Is innovation delivered by strokes of insight OR blood, sweat, and tears?
Yes.
According to Thomas Edison, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” So how do we foster individuals’ imaginations for Part A, and individuals’ perseverance for Part B?
(And has that Part A ship already sailed for me because I’m parsing the quote into two parts and creatively labeling each alphabetically? Does this bloodlessness imply that all I’ve got left is sweat and tears? (Well, that’s what my pillow would suggest… I mean, tut tut, my pillow? What? I’m fine, FINE, fine. Everything’s normal… Hey, look over there!!!))
Anyway.
These questions figure prominently in John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas’s recent book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. At yesterday’s Annenberg Innovation Lab conference, the authors articulated their vision for relevant education. They urged more front-ended problem-solving, grounded in real world issues. Whereas curricula has traditionally commenced with instruction then segued to applied work, the repository of information online allows for timely and targeted information retrieval as one explores/discovers/produces hands-on. They also encouraged tapping students’ passions, and regard failure both to ask a student what s/he cares about and to provide space for the student to pursue that passion a major indictment of our educational system. Perhaps that’s how our students graduate high school, even college, sometimes even elite universities, without a sense of self or direction; perhaps that’s why our students satisfice instead of excel, inquire as to course requirements rather than probe subject matter.
Education needs innovation so that students themselves can innovate. According to Seely Brown and Thomas (as well as 2010 documentary examining public and charter schools, Waiting for Superman), that’s the ticket to American kids’ future; manual labor and the service industry have been outsourced — all we have left is higher-order professional engagement. Is such a bar set unrealistically high? Does lowering the bar function as a self-fulfilling prophecy and/or indulge in the besmirched “soft bigotry of low expectations”?
I am a product of educational tracking; since fourth grade, I was invited to leapfrog my embarrassingly well-resourced school district’s honors classes for induction into its elite “gifted” program. And I benefited. Of course I did. To what extent was this due to my own nature as opposed to the nurture inherent in the program’s label, community, and curriculum? Impossible to say, especially since the two are inextricably linked. What would have happened if everyone were, say, invited to pretend to play the stock market, as we were in eighth grade? Would my enrichment have suffered? Would it have declined by a factor less significant than the gains potentially made by others? Would it have declined at all if such a policy had liberated me and my ilk from the teasing and anxiety-driven distraction associated with isolated dorkdom? Rather than reinforce one another’s nerditude, we might have modeled ourselves after a broader swath of peers and demystified — perhaps never even have become — the Other. We also might have had the opportunity to tutor our classmates, an activity that almost always boosts the tutors’ own comprehension, and could have opened the door for reciprocity in other venues (from other academic subjects to physical feats to social savvy). So maybe this democratic leveling actually could have stood we “gifted” in good stead (as if serving the gifted is the most important consideration in education!)… maybe.
Not every learner is the same — far from it. As such, contemporary teachers are mandated to differentiate curriculum according to the needs of multiple populations, including my coterie of “gifteds” as well as English Language Learners, Standard English Learners, Special Education Students, and Culturally Diverse Students. Perhaps building in strategies and affordances is less blunt than tracking… but it bridges that divide between disinterested uniformity and designated distribution… My former boss, Eliot-Pearson Children’s School Director Debbie LeeKeenan, used to remind we staff members that fair isn’t the same as equal. So what’s fair?
If fairness is a goal — and I believe it must rank among them — how do we reconcile it with the innovation imperative? Perhaps co-creating a fair — or fairer — educational system IS the innovation. And from it cascades all the innovations to come…
