquisition of skills.
Conclusion
We live today in times of accelerating change. The pressure this puts on current educational systems and institutions to continuously modify and adapt is simply not sustainable. Further, this pressure is resulting in a disconnect between the means and ends of education. The larger democratic ideals of social justice, of interdependence and of co-evolution through cooperation and collaboration are being increasingly marginalised in favour of greater accountability through testing, the drive towards nationalised curriculum, which suffers from a ‘one size fits all’ mindset, and the need to develop competitive advantages in a networked world that has a globalised economical structure.
Accelerating change produces conditions of freefall and a culture of immediacy. This culture of immediacy in turns values fast knowledge which in turn runs counter to the development of both the self and the mind.
What slowness has allowed us to do is find the time to work on the mind and the body as one whole and not as two distinct and separate parts. Slowness has allowed us to focus not just on learning but on unlearning. Lao Tzu, Zen master, makes this point:
To learn
One accumulates day by day.
Through reduction and further education
One reaches non-action,
And everything is acted upon.
Therefore, one often wins over the world
Through non-action.
Wholeness has allowed for us to be mindful and contemplative. To be mindful involves the conscious developing of the practice of emptiness, which facilitates recall through the activation of visual attentive memory. Our ‘Memory Books’ are tangible and vibrant artifacts that provide rich evidence of the value of this process.
But where is technology in all this? Technological fluency is critical to any growth and development today. But technological fluency should not be confused with technological determinism. The thoughtless and widespread use of technology as the universal solution to the rising need for fast knowledge is wrong and must be questioned. Often in developing countries, such as India, the term ‘digital divide’ is used to support the argument that the use of new technologies, alone, will create conditions of learning and hence social and economic change. That is not true and I remain deeply saddened by initiatives such as those that I see here in Bangalore where vans outfitted with computers are sent to slums as an alternative to real substantive learning opportunities. To me the new digital technologies are tools that allow for learners to develop their imaginations, to be able to play and to have fun, to be able to tell stories in different and exciting ways. But in order to generate value they need to be integrated into new forms and structures in an invisible and contextual manner so that they work slowly and with great finesse to create an unquiet and critical pedagogy - one where new media arts can sustain social change.
Useful Links
Overview of the CES Small Schools Project
http://www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/ssp/overview.html
Intel presents the Computer Clubhouse
http://www.computerclubhouse.org/
The Computer Clubhouse: Technological Fluency in the Inner City
http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Clubhouse/Clubhouse.htm
References
Alexander, C. Ishikawa S. Silverstein M. 1977, A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, London.
Brand, S.1999, The Clock of the Long Now, Time and Responsibility, Phoenix.
Brockman, J. (ed) 2006, What is your Dangerous Idea? Simon and Schuster.
Capra, F. 2002, The Hidden Connections, Flamingo.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper Perennial.
Friere, P. 1985, The Politics of Education, Bergin and Garvy.
Friere, P. & Shor, I. 1987, The Pedagogy of Liberation, Macmillan.
Faud-Luke, A. 2002, ‘Slow Design, a paradigm shift in design philosophy’. Retrieved 12 April, 2007 from http://www.thinkcycle.com
Goodman, N. 1978, Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett Publishing Co Ltd.
Holt, J. 1983, How Children Learn, Penguin Books.
Holt M. no date, ‘The Nature and Purpose of Education’. Retrieved 12 April, 2007 from http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/rsl/maurice-holt.html
Holt M. 2002, ‘It’s Time to Start the Slow School Movement’, Phi Delta Kappa International, vol.84, no.4. Retrieved 12 April, 2007 from http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0212hol.htm
Illich, I. 1972, Tools for Conviviality. Retrieved 12 April, 2007 from http://http://todd.cleverchimp.com/tools_for_conviviality
Mau, B. 2004, Massive Change, Phaidon.
Meier D. 2004, ‘Overview of the CES Small Schools Project’. Retrieved 12 April, 2007 from http://www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/ssp/overview.html
Miller, R. (ed) 2000, Creating Learning Communities, Solomon Press.
Narayanan, G. 2006, ‘Crafting Change II’, paper presented at the Global Summit 2006, Sydney, Australia.
Resnick M. Rusk N. & Cooke, S. 1998, ‘The Computer Clubhouse: Technological Fluency in the Inner City’. Retrieved 12 April, 2007 from http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Clubhouse/Clubhouse.htm
Thackara, J. 2005, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, MIT Press.
Comments
16 Comments so far
There is great benefit I believe to what you are undertaking. My children went to a small school of 90 children and many of the classes were integrated with children helping each other. Parents were encouraged to participate and older children were mentors and ‘protectors’ of the younger children. School plays involved the whole school and it allowed for children to be more innovative and comfortable. I also believe in education by ’story telling’ and to take this further earlier this year I saw an indigenous movie called ‘the ten canoes’It is an excellent movie that is a story within a story. The giving of values through story telling. ‘Perhaps we should be looking at both the future and the distant past’to combine as a ‘new’paradigm.
Wonderful article! I have recently felt a big shift in my work in educational design that requires me to think more about designing spaces for learning rather than learning content and sequencing tasks and activities.
In terms of rattling my own reflective cage, I see some parallels with the Bangladesh mobile phone project and I also recently viewed this TEDs presentation by Stewart Brand about city slums. I was confused a little by this one - it certainly made me think - anyone else seen these? What are your thoughts?
Thank you for your captivating piece of writing Geetha.
Best wishes, Marg
I really enjoyed this article and the way in weaves together some important current threads and counter intuitive ideas- slowness, emergence, learning through design, self organisation, vernacular forms and archetypes
Chris Alexander was ahead of his time with his wonderful pattern language - but we also have Illich ‘Deschooling society’ and Mike Cooleys industrially based ‘Architect or bee’ from the same period nearly 40 years ago !!
