Mind the Gap: Creating Experience-based Learning Remotely

Is it possible to re-design the kind of experience-based learning we created together at CITYterm and in the Teaching for Experience workshop in a remote medium?

I confess I do not know, but I am really eager to try. And that is what Mind The Gap is going to do this fall.  Here is the link-https://mtgnow.org/

We just went live today with the website. Please feel free to pass this link around to whomever you think might be interested.

Since you read this blog (well, maybe you read it sometimes), you have some idea of the kinds of things we have learned about how and why some moments in our lives become experiences. And transformative experiences in many cases.

So, the new challenge is this--can you design an online curriculum, pedagogy and a collective of human relationships that will allow everyone involved to create an experience?  I have been very hopeful with some experiments lately, but it is such a different world to what I am used to whether I am working with students or teachers.

Here is one thing I think we have going for us from a learning theory point of view. It took me years of teaching and coaching to realize that the following phrase is deeply true--"Transitions are a time of maximum creativity." We will have to have a sophisticated understanding of the characteristics of transitions and why we sabotage that state of being so frequently, so unnecessarily.  This venture is all about the time of TRANSITION. Let's see what we can create!

Thoughts and comments welcome. I will keep you posted as this progresses. Share the website with your friends and colleagues.

Keep the faith..

The DKDK Project Goes to College!

Twenty-four years ago, CITYterm started experimenting with how early elementary school might be synthesized with college to create an educational experience that adolescents would actually be eager to engage in and would trigger an intrinsic motivation for learning. To that end, we mined (and stole) liberally from Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Waldorf and the Bank Street School of Education. 

The other major place we looked for engagement and intrinsic motivation was in the (tragically named) world of "extra" or "co-curriculars." My own expertise was in the world of athletics, but I soon found that theater, music, debate, outdoor education, service learning and countless other areas would yield great ideas for deciphering the mystery of engagement and motivation.

Why couldn't high school classrooms look more like those arenas?  Could you make a student's learning experience become integrated and overcome the fragmented world they inhabit that is partially responsible for generating the crippling levels of anxiety that students feel today? What we found was that they could, but you had to be extraordinarily precise in the skills and psycho-emotional dispositions you had students practice. And you had to be very flexible and adaptive in the way you used time and space. In other words, where and how does learning take place? And what makes it transformative?

Well, colleges have been experimenting with these ideas for a number of years now. For example, Ken Bain and his colleagues (that includes us!) at The Best Teachers Institute spend time designing what they call "Supercourses" that facilitate deep learning. 

While the DKDK Project has already been working with elementary, middle and highs schools to design and implement this kind of learning, we are exceptionally pleased to be partnering with a number of offices, centers and museums at the University of Chicago to share what we have learned in the college setting with teachers of every age group.

The DKDK Project goes to College in April 2020!

The DKDK Project, in partnership with The University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, Stevanovich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, the Center for Teaching and the Smart Museum, is thrilled to announce the

Learning Beyond the Classroom Workshop

We invite educators from secondary, post-secondary and community-based settings to join us in Chicago for a two-day workshop focused on transformational teaching practices.

What participants can expect

Designed in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, this workshop is an interactive seminar that asks participants to experience the benefit of deep learning, including place-based and experience-based pedagogical practices. Through hands-on sessions and seminar-style discussion, participants will explore ways to make the content of their course memorable, transferable and transformational for students. Participants in this workshop will experience model lessons which have been developed over several decades, as well as strategies for incorporating “guests” and other “experts” into classes as a way to deepen inquiry and engagement. This workshop will feature local community members connected to the Office of Civic Engagement and organizations working in Chicago. 

Registration

The workshop will begin on Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 1050 East 59th Street, 3rd Floor  (9:00 am to 5:00 pm CST) and will conclude on Wednesday, April 22, 2020 (9:00 am to 3:00 pm CST) at 5737 South University Avenue.

The cost of the workshop is $750. This fee includes breakfast and lunch each day, as well as all instructional materials and activities associated with the workshop. Housing and transportation are not included. CPDU offered for public school teachers.

Apply via this google form. We will reach out to confirm your registration and share additional details. For more information, contact Erica Chapman at ericachapman@dkdkproject.org.

Download more information about this workshop here.

While I have been experimenting on transforming this blog into a book, there are still so many other things that are happening.  Nice to know we made some correct observations about teaching and learning 25 years (or so) ago, and that people are still interested in what we have been discovering in the last quarter century.

But, one of the things I am most happy about is the workshop below.

Please spread the word and pass this on to whomever you think might enjoy it.

And I will let you know when this blog transforms into a book (in a very different form it appears--so far).

