The Class That Wouldn't Stop Learning

This past summer, I taught a course called Mass Media to twelve rising high school seniors at SPS's ASP, and to this day--almost exactly one year after beginning the course--I'm still teaching them. That's not true; it's actually more accurate to say, I'm still learning with them. Though the class ended 11 months ago, we still share articles and questions on our Slack page and we still meet digitally every couple of months to talk about current events and how they affect our lives.   

The course is set up perfectly for intellectual discussions about the news and the media and how that affects our lives. Naturally, those discussions include a lot of conversations about technology and social media and how that is changing our lives. These topics and conversations resonate with teens, and this particular group of teens wanted to keep talking about them beyond the course.

The Slack page also served as a place for them to share ideas and articles. For example, I had students who asked for podcast recommendations:

and students who asked for help planning school events (like their March For Our Lives demonstrations):

While our Slack page has been fun and informational, this style of exchange is pretty normal for teenagers. In school, when completing homework or preparing for an assessment, students exchange messages and resources online. What's more interesting about our exchanges are that students turned those messages into face-to-face conversations. They wanted to leave the message board to listen to additional perspectives and articulate ideas in-real-time, together understanding that it's okay to disagree, to stutter, to think out loud, or--in other words--to make a mistake.

Earlier this year, I wrote about my frustration that these days teenagers have controversial conversations online, rather than face to face--I also wrote about why these conversations should happen in the classroom, face-to-face, especially for teens. So I was especially excited when my students asked to digitally meet (we live in different states) to discuss things like the Google anti-diversity memo, Charlottesville, mass shootings (Las Vegas and MSD), or Cambridge Analytica. Since the course ended, we have had five Google Hangouts where anywhere from 4-7 students and I meet to discuss current events.

Sometimes these discussions came from an individual student asking me to host a conversation. For example, I received an email saying, "Maybe we can have a [Hangout] this week?... If we don't talk til after the break (which I hope is not the case... net neutrality?? Roy Moore?? Trump??? We need to cover this!!) I hope you have a great holiday break."

Other times, these discussions originate from our Slack channel when we feel like we need to elaborate on an issue, either to understand the issue better, or to clarify our positions and/or hear how other people perceive and analyze the same topics. For example:

How can we emulate this style of learning in other classes? How can we get students to continue learning about a subject even when a class ends? How can we get students to want to converse face-to-face about issues that affect our lives? 

I wish I had the answers to the questions above, but I don't. I have been teaching nine years, and this is the only class with which I've had this kind of success. I will, however, conclude with some thoughts as to why this group wants to continue having these conversations. Perhaps that can hep other teachers emulate this success.

• Our teenagers don't have meaningful, intellectual discussions on their own. Or if they do, those experiences don't feel authentic. When teens talk about complex issues, usually the loudest (or most extreme) voices pollute the conversations for others who want to hear additional perspectives and articulate their own thoughts.
• In school, we don't really allow authentic student voice. Sometimes we let students talk, but it's almost always with our topics and our rules, and that doesn't resonate. What's worse, often a teacher will impose his/her thoughts before the conversation begins, thus polluting this environment for those who want to learn form others and articulate their own thoughts without judgement.
• It's not "cool" or "normal" for teenagers to want to discuss current events or how media affects our lives. So something about the fleeting nature of this course (summer school) with teens from different schools, made it cool and normal to care about these topics. 
• Everyone felt comfortable contributing in class and in our Hangouts after class. That's because  1) the class, and our conversations, were not graded; so students didn't have to worry if their point conflicted with the teacher (or the teacher's pet). And 2) I asked everyone to contribute and I allowed them to contribute in a variety of ways (ask questions, read quotations, agree with a peer, or make a connection to current events). This ensured everyone had a chance to articulate his/her thoughts in a way that he/she felt comfortable.

If you have any thoughts on how I can make this happen with every one of my courses, I'm all ears. Comment below.