Hello Geetha and everyone.
The live conversation was lovely.
It was great to hear from Georgina at
http://www.deadlymob.org/
working in the same kinds of ways.
I listended to Alan Kay who wrote the smalltalk language which Squeak and Scratch use today.
http://video.csupomona.edu/TechSeries/AlanKay-245.asx
I can see why Geetha is interested in Scratch and Squeak.
Early days for us but in SA we are aiming to do a weekend workshop looking at how we can learn squeak in schools. Some teachers including Bill Kerr and Peter Ruwoldt are already on the case, and Kylie Willison who does home schooling has also been working on Squeak.
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/
http://www.waraku.blogspot.com/
http://kyliewillison.blogspot.com/2007/05/exploring-squeaketoys.html
http://groups.google.com/group/sasqueak
is where we are talking about using squeak in schools and where we are talking about organising the camp for March 2008.
http://www.granths.com.au/edwiki/index.php?title=Programming_Camp_08
is where we are thinking about how to organise the camp.
I hope we can develop the event as a ‘whole’ adventure and I’m thinking about the student teacher mix we could have to help that happen.
Geetha if I can help at all with sending open source CD’s to you or any other information or materials do feel free to holler. Fantastic and inspiring work.
Thank you for the appreciative comments. I do think that this appreciation is because the time has come for learning innovation and innovators to seriously re-consider and re-define the educational “space”. I also find the idea of slow in today’s world need the active but invisible support from technology- and perhaps this will be technologies greatest contribution - to change in the way people ( including children) learn.
I woul be happy to have more information on the open source software -particularly those that are friendly to non-english language users.
Dear Geetha and all,
What you said is so true! I’m a Brazilian EFL teacher and your project could transform many lives in our own “favelas” (slums). I’ve been questioning a lot the point you mentioned about technological determinism. I’m an avid Internet user and love to explore its potential in the classroom, but just the way you mentioned, connecting minds, being meaningful, developing one’s beliefs in the power of transformation.
I wish more educators in Brazil could see what you are doing!
Thanks for sharing.
Carla Arena
Hi folks
I have sent the free software links to Geetha direct via the school as I had trouble getting them through the wordpress comment thing.
Cheers
Janet
Dear Geetha, thank you for imagining and then implementing such an interesting redesign of what school learning might be.
Your fragmenting the one place one space school into “four distinct, distributed, interactive and inter-related components that work in coordination with one another.” makes strong intuitive sense and I have been kept amused all week imagining how these components could be introduced into the Auckland suburb’s where we work in New Zealand.
I am captured by your notion of slow pedagogy - interested in how these components share a pedagogy that is “consciously embracing the core value of slowness – both as way of being and as a way of learning” – layered through looking and listening - exploring and thinking and making and being. I want to think about the possibilities of a slow pedagogy some more
Some responses
Carla- I do think that some of these ideas make sense in a Brazilian sense. They do work!
Janet- I did not get the point about the software-have you mailed it to Srishti?
Pam-slowness has transformed my whole approach to education and I do feel its energy and power. It has yet however to touch my own life-which seems sadly rushed and attempting perhaps far too much!!!
Geetha
Wow, great article! As principle in a small (200 student) K-12 school, I can say our greatest moments are when we leverage collaboration between older and younger students.
Also, we are faced with amazing access to technology- suddenly really, over the past couple of years. I couldn’t agree more with Geetha’s closing comments: “But in order to generate value they need to be integrated into new forms and structures in an invisible and contextual manner so that they work slowly and with great finesse to create an unquiet and critical pedagogy”
Therein lies the task and the purpose.
[...] changes in structure and form are meaningless without corresponding changes in pedagogy. Slow pedagogy (similar to fast and slow food) counters the current culture of acceleration, giving learners time [...]
If you have a postal address we could post things from here.
This is where you can order ubuntu
CDs to be sent to you.
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/login
Here is their help information in English
https://help.ubuntu.com/
Here is the Indian community site
http://www.ubuntu-in.org/wiki/Main_Page
It looks like inkscape does not yet have a translation for IN (perhaps
some students might be interested in this?)
http://www.inkscape.org/doc/index.php?lang=en
OpenCD has some applications which are open source that you can run on a Windows base system http://www.theopencd.org/
Some discussion about localisation in India:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Infotech/Software/Open_source_computing_desktop_in_Indian_languages/articleshow/1786384.cms
http://www.technetra.com/writings/archive/2004/03/19/open-source-software-localization-of-indian-languages
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/015jan06/features/tapia/
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/5141/469
http://news.com.com/India+Speaking+your+language/2100-7344_3-5951942.html
http://www.indianoss.org/
http://www.iosn.net/l10n/news/india-struggle-l10n
Web 2.0 Backlash…
I haven’t read Andrew Keen’s new book - The Cult of the Amateur. But I will. I’ve been following his blog for about a month - not because I agree with what he’s saying, but because I believe we need……
[...] Keens Buch „The Cult of the Amateur“ oder Teemu Arinas’ Ausführungen über die “Slow Pedagocy” and „Parasitic Learning“ haben mich nachdenklich [...]
I’ve only skimmed the offering about slow pedagogy and the readers’ comments.
My first impression is about the “education equation” as I call it. this article & its readers who commented seem to think of education as a single variable equation: EDUCATION = TEACHING by which pupils are treated as inert raw material to be processed by the education machinery.
My view of the education is that it is an interactive, 2-variable process that can be written as: EDUCATION = FUNCTION OF(TEACHING,LEARNING)and if there is no learning there is no education. Let me emphasize my paradigm assumes a learner who can and does decide to learn in much the same way an infant decides to accept/reject what is being fed.
Hmmmm?
Art