Art TEAMS is off to a Great Start

 

This week we finally started our Art TEAMS grant with teachers. The project is developing self-driven creative learners who connect disciplines using arts and emerging media as a language to engage and organize knowledge and life experiences.

We will accomplish this by developing, implementing, and evaluating a professional development program for K-12 art educators, generalist teachers, principals, teaching artists, and museum educators.

This week was our first with this great crew of educators. In this professional learning opportunity, we have been careful to design a program that respects the strengths of all the participants and positions everyone as a participant and co-leader. I have to admit that I have not created this much physical representation of learning since my Graduate school days at UCR, nor have I created this much art since my elementary school days. I have found the interactions and the learning powerful, and I believe we are on our way to creating a powerful model that will provide an avenue for innovation. 

Reflecting on this week, my lessons are:

1. We all require protected time to make leaps in our practice and transform our approach. I do know that summer workshops transformation is hard to bring back into the classroom, and thus we will continue to support and work with our team of educators for the next two years.

2. Art is fun even for those with a limited artistic ability (me). You just have to let go and be playful. 

3. Exploring the affordances of materials and discovering their malleability is a truly engaging endeavor.

4. Movement. Movement is magical; in many ways, it is a discovery for me, a discovery that makes me dance with joy. 

Finally, I want to reflect on a moment of pride. In this grant, we insisted on supporting local Nebraska artists. We have found four unique and outstanding artists. I will talk about each of them in a different post but for now suffice to say that I have had a glorious week, and I cannot wait for next week to continue the work.

Mass shooting at Uvalde elementary school

 I found out about the massacre on a flight to the RESPECt conference in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. What is the point of discussing how to teach computer science to young children when their lives are forfeit? Yes the gunman/child was most likely unstable. But the fact that the act of desperation is aimed at young children and the people who care for them? That is a social ill. We have to do better, we have to do something. We shall say prayers, but those are not enough. I just hope that this will not kick off a new campaign of denial debasing the loss of grieving parents.

Computer Science as a Core and the Buffalo Massacre

 

The argument against teaching computer science to all came this week from some of our rural schools. They point out, and rightfully so, that the many jobs needs in their communities go far beyond computer science. Once again, I would like to stress that rural communities do need to manage their needs in flexible and locally sensitive ways. 

My point, however, is that we should stop thinking about computer science as exclusively a Career and Technical Ed issue. It is not. Understanding and being able to get a sense of technology is a core knowledge. The metaphor for me is the difference between a health career class (CTE) and biology (core knowledge). All educated people need to understand core ideas in the way the world works around them. Technology-driven by the capacity of computer science is one of the most dominant forces in our lives. 

An example in public discourse is how some platforms use algorithms that create extremist views by presenting users with a twisted worldview fed by engagement algorithms. Extremists from all creeds seem to find a community and become radicalized online. Teaching Computer Science will not solve this problem. It will, however, help at least some users understand the process and maybe resist it a little better.

Curriculum Unhidden

This post is a result of a series of conversations I recently had with a number of people vis-a-vis more recent developments in curriculum development and rejection.

So first things first- the hidden curriculum, according to Wikipedia is, "A hidden curriculum is a set of lessons "which are learned but not openly intended"^[1]

 to be taught in school such as the norms, values, and beliefs conveyed in both the classroom and social environment.^[2]" (Wikipedia). More recently, efforts like the 1619 project curriculum were recognized as subverting the hidden curriculum. In the past attacks on new curricula were often somewhat veiled in language that claimed that these new approaches will lead to children not learning. This was very clear during the attacks on "New Math". I do not want to get into what New Math is or even if it was working. I just want to note that it was an innovation that got ridiculed without a serious look. My point is that it got attacked because it was new, and it was in some ways disrupting elements in the Hidden Curriculum. The attacks on the Common Core standards are very much the same. The common core became a political target as explored in informative ways in the website #commoncore project.

We have changed since then. The attacks on Critical Race Theory and banning curricula, for example in Florida, have made it clear that there is no more hidden curriculum. Instead, we have a hotly debated curriculum that is at the center of a political maelstrom. In some ways, I welcome the open discussion about the content of education. On another level, this makes education at the center of the culture wars in ways that are not welcoming for students and teachers. 

Thinking about the Future of Conferences

 For the past three weeks, I have been to three conferences. SITE, the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education, in San Diego, was an international hybrid conference (I went in person). NETA, the Nebraska Educational Technology Association, was an in-person-only conference. And finally, AERA, the American Educational Research Association meeting in San Diego, is a hybrid conference, and I am attending virtually only.

