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Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

irvington_statue_of_rip_van_winkleOn November 4, voters in the US made a momentous choice, not only by taking another step towards racial equality, but also by demanding new ways of relating to other countries, to injustice, to the environment, and to truth itself. As of today, that is only one step; nothing has changed except the direction we are pointed.

Where the path leads next depends even more on the rest of us than it does on President-Elect Obama. The great challenges of globalization, racism, poverty, and violence are unaffected by a single election. Yet, there is a risk that we can fall asleep, lose sight of those challenges, and begin to think only of narrow issues, such as many that surfaced in the campaign.

We have the opportunity now to respond to the challenges posed 43 years ago in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s excellent speech, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. In his talk, he relates the story of “Rip Van Winkle,” who slept 20 years. But he reminds us that when Rip went up to the mountain, the sign on the local inn had a picture of King George III of England. Twenty years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington. Rip had not only slept 20 years; he had slept through a revolution. As King says, “Rip Van Winkle knew nothing about it; he was asleep.”

King saw that we are experiencing a scientific and technological revolution, one that challenges us to remain awake, and to develop a world perspective. It’s more imperative than ever to eradicate racial injustice and rid the world of poverty, and to find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Long before talk of flat worlds, King saw that our destinies were intertwined:250px-martin_luther_king_jr_nywts

All I’m saying is simply this: that all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be – this is the interrelated structure of reality…And by believing this, by living out this fact, we will be able to remain awake through a great revolution.

Remaining awake means looking beyond government as usual and recognizing that children in Haiti are in our “garment of destiny,” as much a part of our world as the person next door. It means knowing that justice is an ongoing project that needs to be defended wherever we hear of abuses of human rights, not seeking ways to justify them. It means finding an end to wars, not simply moving from one venue to another.

Can we do any better now at addressing King’s great challenges?

References

King, Jr, Martin Luther (1965, June). Remaining awake through a great revolution. Commencement address for Oberlin College, Oberlin Ohio.

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Learning from graveyards

oldsectionhillside-017Starting with the town in which they lived, North Andover, Massachusetts, Caroline Donnan’s third-grade students physically entered history. They each adopted the family name of a European settler from the 1640’s period and thereafter assumed an historical role. A story centered on one of the historical characters would then form the basis of a study. That led to holding meetings, making maps, studying architecture, and discussing issues of the time as their assigned characters might do. (Photo by Ron Taylor, 2005).

Unraveling the town’s history, then, became the common vehicle for covering many skill and subject areas. It was also a wonderful excuse to put students in the position of discoverers, gatherers, and inquirers.

Their trips to a graveyard sparked scientific inquiry.

“People say settlers didn’t live as long as we do these days. What can you find here to prove whether or not that is true?” The class spread out to inspect gravestones. Scribbled columns of notes later turned into graphs and charts, subtraction and regrouping, smallpox and diptheria, questions and conclusions…Putting [the findings] together with a tally of how many people died at what ages, we came full circle to questions, connections, information. In point of fact, if settlers survived the first five years of life, their chances for survival were the same as they are today.

johnsoncottageI’m guessing that there are no surviving homes from the 1640’s era in North Andover. But there is the Johnson Cottage, built in 1789. According to the North Andover Historical Society is the “last surviving artisan’s cottage in North Andover’s Old Center.” The students made an expedition there and discovered low ceilings and short beds. This led to further inquiries into what it was like to live in the even earlier period.

The photo of the Cottage, shown here, is used by permission of the Historical Society. Their archives contain the largest amount of information on the Cottage and on the burial grounds in North Andover. They also host educational programs based on the first burial ground.

The students’ inquiries developed as multiple forms of literacy woven through the daily life of the classroom:

When we couldn’t get to real locations, we worked on constructing our own original one-room “town founder’s house” (located at one end of the classroom) or practiced scenes that eventually became “Starting from Scratch,” a full length musical relating the town’s earliest history. We also spent a substantial amount of time writing settler diaries, field notes, notices for the meetinghouse, town records, sermons, poems, trip lists, hymns, project progress reports, hypotheses, and conclusions. And we drew maps and charts, costumes and scenery, fences and rooftops.

It seems odd that a world tied to the past, even to graveyards, could be so alive for the students and Donnan herself. It’s even odder that this fantasy world became closer to the lived experience of the children than did their usual curriculum. But it’s less odd when we realize that it was based on their actual physical and social surroundings, and related to their own experiences of living spaces, health, family, and neighborhood.

Any learning activity raises questions. I’m curious to know how the class related their experiences in the 1789 Cottage to their simulation of life in 1640. I also wonder how much “Starting from Scratch” recognized the culture and lives of the Wampanoag people who lived in the area before 1640. What I can guess is that Donnan’s students were better able to engage in productive dialogue about these and other issues following their year in her classroom.

Donnan’s article is out of print. That’s a pity, because it’s an impressive example of how learning can be connected to life, offering a model for any age of students. Donnan even addresses the standard curriculum problem:

We had but one problem. In all the pages of the neatly typed, carefully bound, district-required social studies curriculum, never once was there mention of any of this.

