Designing Communities of Learning - Constraining Features
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By Clarence Thompson
The first post of this series presented the challenge of designing a learning community as a problem of imposing a desired outcome or set of outcomes on a situation that is initially chaotic and non-textbook, a situation that is subject to constraints beyond the control of the designer. The second post listed the desired outcomes or strategic goals which our particular team is aiming for in designing a community of learning for mastery of basic arithmetic, algebra and college-prep math in North Portland. This week's post will consider some of the features and constraints of our design "landscape."
We teach at a public community space once a week in the evening after our work (and the regular schooling) of our students is over. Some of us try to arrive about 45 minutes before our formal teaching session starts so that we can mingle with students (and potential students), and to help anyone who may want assistance with homework. Our formal teaching session starts after this and lasts for an hour, and we give homework to help students practice skills and master concepts.
Obviously the reason why we teachers are giving our time, effort and resources to this task is because we want to provide the best opportunity for our students to grow into strong leaders of strong communities that can successfully resist the oppression which communities of color have historically faced. Yet it is also true that we are asking our students to do something that is more than a little unnatural. They are kids ranging in age from nine to fifteen years of age, and we encounter them while they are hanging out in a public space with friends, video games and basketball courts. We want them to give up some of their free time to learn arithmetic from us - a group of uncool adults. But whether they choose to do so or not is entirely up to them. We can't compel them.
Here we run into our first constraint. Spending time in this way doesn't taste good to many kids. And if they are pressed with arguments that this use of their time is for their own good, many of these kids are good "lawyers" who will skillfully argue that they already had school and that they see no point in spending time after school to do more school. Faced with this response, a would-be teacher could throw up his or her hands in surrender and say with George Bernard Shaw that youth is wasted on the young. But such a surrender would leave our youth in a situation of continued economic and political vulnerability due to a continued lack of the economic and political power that comes from learning how to skillfully do beautifully good work.
A second constraint is the home environment in which many of these kids have grown up, and the resulting habits which that environment has produced. Many of these kids are the product of disruptive and chaotic home environments. Therefore, they are not used to a structure of clear expectations, nor have they learned the discipline of delaying gratification in order to achieve a goal. Their babysitter has been a TV set or game console. Or they are "free range kids" without a lot of adult structure and guidance except for the time they spend in school. Or their home may be full of dysfunction and family difficulties.
A third constraint is the prevailing culture in which they have been immersed. It is a culture which does not present very many positive role models from communities of color. One big reason for this lack is that the major outlets of American culture are owned by rich members of the dominant population who have made their wealth by selling entertainment which strives for maximum stimulation, arousal and excitement by appealing to the basest of human cravings. Many people have begun to realize that in America, sports are the "opiate of the masses." The major outlets of American media therefore bombard young African-American (and other minority) kids with images of role models who are paid huge amounts of money to do such useless things as playing basketball for a living. These kids then internalize the message that they don't have to learn math in order to study how to engage in beautifully good work for necessary uses, because they'll just play in the NBA when they grow up. And if they find that they can't make it onto a team roster, well...they'll be rappers or other entertainers, because those are the role models they see in the culture fed to them by mass media, which holds up pictures of the most useless members of their communities as models to emulate.
Indeed, the present-day American mass culture which has been created by the most powerful members of the dominant population is designed to turn as many of us as possible into addicts, and to make the purveyors of this culture as rich as possible from our addiction. So we now have Takis for the body, and by means of electronic entertainment we also have Takis for the soul.
Given this sort of environment subject to this set of constraints, it might seem impossible to transform a bunch of unstructured kids into a disciplined community of learning dedicated to mastering a subject such as mathematics and a skill set that requires hours of focus, concentration and deliberate practice. And yet that transformation is happening, as can be seen from these pictures:
One of our teachers poses a subtraction problem
And a couple of our students chew on it!
My next post will delve more deeply into the particular design tactics which our group is using to achieve our design goals.
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