Keep the faith

 

Announcing the Teaching for Transformation Workshop

June 15 - 19, 2020

The DKDK Project and The Hewitt School are thrilled to offer the Teaching for Transformation (TfT) Workshop. Designed for educators interested in deepening the learning experiences offered in their classrooms and their schools, TfT is a five-day workshop that explores the principles of transformational learning through active participation in a series of unique learning experience and small group dialogues.

The workshop will begin on Monday morning, June 15, 2020 and will end in the early afternoon on Friday, June 19, 2020. Sessions will take place at The Hewitt School’s campus on the Upper East Side of New York City.

About the Teaching for Transformation Workshop:

The Teaching for Transformation Workshop explores the following questions:

• ●  What are the characteristics of deep learning (as opposed to surface and strategic learning) and how can teachers facilitate deep learning?
  
• ●  How do skills and content work together to create transformational learning experiences?
  
• ●  What is the relationship between feedback and deep learning?
  
• ●  How can teachers effectively use transfer as a way of generating experience?
  
• ●  How does collaborative learning affect the depth of learning?
  
• ●  How can authentic, alternative assessment drive learning? 
• 
  
• Programmatic Highlights:
  

• ●  Session facilitators: ​Erica Chapman​ and D​avid Dunbar​ of the ​DKDK Project​ and Maureen Burgess, Assistant Head of School for Learning and Innovation, ​The Hewitt School
  
• ●  Seminar with​ Ken Bain​, renowned professor, educational researcher and author of ​What the Best College Teachers Do,What the Best College Students Do a​nd​ Super Courses (forthcoming)
  
• ●  Explore deep learning pedagogy first hand through place-based experiences that use New York City as a text
  
• ●  Enjoy New York City, including dinners and evening activities
  

The TfT approach to adult learning:
In order to facilitate deep learning experiences for our students, we believe we must first experience transformational pedagogy as learners. Therefore, TfT is designed not as a traditional workshop, but as an immersive learning experience that supports workshop participants in experiencing and articulating the principles of deep learning. To do this, we design TfT with the following premises in mind:

Learning is social.
Join a cohort of 15 to 18 educators from schools across the country. Consider your own beliefs about teaching and learning by entering into a rich dialogue new colleagues working in a range of disciplines and from a variety of schools.

Learning is active.
TfT asks participants to engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary learning experiences on-campus in in New York City and in seminar-style discussions. Over the course of the workshop, we move from practice to theory and back again, all the while refining our understanding of transformational learning.

Learning sticks when it is connected to a “need.”
Participants are selected because they are reflective practitioners interested in exploring specific aspects of their practice. Because we bring together a dynamic cohort who are each pursuing different lines of inquiry, no two TfT Workshops are the same; sessions are designed and redesigned based participant interests.

About the DKDK Project:
After fifteen successful years co-leading the Teaching for Experience Workshop, based on the work they did leading CITYterm (a semester program that served as a laboratory for transformational learning with students), Erica Chapman founded the​ DKDK Project​ alongside her long-time collaborator, David Dunbar. The​ DKDK Project​ is committed to refining our collective understanding of transformational learning - what it is and how it happens - alongside like-minded practitioners. Our goal is to support schools in creating the conditions necessary for both students and teachers to experience transformational learning.

About The Hewitt School:
Founded in 1920, The Hewitt School is a K-12 girls’ school located in New York City. Hewitt’s academic philosophy​ is rooted in four pillars: presence, empathy, research, and purpose. These pillars define Hewitt’s approach to educational innovation and effective learning.

Application process:
To apply for Teaching for Transformation, please complete an ​application​ by March 1, 2020. Applicants will be notified by April 1, 2020 if they have been accepted.

Applicants who apply by March 1, 2020 will be notified of acceptance into the June 2020 cohort by April 1, 2020. The cost of the workshop is $1875. Invoices will be sent out in April and are due by May 1, 2020. The workshop fee includes breakfast and lunch each day and two group dinners, as well as all instructional materials and activities associated with the workshop. Housing and transportation are not included.

For more information, contact Erica Chapman at ​ericachapman@dkdkproject.org​.

Static vs. Dynamic Paradigms

In the last post, I was trying to make a case for the power of paradigms in shaping our world views, and how they might change and morph over time. When you are trying to design and execute transformation, and particularly when your goal is the cultivation of the ability to self-transform, then there are some paradigms that are more dynamic than others. What I want to explore in this post is what some of those effective paradigms might be, and which ones might not be as effective.

But first, remember what President Obama said in the last post, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He then went on to say, "I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone." Obama is really picking up on one portion of the idea of American exceptionalism (see last blog post for a fuller explanation) that goes back to, among other people, Abraham Lincoln. 