#Rancière18 - Why I don't Teach Content Anymore (joking, but not really)

A group of us are reading Rancière's "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" to try to connect his lessons to contemporary education. This is a reflection on chapter two, "The Ignorant One's Lesson" that will be posted here and on Jared Colley's blog here. 
And now, a summary for those who are not caught up :) While chapter one focuses largely on how to foster student "will" (or as @nick_dressler wrote last week, student "want to") to "emancipate" them (rather than "stultify" via "explication"),  chapter two is concerned with how to do that. For teachers, Rancière highlights the benefits of universal teaching, intellectual freedom, and playing the role of the "ignorant master." For students, Rancière praises focusing attention, researching deeply, and achieving a growth mindset.

Throughout this chapter, I couldn't stop comparing Rancière's words to an elective I taught this year called "Passion-Based Learning thru Social Media." I suppose Rancière is right that "there's always something the ignorant one knows that can be used as a point of comparison, something to which a new thing to be learned can be related." (28) When friends, colleagues, or strangers ask what the course is about, I always feel strange describing it as, "a contentless course" where "I just teach students how to use social media to learn about something they care about (a passion)." Obviously, there is content, it's just the students choose it, not the teacher.

I pitched the class as a unique course that leans into the way the internet and social media are drastically changing our ability to learn. What I didn't know until this week, was that Rancière beat me to it. While the contentless course works well for me and Rancière, it's not for everyone. I have presented on this course at several conferences, and (as far as I know) no one has ever tried to replicate it. Teachers and administrators articulate a lot of the same hangups about a course like this one. In reading this chapter, I learned Rancière had already understood, analyzed, and overcame these hangups back  in 1987! Below, I use Rancière's words and pedagogy to change the minds of those who are afraid to teach a contentless course.

1) How can the teacher teach if he/she is not an expert on what the student chooses to study?

Rancière answers this one with his title "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" or perhaps better with one of his section headings in chapter two, "The Power of the Ignorant" (31). He prefers a teacher who begins his journey with a student on equal intellectual footing rather than one who is an expert in his subject area. "Whoever wishes to emancipate someone must interrogate him in the manner of men and not in the manner of scholars, in order to be instructed, not to instruct" (29).

Perhaps most succinctly, Rancière writes, "to teach what one doesn't know is simply to ask questions about what one doesn't know" (30). He opens the chapter by showing the power of students teaching a teacher content. "'But I'm confused. Did you all, then, know chemistry?' 'No, but we learned it, and we gave [the teacher] lessons in it. That's universal teaching. It's the disciple that makes the master" (19).

2) What does class look like on a day-to-day basis? What does the teacher do if he/she does not explicate?

According to Rancière, a teacher must "interrogate" and "verify" (31). He also must allow the time and space for research. And he needs to direct students' attention to ensure they are learning.

Mostly, the teacher should become more of a mentor than an explicator, one who encourages, asks questions, and perhaps most importantly, promotes a growth mindset--or as Rancière would say, one who "forbids" the "'I can't, I don't understand'" (23).

Intellectual growth is not linear; the "route is unknown" (33). So as teachers, we need to lean into this. Emancipated classes should be flexible on a day-to-day basis. "The master is he who keeps the researcher on his own route" (emphasis mine, 33). Additionally, students should be able to explore and learn at their own speed, just as long as they're researching and focused.

3) What happens if a student doesn't know what he's passionate about?

In order to discover a passion, one needs to know himself, "that is to say, by examining the intellectual acts of which he is he subject, by noticing the manner in which he uses, in these acts, his power as a thinking being" (36). Every one of our students can do this, we just need to 1) ask the right questions and 2) give them the space to figure this out. Then it's the student's job to continue their intellectual growth by "[learning] something and [relating] everything else to it" (20).

4) How does a teacher assess? How do you hold students accountable? 

While I gather Rancière disagrees with grades, he does leave us with a number of verbs that he seems to value in student learning. For example, "[asking] questions," (30) "observing, comparing, combining..." (36) "seeking, [and] researching" (37). If a teacher must assess, it seems this is how he can evaluate a student's work on an equal intellectual footing. I think Rancière could agree with this style of assessment or accountability even if he doesn't agree with grading per se. After all, he writes, "[a teacher] will not verify what the student has found, just that the student has searched" (31).

It just so happens, this is exactly how I built assessment/accountability into my course: