In August of 2012, after 20 years of working in the field of education, I decided to take the GRE. It was a decision I made despite the fact that the GRE is against everything that I believe about education and learning. Because of this it pained me to pay ETS and to buy into the system in this way, literally. For a variety of reasons though I thought it could be useful to take and, in truth, I was curious. With standardized testing such the rage in education right now, I was wondering how I would do on one of these tests after 20 years as a professional in the field, as a moderately successful student before that, and a person who stays fairly current, is reasonably well-read and writes online frequently.

Well, I failed. Badly.

“Did I study?” my friends asked. Yes, I did study. I knew that my math skills, which were reasonably good in high school, were very very rusty having done little beyond the basics now for a couple decades. And it turned out it was kind of fun too – remembering how to solve problems, figure out the length of sides and degree of angles, solving for %s. In some cases helpful too. I also worked on vocabulary – downloaded apps that I would play with in those in-between moments, take practice tests, etc.

“Maybe it’s because you have such a bad attitude about the GRE” they would then conjecture. Sure, I’m positive that was a factor. Having everything I viscerally believed about standardized testing confirmed by Nicholas Lehmann back in the 90s, I have never looked back. I’m sure that somewhere in the back of my mind there are elements of resistance kicking that got in the way. Even so, on top of practicing for months, I even took a full week of my vacation to focus. Though I am a critic, I wasn’t trying to fail. In fact, I was trying to succeed!

Yet.

So … maybe you know this if you’ve taken this test anytime in recent history. But first you get to the study center and they ask you to leave everything behind in lockers – nothing can come with you. No watches, calculators, etc. let alone smart phones, etc. Then because you arrived early, you wait. Anxiously. I saw people – most much younger than me – in the waiting room literally still studying, cramming, before they go in. Some were actually sweating and most tap their feet or fingers or some parts of themselves with nervousness.

This was not a happy environment. And the walls were painted that mental hospital green, I suppose to keep us feeling calm. But, at least for me, it just cast a sickly gloom on top of everything else around me. No one smiled. This was not a place to be smiley.

Finally it was my turn. I enter the test center main doorway after signing some sort of agreement (I don’t remember what I signed … a promise to not disclose, I believe), was wanded by security, and pointed to my cube. I got one pencil, one scrap of paper and an old computer (monochrome screen, flat keyboard). Oh, and optional headphones that I suppose could have used to block out any additional noise since there was clearly no music around to tap into.

I truly felt like I had entered a dystopic novel.

Finally I start to take the test. All that fun I had solving math problems was very helpful and calmed me down right away … I know how to do this one, and this one … and I started to go through them at a steady consistent pace. I didn’t linger too long if I was stuck, planning to come back to those I found harder, I double-checked my answers in quick ways I learned, I got the easier ones out of the way.

I was barely half-way done when the timer timed out.

Next up verbal and quantitative reasoning. This part was generally fine and I even had time to go back and review. Wheew. But then, the Analytical Writing section was next. This section is meant to measure “your ability to articulate complex ideas clearly and effectively; support ideas with relevant reasons and examples; examine claims and accompanying evidence; sustain a well-focused, coherent discussion; control the elements of standard written English.” This is the part graded by both one “one trained reader, using a six-point holistic scale” and “reviewed by e-rater, a computerized program developed by ETS, which is used to monitor the human reader.”

I was asked to write to an “issue task” prompt first with an essay in response to the prompt. I had 20 minutes. The prompt was, in my mind, a complicated philosophical question and the tool I was using was a crude word processing program.

I barely got my thoughts together by the time the 20 minutes had ended.

By this time I was shaken – I’d timed out on 2 of the 3 sections. The next ones went almost the same way, with me not able to complete the math on time, finishing the reasoning part but unable to complete a decent essay in 20 minutes. I probably got a little further on the math second time around and I did at least complete an essay this time – the “argument task” prompt was, to me, more straight forward – but my answer was truthfully fairly idiotic, IMHO. I was really just trying to get something finished and didn’t really care what I had to say to do so.

So no need for me to share my actual score – you can probably guess how this turned out in the end. I walked away a bit upset but ultimately had to have a sense of humor about the whole thing mostly because it wasn’t a high stakes situation for me (I did not send my score anywhere!). But, as a person in that room among all the others, I knew my low-stakes situation was privileged. For most of them, this was a really big deal. Although, as ETS will let you know, you can choose to cancel your scores after taking the test and “canceled scores are not added to your permanent record.” However, “If you wish to take the test again, you must reregister and submit another test payment.” (Which, I believe at the time I took it, cost $120.)

Oy. Besides all of this, I really did try to notice what this test did test in me, besides the ability to take the test in the allotted time with the allotted tools in the allotted conditions that they provided. And as generally self-reflective person, I have failed to come up with anything more than that. What I know now is that I am a poor “Computer-based GRE® revised General Test” taker. I’m not sure that there is anything else to know.

All this to say that I remain very disturbed by what standardized testing experience means on the greater scale. I am very disturbed when I watch Frontline’s replay of the Michelle Rhee story in DC that standardized test-scores were, and remain, a prevailing factor in assessing success for youth as well as for teachers and administrators. In Philadelphia where you read about the same kind of testing scandal taking place that you saw in DC, you don’t have to dig far to see that there are actually thousands of examples of this across the country. And I am disturbed by sanctions Seattle teachers face for boycotting tests that they believe, as professionals in their field, are inherently flawed and don’t show student learning**.

As Yong Zhou wrote after scandals were reported in Atlanta, “[This] should serve as a wake-up call to proponents of test-driven reform policies: it’s time to abandon high stakes testing in our schools. Decades of high-stakes testing has not brought improvement but has corrupted our schools. The cost is too high.”

On the post-secondary level too, what we know is that the GRE is an artifact of a school of thought that chose to make higher education a meritocracy yet so many of them continue to require it even today*.

With roots in intelligence testing that go back generations, the mental measurement establishment continues to define merit largely in terms of potential ability rather than actual performance. The case against standardized mental testing is as intellectually and ethically rigorous as any argument about social policy in the past twenty years. And yet such testing continues to dominate the education system, carving further inroads into the employment arena as well, having been bolstered in recent years by a conservative backlash advocating advancement by “merit.”

Like a drug addict who knows he should quit, America is hooked. We are a nation of standardized-testing junkies.

Meritocracy’s Crooked Yardstick, FairTest.org, August 21, 2007

I do not believe in meritocracy in education – for youth or adults. I believe learning should be a democracy and in fact, institutions of learning should be our most democratic space for both practice and for social renewal.

(*Note: I chose to come to Arcadia University for my masters’ degree in Education because, at least in this school, they do not require the GRE for admission. I applaud them for making this decision. See FairTest.org’s list of 4-year colleges and universities with test optional admission policies.)

(**Second note added a bit later because so important: Scrap the MAP! Solidarity with Seattle teachers boycotting the MAP test)

Ignorance and learning and like two sides of the same sheet of paper (Ellsworth, Teaching Positions, 57)

Influenced by reading Elizabeth Ellsworth’s Teaching Positions and William Pinar’s What is Curriculum Theory?, as well as my continued exploration of the Youth Voices forum, I am choosing to wrap this blog post around my personal experience and autobiography as a learner. Of course, no one blog post can contain my entire story so approaching this post in this way assures that I’ll need to return to this idea in subsequent writings, which I believe Ellsworth, Pinar and the Youth Voices team would argue, is productive.

Elizabeth Ellsworth, as a person with a background in film studies who becomes a teacher of media theory, applies a notion of “modes of address” to the situation of her own teaching in her book Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy and the Power of Address published in 1997. She turns to others who have similarly looked to fields outside of education, including psychoanalysis, literature, film theory, and performance, to better understand the paradoxes of teaching.

My own experience as a learner, a colleague of educators at the NWP, a person interested in the visual arts and performance, and probably most importantly for this post, my experience as a patient in a psychoanalytic tradition (modern psychoanalysis, to be specific) for much of my adult life, draws me to her writing and her core questions about teaching and learning. 

I was in my early twenties, about to graduate from college, when I first sought out a mental health care for myself. Many years before that, as a teenager in the throes of a volatile family divorce, my sisters and I were brought to a mental health practitioner in this same modern psychoanalytic tradition. This “intervention” lasted only briefly, however, because of a lack of agreement on whether or not it was actually useful. Many years later though, as I worked my way through college I realized that I was seriously struggling – struggling with the big essential questions of right and wrong as many do at that age … but also a constant inner dark struggle that I found difficult to name yet impossible to escape.

“Curricula and pedagogies, like films, are for someone” Ellsworth writes. (58)  As a teacher considering her own “modes of address” within her curricula and pedagogy, she looks at “.. the impossibility of perfect fits between what a teacher or curriculum intends and what a student gets; what an educational institution desires and what a student body delivers; what a teacher “knows” and what she teaches; what dialogue invites and what arrives unbidden.” (52)

It is this part of what is invited as well as what “arrives unbidden” that is the most fascinating to me. I believe this is partially due to the fact that I have always, as a learner, been keenly aware of what I am focused on intellectually and what, at the same time, I am feeling emotionally and the kinds of ideas, questions, sensations that intersect with my reading and writing along the way, whether in an formal educational environment or otherwise. This has always made it hard for me to follow paths (ie. curriculum) inscribed by others; while at the same time allowing me to connect ideas together that might otherwise not be connected. It was through psychoanalysis, in fact, where I learned to apply a therapeutic and creative lens to this way of mental/emotional processing, and that supported me in realizing how both relatively normal this way of thinking is and also how it could be a useful way of “reading/writing my world” (Freire) if honed and used correctly.

“Teaching is not psychoanalysis” however, writes Ellsworth. Instead she focuses on the ways that psychoanalysis can inform teaching. This is because, she writes, “consciously or unconsciously, teachers deal nevertheless in repression, denial, ignore-ance, resistance, fear, and desire whenever we teach.” (70)

In exploring what teachers can learn from psychoanalysis, Ellsworth shares more about the practice itself, beginning with the fact that analysts are themselves engaged as both doctors and patients, ie. “part of the training of psychoanalysts is that they themselves be psychoanalyzed”

this is because, like literary critics, psychoanalysts cannot be taught how or what to interpret. They can only cultivate a familiarity and awareness of the undecidability of readings – and how texts manage to defer any final reading. (70-71)

What follows then in this first section of Teaching Positions are her imagining what this could look like in a teacher education program – how those learning to teach, instead of simply learning the meaning of a particular author’s text could instead be encouraged to pay attention to their own thinking and emotional processes, when engaging with the text. This would be a means of beginning to understand better the different ways that dialogue is both invited as well as “arrives unbidden” in any dialogic situation.

She quotes Bollas (1995) and writes that analysts “must cultivate a ‘third ear’ that ‘listens to the latent contents concealed in the manifest text’ that the client speaks” (71), and then similarly, in imagining teacher education programs where pre-service students might, for example, interrogate a text, suggests that a similar approach to reading – ie. through paying attention to their own thinking and emotional processes – could support teachers in “reading as educators.” (italics hers, 73)

In Pinar’s What is Curriculum Theory? (2004) he also focuses in on a quote by Ellsworth in this same section:

What happens to my own processes of thinking, my own symbolic constellation when I read this author’s words? Where, as I read this author, do I get stuck, do I forget, do I resist? Where, when I listen to a classmate’s response to this reading, does my own project … get shifted, troubled, unsettled – why there? (73)

Pinar writes that the “focus here is on teaching as a structure of address; it is implicitly, on curriculum as a verb.” (199) This idea of curriculum as a verb supports Pinar’s notion of “currere” as “strategy for students of curriculum to study the relations between academic knowledge and life history in the interests of self-understanding and social reconstruction.” (35) In this framework, curriculum is shifted from a set of objectives to be followed and instead makes it a “complicated conversation with oneself … in which one becomes mobilized for engaged … action… as a private-and-public intellectual … with others in the social reconstruction of the public sphere.” (37)

Curriculum theory asks you, as a perspective or practicing teacher, to consider your position as engaged with yourself and your students and your colleagues in the construction of a public sphere … so conceived, the classroom simultaneously becomes a civic square and a room of one’s own. (37-38)

In the context of curriculum theory too, Ellsworth writes that attending to impossibility of teaching, the gaps in meaning-making and the modes of address help us to “exceed the hidden curriculum.” She writes that it is no longer “ … about the unacknowledged ideology of the curriculum which can be brought to light and decided through analysis.”  (52) But that it is instead the multiple stories and the gaps between the stories, where questions emerge and new meaning can be made – meaning that is not determinable from the outset. Social justice and change is therefore “performative” and situated as is the teaching and learning surrounding it.

It is now, as an adult working with educators, that I see this kind of performative and situated work in Youth Voices, the online social networking platform for youth developed by a group of writing project colleagues. It’s not really a surprise, I am coming to realize, that I am drawn to this work, which seems to me to be attempting to find ways to integrate the personal and the worldy, the intellectual and the emotional, the learner and the teacher, “the world and the word.“ (I will explore these connections in subsequent posts.)

My reading path, through Ellsworth, Pinar, and also as I start to read the work of many within Youth Voices, is peppered with my own feelings, reflections, reactions, rejections, assumptions, along the way. This blog post is only a thin layer of that, which even as I work to conclude, I’m slightly uncomfortable not to go back and “clean up” (ie. remove the more personal content and connections about me). It is important to keep these in here though, I decided … while also important that I continue to go more deeply with these connections that I have surfaced.  In this way I am attempting, I believe, to embrace Ellsworth’s call to “read as an educator,” exploring currere a la Pinar, and “detoxing” a la Youth Voices in the spirit of my own self-directed learning. 

It is this resistance to the banalities of normalization that makes agency possible. (Ellsworth, Teaching Positions, 44)

Describe yourself, including perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses.

Over the past two decades, and full-time for the last twelve years, I have worked with the National Writing Project, a peer-based professional network of teachers across grade levels (K-16) and across disciplines with a focus on writing and literacy learning. My particular focus has been an interest in the way that digital media and networked learning environments are changing the way we think about literacy learning and teaching. I now direct our Digital Is project funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. 

I think the path I have taken shows a bit about myself and highlights what I think are some of the strengths of my learning style and approach.

My introduction to the writing project began in the early 90s after I had completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania and was living and working in the West Philadelphia neighborhood. I was taking graduate classes in painting at the time and looking for a position that would support my interests in the arts, education and community-based change. The Philadelphia Writing Project (PhilWP), based at UPenn, was the place where I found a job and ultimately a home. PhilWP teachers take an inquiry approach to their practice, supporting themselves and their colleagues in being creative and innovative thinkers and leaders, even within what are often traditional “banking” structures of education. It is a networked professional community of practice and it was here that I found a place that fit my beliefs as well as inspired me to dig more deeply into my own questions about teaching and learning.

Around this same time, the Internet was becoming more widely available, and inspired by PhilWP and the larger national network, I was able to take a collaborative inquiry approach to what could be learn from and with this new forum. These questions and collaborations immediately opened interesting paths, and eventually a career, that now combines my interests and passions in arts, pedagogy and networked communities.

This path has brought me to now be fully embedded within a dialogue about what is being called “connected learning” – a set of learning and design principals described by the MacArthur Foundation through their Digital Media and Learning work and research. These principles, and the core values behind them, have deep ties to work and learning from constructivist and progressive education. Connecting these worlds is a large part of what I help to do in my writing project work today, including program direction, design, and the creation of online environments for sharing dialogue and inquiry such as the NWP Digital Is website. 

As a member of a peer-based network, I don’t teach as much as I organize and facilitate and I am always a learner. I feel incredibly fortunate to have found such a dynamic space and community that has supported my own growth and development while allowing me to contribute to the learning of the larger field. It is also this space from which I have formed a vision of what is possible in education and across learning environments in general.

Another component of my vision of learning has been developed through my interest in the arts and social justice and a connection to a small Philadelphia-based non-profit called Spiral Q Puppet Theater. Spiral Q supports peer-based cross-generational, creative and interest driven social justice work within communities (whether they be schools, neighborhoods, support groups, activist groups, etc.). In many ways, Spiral Q is a unique and exciting example of what is possible when considering the principles of connected learning. My work and experience there has also been a path created through inquiry and interest – one that began when I was a community volunteer who helped establish the annual Peoplehood parade and pageant. Over time, I supported resource development around educational initiatives at the Q, co-facilitated some of that work, and eventually became a member of the board of directors. I was co-chair and chair for five years and completed my eight-year tenure this past May. Having now stepped down from my board role, I look to integrate this work and thinking into a larger investigation of teaching and learning connected to community-based practice.

[edits based on feedback, added 07/22] I believe the path I have taken also demonstrates why, only now, I have returned to formal education. And my meandering path, while fruitful, has meant that I have no formal degrees in education. In terms of weaknesses and items to further work on, I also know that focus can sometimes be a struggle – and the more that the webs of life (and the Internet!) weave their beautiful patterns the more that I can find myself wandering.

Explain your reasons for wanting to pursue your particular program. Include your career goals.

I am deeply curious about the ways that we all learn and change as individuals and within communities. Within in the rainbow of possibilities those curiosities offer, I find pedagogical pathways to be most interesting. Curriculum studies, in particular, feels to me to be an opportunity to bring together the different stands of my work and interests and I appreciate the focus on inquiry into learning and teaching that curriculum study embraces.

My career goals are similar to what I am working on today while opening up additional teaching and research possibilities. I seek to enhance my ability to communicate my ideas, focus my inquiries, and increase the tools available for me to do this work.

I am therefore applying to your Masters in Education program with a focus on curriculum studies as an opportunity to work creatively within a more formal structure of graduate education. I seek to formally matriculate as a part-time graduate student in the fall 2012 with the goal of completely a formal course of study by December 2013.

Thank you for considering my application.

Originally composed as a Pecha Kucha presentation, Spring 2012 for Curriculum Theory, Policy and Change at Arcadia University. Inspired by all mentioned … plus Dr. Peter Appelbaum, Christopher Loeffler and Maxfield Arnosky. Thanks all ya’ll!

Some 20x20 thinking about the metaphor of the “rhizome” in learning

“Rhizomic learning theory” caught my attention this past fall when Dave Cormier started a robust dialogue about these ideas during a MOOC I somewhat follow called #change11. I decided to “dig” into it (pun intended) as part of a course on Curriculum Theory, Policy and Change that I am taking this semester.

Dave Cormier is a blogger and educator in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and published an article in Innovate—Journal of Online Education called “Rhizomic Education: Community as Curriculum” (2008).

Rhizomic learning theory is based on the metaphor of rhizomes found in the writing of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:

“… A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. …”

A core idea of Deleuze’s rhizomic philosophy suggests that there is no fixed knowledge only new knowledge that emerges from acts of creation.

Therefore in regards to curriculum, Dave writes,

“In the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.”

Other educators have been thinking about this metaphor as a way to think about learning. Mary Ann Reilly, a blogger and educator working in New Jersey, considers rhizomic theory in the context of teacher professional learning.

“I suggest that implementation of [professional development] programs as a substitution for professional learning undermines teachers’ agency; obscures our capacity to recognize anomalous situations, and diminishes thinking and learning. As a counter model to development, I describe professional learning as rhizomatic, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) metaphor for horizontal thinking that is nonhierarchical, and advocate for locally determined professional learning.”

In a blog post about her work at the InnovationLab in Colorado where rhizomic learning is a key theory of action in the design and implementation of curriculum, titled “Wanted (And Needed): ‘Radical’ Collaborations” Monika Hardy writes,

“One of our immediate goals is to affect the research/researchers/stakeholders enough to break down the walls of tradition and remove major roadblocks to these spaces of learning/permissions, particularly in the mind, such as standardized testing and set curriculum. And to do it in a way that is useful.”

I believe that I see and experience different aspects of rhizomic learning by participating with teachers and learners – particularly those taking an inquiry stance towards their work and learning – both online and within networks (see also a previous short study I did on teachers leading in online public spaces). Dave Cormier has suggested that the rhizomic metaphor is a useful way to think about the ways we can learn learning and connecting in online networked environments given his experience with #change11 and also EdTechtalk.

Here are a few forums online that strike me as fairly dynamic centers of activity with potential for highly rhizomic connections:

• Teachers Teaching Teachers and, a related, …
• … teacher and youth created curriculum and social network space like Youth Voices (created and fostered by writing project teachers with others)
• I am biased, but … NWP Digital Is
• Forums supporting peer teaching and learning such as Peer 2 Peer University
• Cooperatively organized online spaces like the Cooperative Catalyst blog
• MOOCs such as #change11
• Twitter, in general, and in communities like #engchat
• And … various social media tools for creating, collecting, curating, annotating, sharing.

Would love to learn more about your rhizomic connections too!

See also …

• Dave Cormier’s recently created Rhizomic Learning group on Mendeley group can join.
• A Rhizomes about Rhizomes Pinterest board I am compiling you can follow or add comments.
• And a Rhizomatic diigo group I invite you to join too.

 … it just makes my brain feel right. Want to join me?