Probably the most eloquent and powerful exegesis of this part of the American mission in world history was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In it, Lincoln offered that America existed in world history for one major reason--  the nation had been "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln understood-- like few other people-- the continual paradoxical tension of a country devoted to both liberty and equality, but also thought that it was the American mission to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth." In other words, can a country exist as an ever-increasing democratic republic consisting of a common civic culture amongst free and equal citizens? That is a vital part of the American experiment.





In this theory, America is held together not by ancestry or geography but by ideas and shared beliefs that form a common civic culture. Lincoln remains the only President to ever pass a federal law, on July 4th 1864, encouraging immigration. While Lincoln's motive was avowedly to bring a much needed labor force to a country embroiled in a Civil War, he had long believed that the the "electric cord" of the Declaration of Independence could link people from throughout the world. Therefore, in theory, anyone can become an American, or even a hyphenated American, if they subscribe to those ideals. In my own case, after Cromwell sent my ancestors packing out of Scotland in 1650, I have a choice to be American--or even Scottish-American, if I want. But my son who lives in Scotland could never become American-Scottish because the concept doesn't exist. So it is with all immigrants to America--except it isn't. 

There is, I think, one other reason that America exists in world history and it too defines what the country's legacy will be. America's greatness, I think, will be something decided in the future--not in the past and not in the present. As we noted, the first reason for America's experiment in actually applying the political tenets put forth in the Declaration of Independence. But the other half of the American experiment is the ongoing fight to see if people from every nation, every race, every religion, every ethnicity, etc. can actually live together in a single commonwealth. Part of what I have loved about exploring the significance of New York City for the past two decades has been exactly that E.B. White wrote about in his iconic essay Here is New York in 1948, "The collision and intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry." And New York's un official poet laureate, Walt Whitman, saw New York symbolizing this same tension when he wrote in Specimen Days late in his life in 1882, “New York gives the directest proof yet of…the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate.” New York City has been to the United States what America has been to the rest of the world, the great experiment in multicultural re-creation. It is, I would venture, the most important work that Americans will ever do. But the paradigms we choose to be the foundation of this work will be vital to its full success.

For the past fifty years or so independent schools have been consciously becoming more heterogeneous. Most of those schools have been using a diversity model that tries to admit students that will be racially, ethnically, religiously, geographically, and economically different from one another. The commitment often takes the form of "celebrating diversity" through various affirmations of different people's cultures and differences.

But “celebrating diversity” is really only a step along the way to trying to inculcate a truly multi-cultural attitude.  The difference between the two—a diversity model and a multi-cultural attitude—is significant.  Diversity is a static concept that is actually just the description of a condition that exists to a greater or lesser extent.  The schools I have worked at have had varying degrees of diversity and various commitments to increasing it. This commitment to diversity should not be an end in itself, however; it is only a foundation from which real learning can occur.



If diversity is like a noun, multiculturalism is like a verb.  It is dynamic, not static.  Multiculturalism depends on being willing to use higher order critical thinking skills—ferreting out premises and assumptions, imagining implications and monitoring inferences—in examining one’s own worldview as well as the worldview of people who are different than you are.  In a multicultural world it is not enough to teach tolerance or respect (as valuable those attitudes are), you are called upon to use empathy as a critical thinking technique to try and enter someone else’s understanding.

In a way, adopting this attitude is like going to a foreign country not as a tourist, but as a traveler who is willing to go native.  But this is precisely what the historian does when she visits the past.  To teach people to be historians is to give them the skills to empathically understand the psycho-emotional world of someone not like them.  In that sense, visiting the past and visiting a foreign country are very much the same. To be a good historian is to be a good traveler.

I remember one class in particular where I learned an enormous amount about how to try to use diversity as the jumping off point rather than the end game. In this particular United States History class eight of the students were from foreign countries (Turkey, Serbia, Korea, Taiwan, China, Thailand) another five were first generation immigrants (a combination of the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Israel, Puerto Rico, Germany, Rwanda, Montserrat) leaving only three students whose families have been in America for more than a generation.  It was the perfect crucible to be testing the inculcation of multiculturalism through the study of United States history.

One of our projects, for example, was to explore the conception of freedom as it has existed in different eras in American history.  We used the techniques of the historian to explore “relics” from the 1770’s (the American Declaration of Independence and the pamphlet Common Sense) and the 1960’s (the “I Have a Dream” speech and the film Easy Rider) to see what we could discover about how Americans view freedom at different times in their history.  But then we each picked two “relics” that inform our own personal conceptions of freedom. And while the three more "Americanized" students picked things that most of us would recognize, some of the other students were exploring their understandings of the writings of Ataturk, the Rwandan genocide and the "red shirt" protests in Bangkok. 