She concludes by saying that we don’t have to wait:

With all there is to learn and do in the outside world, we really shouldn’t wait until June to get started.

References

Donnan, Caroline (1988). Following our forebears’ footsteps: From expedition to understanding. In V. Rogers, A. D. Roberts & T. P. Weinland (Eds.), Teaching social studies: Portraits from the classroom (Bulletin No. 82) Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies.
Gorvine, Harold (1970, May). Teaching history through role playing. The History Teacher, 3(4), 7-20.
Levstik, Linda S., & Barton, Keith C. (2001). Doing history: Investigating with children in elementary and middle schools (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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The Women Who Went West

Under the leadership of its first Dean, Katharine Sharp, Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science sent the first librarians west.

As pioneers immigrated to the western towns of Wyoming, New Mexico and Oregon, graduates of Illinois set up libraries to educate the growing population. Often the only women for miles, these librarians created literacy programs with very little resources. –Here & Now: Videos

The video, The Women Who Went West, features Betsy Hearne, re-telling some of the stories of these early librarians. These early librarians showed courage and resourcefulness in spreading books and literacy. As Betsy says, “democracy depends on an informed population,” and they clearly did more than most to make that happen.

Reference

Des Garennes, Christine (2008, November 23). Video shows UI librarians’ quest to settle the West in 1908. The News-Gazette.

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National Day of Listening

The day after Thanksgiving (November 28, 2008), has been declared by StoryCorps as the first annual National Day of Listening.

This holiday season, ask the people around you about their lives — it could be your grandmother, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood. By listening to their stories, you will be telling them that they matter and they won’t ever be forgotten. It may be the most meaningful time you spend this year.

You can preserve the interview using recording equipment readily available in most homes, such as tape recorders, computers, video cameras or a pen and paper. Our free Do-It-Yourself Guide is easy to use and will prepare you and your interview partner to record a memorable conversation, no matter which method of recording you prefer.

The National Day of Listening site has a four-step scheme to help with the process, including the DIY guide and a video. This looks like a great way to build up a family or community oral history.

The process that StoryCorps describes could of course be done any time, but most of us are inclined to procrastinate. We tend to vacillate between thinking that it’s nothing more than listening again to an old story and thinking that it requires fancy equipment, special expertise, and many days of hard work. Maybe setting aside a National Day, calling for one hour of serious listening, and offering a four-step process will make it easier for any of us to do.

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Bill Ayers interview

Bill Ayers gave his first interview after the election on NPR’s Fresh Air on Tuesday. It’s very interesting,  providing some context on a bizarre aspect of the Presidential race this year. Terry Gross gets him to speak freely and also asks probing questions about the war in Vietnam, the 60’s, terrorism, means v. ends, politics, imperialism, and the personal impact.

Fresh Air from WHYY, November 18, 2008 · The name of former anti-war activist William Ayers was brought up twice in an attempt to discredit Barack Obama during the recent presidential campaign — first by Hillary Clinton, and then by the McCain campaign. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin accused Obama — who served on two nonprofit boards with Ayers — of “palling around with terrorists.”

The accusations stemmed from Ayers’ involvement with the Weather Underground, a radical group responsible for bombings on the New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. The federal case against Ayers was dismissed in the early 1970s.

Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of ‘Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist.’

Ayers will be a guest-in-residence on the Urbana-Champaign campus this coming March 8-12.

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What, when, and where of web pages

tree-of-practices-screenHow do we find an entry on a website? Usually, we do it either from a general search or by a link from another entry. But both of those are enabled by the fact that the entries are connected in some pattern.

What

One such pattern depends on what the entry is about. When we focus on the what, we call the entry a page. The main page on a topic (the parent) then links to sub-topics (the children). An example of this is my page on Teaching, which has several children pages. There can be many generations of pages, resulting in complex family tree of pages. Of course, with hyperlinking, it’s not strictly a tree structure, but the fundamental idea isn’t that different from the kinds of outlines we were taught to do in school.

ribbon

When

A second way to organize pages has become so common that many people use its name to refer to any website. That’s to focus on the when of an entry. In that case, the website becomes a blog and the entries, now called posts, are organized by their time of creation into a chronology, usually with the most recent first.

Image at left, showing geologic time, courtesy of the Indiana Geological Survey.

world_mapWhere

So we have a conceptual organization and a temporal one, what else is there? Well, another that is emerging now is a spatial organization. In this case, the entries, now called place-descriptions(?), are organized by their geotag, or where they occurred. For example, my entry on Aughavannagh and Glenmalure is more about the place than about the particular time our visit occurred. Just as pages can be grouped into a tree structure or posts into a chronology, place-descriptions can be grouped into a spatial map using their geotags. So, this site now has a world map, with place markers indicating the place-descriptions.

Things get messy in practice. We also use the less-structured tags and categories as other ways to find entries. A given entry might serve as a page, a post, or a place-description. And none of this works if the entries aren’t marked appropriately.