These are in no way my first conferences after the pandemic. Still, their concentration in a span of two weeks allowed me to think about the affordances and limitations of technology. First, there is no doubt that the face-to-face interaction of in-person conferences allows a different set of interactions. For example, after one of my presentations, I just happened to meet Erkko Sointu from Eastern Finland university in the corridor; a short interaction resulted in his declaration "Go Big Red" and a discussion about his ties to Nebraska. This led to great conversations, me hearing about some of the work done by the group and a cluster of proposals for a conference they are holding next Fall (Hybrid). NETA is a practitioner conference. At NETA, I  spent a good part of my time interacting with teachers in our booth. I reached out to passers-by and engaged with them. This would not be possible at all in an online format in which participants have to choose to engage with me specifically.

Right now, I am in a hybrid format meeting of AERA. I have not engaged in many sessions despite paying and having an interest. The online interaction is more challenging because staying at home/work means that I have many competing commitments away from the intellectual benefits of the conference. Not seeing people in person lowers my level of engagement considerably. All of these reasons point to the significant affordances of the in-person conference. Well, not so fast.

On Thursday afternoon of the SITE conference, I walked down the corridor. Four rooms had no living person in them but had a projection of presenters and participants, all online,  engaged. It was an eerie experience that felt like bad science fiction; however, the participants included many who were limited in their ability to travel (cost, health) or international participants for whom the travel was onerous. The result is that many participants who would not otherwise have access to the work were able to present, learn and grow. 

Travel, especially by plane, has a significant carbon footprint. There is no doubt that in-person conferences are full of growth opportunities, serendipity, and fun. But are these qualities worth the price in carbon footprint? 

I do not have an answer to what we should do, but I would like to suggest:

1. We should keep exploring alternative formats for conferences that engage participants in fuller ways than they do now. 

2. We should be highly selective of the conferences we choose to attend in person.

3. We should experiment in other ways to interact with each other through digital means- perhaps ed camp (unconference) style.

Finding my way around Fargo North Dakota and other Metacognitive tasks

 This weekend I went to Fargo, North Dakota for an athletic event. Navigating a new city is always a challenge, and I started by activating Google Maps to get everywhere in town. I quickly found out that relying on google maps without any idea about the general direction was a disorienting and challenging experience. 

I ended up looking at the routes for destinations in town before I started every drive. In this way, planning made me more certain of where I was going and less dependent on the device as the sole (and not always most efficient) guide. In the work we are planning to do in the next five years, our Art TEAMS project, we have been discussing sketchbooks as a metacognitive scaffold. It is a way to represent inquiry in a layered visual form opening up eyes to connections and insights. This weekend's experience opened up a different avenue of metacognition that I have not considered in the context of our current study. That is the use of planning and directionality to illuminate the initial experience and ensure that we have enough of a scaffold to begin, so we (and our teachers) do not feel disoriented. 

I find that planning is often missing in students' work. They write an essay, code a program, or create n art product with very little planning. The lack of planning often adds to resistance to editing and revision, which are the keys to moving from a fail to a win. It is hard to get our students to plan, but it is perhaps the most important metacognitive skill that we can teach. Make a plan, execute, iterate, and then reflect. But it all starts with a plan.

The workweek then had a significant planning session led by Kimberley D'Adamo. it was a gratifying experience to start charting the path we want to walk, making sure we feel like we know where we are going and having a reasonable plan to get there. 

Skill, Digital Creation and memory

 

I have always thought digital creation as a potential shortcut to help creators leapfrog traditional barriers created by skill. The core idea is that software, such as iMovie, Adobe apps, can help individuals be creative with a low skill threshold. I am attempting to do exactly that on my iPad. However, I am still struggling with results finding myself repeatedly reaching out to physical materials and their subsequent digital manipulation with existing media. 

This idea of new boundaries of creativity allows me to rethink about affordances of the latest technologies and my skills within them. The images I collect and create are reorganized and even layered in ways that rephrase the bluntness of my message. For example, in the image to the right, I started reflecting in writing about my relationship with scraps of paper as ephemeral representations of my life. Messages to self, lists of steps, ideas, doodles, and even notes about what I will say next in my meeting. All of these I throw away with glee once I dem them unuseful or past expiration date. For the first time, I tried to reflect on why I may feel this way? I have so much joy in presenting a clean slate and reinventing myself. One of the reviewers for my promotion file asked (and I am paraphrasing), "Who is this Guy?" 

For someone who has stayed put for 20 years in the same place and job, I seem to be constantly reinventing myself, perhaps pathologically so. Maybe that is why I find the internet's inability to forget us and the things we have done so frightening. My current interpretation is that it links up with the multigenerational experiences of repeated migration. And as usual still processing.