This week has been really rough for me. I returned from 2 weeks abroad with the end of a bad cold, a dislocated shoulder and fractured collar bone, and tenacious jet lag that left me unable to sleep or eat. I walked back into the office at a time that is busier than usual with two big events, planning for spring programming, recruitment for the afterschool program, and four huge grants that weren’t going to write themselves.
Needless to say, you were much more likely to find me sprawled out on the floor of my office or drooling on my keyboard than acting like a productive member of this organization.
But this morning, for the first time in a week, I started to think again and have had a million ideas bubble up in response to the amazing few weeks I’ve experienced.
1) Many things from the WISE conference stuck in my head but I continued to be dismayed after learning that girls in developing countries who attend school often experience a second shift when they return home. While their access to education has increased, the expectation of “woman’s work” and a more even distribution of household labor has not followed. While this shouldn’t surprise a logical mind, learning that the second shift appeared to be universal and multigenerational made me sad (especially knowing that I had to work a 14 hour day and then go home and do the laundry).
We like to think that access to education solves everything, and in many cases it does, but the reality is it doesn’t milk the cow or hang up the laundry.
2) I was delighted to take part in many classroom visits and found myself in a middle school in Sharjah (consult a high quality atlas to find it). At first glance, this classroom couldn’t have been more different from a NYC classroom.
Almost all the girls, and certainly all the female faculty in the room were almost entirely veiled, some with covered hands and full veils over their faces. But I was delighted to find that as soon as I saw the materials on their desks I was able to tell immediately what scientific concept they were learning.
At one school, they girls recently met a NASA astronaut and predictably, they all want to visit space. But in addition to their hopes and desires, they began to push for more math and astronomy courses after hearing one needed significant advanced study in those fields to actually be an astronaut.
3) On Wednesday, Science & the City (which I also design programming for) hosted Thomas Malaby and Lee Guzofski for an event about the anthropology of online worlds. I furiously scribbled notes as they made point after point that reordered my world. I kept looking to Stephanie (my partner in crime) to see if other, smarter people than I, were having the same response.
The idea of the quest captured my imagination. A quest is an epic adventure in which we choose to conquer a big hairy audacious goal through a clearly delineated path and often while working in concert with others.
As a middle school teacher, I can’t imagine creating a real world in which the students choose to quest and yet online, they do it by habit. In comparison, why would anyone want to sit in my class?
Despite many long and impassioned conversations at WISE, I’m not ready to change my fundamental belief that schools, even in their 19th century factory model, aren’t the key element in maintaining a social structure that delivers a decent quality of life for most people.
I have even more concerns about disruptive innovations in education as they seem to continue to privilege those already well served by the education structures — autodidacts with access to expensive things.
4) As part of our work in Malaysia, I’ve had to ramp up on eLearning including a gaming, online schools, and mobile learning (thanks to those who have endured my very basic questions).
I’ve tried hard to find a framework within which I can organize and then apply all of this new information. It was with my first real thought in days that I recognized that ultimately we had been talking about free choice learning theory. This is the organizing framework which guides museum and informal science education and I’ve found it very useful in organizing and applying what I’ve gleaned over the past few weeks.
I must head home to milk the cows and mull over another quest. Hopefully, with a few more hours of sleep, I can actually take all of these ideas and turn them into something more useful than a blog post.