52°54′55″N 6°25′28″W

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eTourism and community informatics

Just saw a notice for ENTER (eTourism) conference, scheduled for Amsterdam in 2009. What caught my eye were sessions on community informatics, user-generated content, accessibility, cultural heritage, online communities, and other topics related to community informatics. One of the speakers is Ulrike Gretzel, who earned her PhD here in 2004 in Communication, with a specialty in etourism.

It’s interesting to reflect on eTourism in relation to community informatics, both in terms of the underlying similarities in approach and because it’s one avenue for students to take. Tourism is the largest business in the world and the most IT-intensive. It’s also the major means of survival for many in impoverished communities.

The mission of our own tourism department is

to understand and promote the development and sustainability of healthy communities and advance quality of life and well-being of individuals, families, and communities through parks, recreation, sport, and tourism.

Compare that to the mission of the Community Informatics Initiative:

works with people to develop information and communication technologies to achieve their goals. It fosters collaborations across campus, local, national and international communities. Together we build innovative community networks, community technology centers, software, and library services.

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Creative democracy: Yes we can!

Yesterday’s election of Barack Obama as President of the United States was not only promising for our future, but was also a moving reaffirmation of all that America can be.

His Presidency may not fulfill all the dreams that the candidacy inspired; some things may not change at all. But it reminds me of what Thurgood Marshall said after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which outlawed segregated schools. When asked what the Supreme Court ruling really meant, Marshall, said that in fact nothing had changed, except that henceforth, repeating the civil rights mantra, “the law is on our side”. In a similar way, Obama’s Presidency offers no guarantees, but does offer exciting possibilities in terms of uniting Americans and restoring America’s role in the community of nations.

The election of Obama is also a reminder that democracy is not a static system, but a process in need of continual renewal by all. Dewey (1976/1939, p. 230) expresses this in his essay, “Creative democracy: The task before us”:

Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means; as that which is capable of generating the science which is the sole dependable authority for the direction of further experience and which releases emotions, needs and desires so as to call into being the things that have not existed in the past. For every way of life that fails in its democracy limits the contacts, the exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is steadied while it is also enlarged and enriched. The task of this release and enrichment is one that has to be carried on day by day. Since it is one that can have no end till experience itself comes to an end, the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.

Let’s have the audacity to hope that we are capable of creating of “a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.” I might add that John McCain’s concession speech was a gracious and thoughtful step in that direction.

References

Dewey, John (1976). Creative democracy: The task before us. In J. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925-1953, volume 14 (pp. 224-230). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1939)

Kluger, Richard (1977, 1975). Simple justice. The history of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s struggle for equality. New York: Vintage Books.

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the informal education site

Here’s a vote for infed.org on a big election day in the US: When needing to investigate the topic of multiculturalism recently, I was reminded again of the site, a great starting point for “exploring the theory and practice of informal education, lifelong learning and social action.” The articles are well-written and have good source lists. For example, see ‘race’ and difference – developing practice in lifelong learning, a recently updated piece by Mark K. Smith.

infed (the informal education homepage) was established in 1995 as an open, independent and not-for-profit site.

Put together by a small group of educators, it is now accessed around 6 million times a year.

a space to explore

Our aim is to provide a space for people to explore the theory and practice of informal education, social action and lifelong learning. We want to encourage educators and animateurs to develop ways of working and being that foster association, conversation and relationship.

via about us @ the informal education homepage

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LIS 590 IBL, Inquiry-Based Learning, Spring 2009

We’ve changed the format for my spring course, Inquiry-Based Learning. It was originally scheduled as a LEEP (online) offering, LIS 590 IBO, but will now instead be offered on campus as LIS 590 IBL. Please share this description with anyone who may be interested.

  • Course: LIS 590 IBL, Inquiry-Based Learning (CRN: 36880)
  • Instructor: Bertram (Chip) Bruce
  • Semester: Spring, 2009
  • Prerequisites: Graduate student status
  • Schedule: Mondays, 9:00-11:50 am, 109 LISB
  • Website: http://illinois.edu/goto/ibl

Inquiry-based learning is a powerful way of thinking about learning as it occurs in libraries, museums, community centers, homes, workplaces, or online, as well as in formal settings, such as schools and universities. It implies the creation of environments in which learners are actively engaged in making meaning through personal and collaborative inquiry. It does not ignore the usual focus on content/skills: “What should be taught?,” or method: “How should we teach?” but begins with even more basic questions about the nature of learning and life.

Because of this, considerations of inquiry-based learning lead directly to issues of lifelong learning, the nature of knowledge, purpose, social justice, and democracy. This broad sweep makes it impossible to encapsulate inquiry-based learning in a simple framework or method. But it is also an indication of its importance in defining ways of thinking about the meaning of community, the roles of teachers and students, the relations between school and society, and how learning and life go together.

In the course we will examine the nature of inquiry and of inquiry-based learning, drawing on philosophical, historical, and critical sources such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, Paolo Freire, and Myles Horton. We’ll read about, observe, and engage in inquiry-based learning. In the course of this, we’ll also consider challenges to inquiry-based learning, including those related to management, assessment, basic skills, cultural differences, and pedagogical goals.