What was learned was that each of us constructs our world differently and that we can use critical thinking skills to come to understand those constructions.  We discovered what every historian already knows—that there are no such thing as facts, there are only inferences based on relics.  And while creating a window into the American world of the 1770’s and the 1960’s, we also created a window into how other people from around the globe understand the concept of freedom.  At that point, we turned that window into a mirror and used those same critical thinking skills to see our own premises through new lenses.  We were using diversity as a base to really explore the multicultural views that existed in the room. This was not easy or comforting work necessarily.  Celebrating diversity can mean holding hands in a circle singing “Kumbaya.” But practicing multiculturalism is more like attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with people who have decided to stop kidding themselves.  We experienced some “expectation failure” where the mental models we had been using to explain our world to ourselves began to fail us. For the American students many of those models involved seeing that the American conception of freedom might not be so easily exported as many of our past statesmen have desired. For the majority of the class--the international students--it was a chance to see where the American conception of freedom had come from and how it had changed over time, and think about how (or whether) they wanted to engage with those ideas.

In my career, independent schools have gone from creating positions for Diversity Coordinators to Deans of Multiculturalism to Directors of Equity and Inclusion. There are schools that are talking about adding the concept of "Justice" to that equation which would add yet another dimension. I know there is much talk all over the world about the failure of multiculturalism in America, and even more so in Europe. Angela Merkel declared it a failed concept as far back as 2010. But note that what she says is that the "multicultural concept" has failed. I wonder if what has happened is that we have made multiculturalism a noun, when it must always be a verb or lose its dynamism.

Different schools seem to be in different places in terms of trying to figure out which paradigm they want to have be most prominent at a given time. I can see virtues, obviously, in all of them but I guess my experience tells me that I want to make sure we keep the transformational power of multicultural engagement as a process--with all the critical thinking (especially the ability to question assumptions), the use of texts as "windows and mirrors," the destruction and alteration of mental models,  the practice of empathy and self-implication, the mastery of dialogue instead of debate or discussion as means of discourse, and the individual, personal engagement--as something that isn't lost. The ability to affect one's own self-transformation seems to me to be one of the most valued objectives of learning, and a multicultural attitude--as a verb-- is a powerful paradigm for facilitating that growth.

The Power of Paradigms

In the early 1980's I was asked to write the 20th century chapters for a new edition of an American History textbook for Harcourt Brace. The request came from one of my former high school history teachers (who gave me a D+ in his Russian History course--but that is another story) who did not have time to do the writing. My interest was piqued by two things--first, this was the book that was used by cadets at West Point and I would get the chance to write the Vietnam War chapters; in fact, my "audition essay" was about why 1968 would be seen as the pivotal year for a generation of Americans. Second, I had just discovered the concept of shifting paradigms. Thomas Kuhn in his landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions posited that it was the anomalies in science that triggered revolutions which took the form of the creation of entirely new paradigms or "maps" of our world view.  One of his primary examples was the "Copernican Revolution" that overturned the previously held Ptolemaic idea that the earth was at the center of the solar system. But if you have any doubt about how powerful even discredited paradigms can hold on, consider that you probably often check the weather report to see what time the sun is going to "rise" or "set." And, while I confess that as I look out at the sky it does appear to my eyes that the sun is setting or rising, the science just doesn't seem to back up my visual experience.




This idea of a paradigm shift became the rage all over the academic world at this time, and my response to it was no exception. It was pretty clear to me what the "anomalies" were in the way American history was told then in any book:  women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants (more on that in a bit). Clearly what was needed in order to have the necessary revolution in the telling of American history was a re-imagining of the narrative to overturn the present paradigm.

The reigning paradigm was one that had gained huge traction from Louis Hartz' award-winning book The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) -- "American exceptionalism." Hartz created a story that posited that America was unlike any other country before it, and it had a superior place in world history because it was a special blend of liberty, the frontier experience, democratic republicanism, political liberalism, laissez-faire capitalist economics, and individualism. As a testament to the lasting power of paradigms, this is precisely what we are fighting over every night in 2018 on FOX news and MSNBC. Remember Obama's comment in 2009 about American exceptionalism? In an interview in Europe he responded to a journalist's question, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He then went on to say, "I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone." Outrage followed from many circles! James Kirchick called him the Squanderer in Chief in the New Republic. Mitt Romney attacked full frontal in his tome, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, and you can tune into Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson almost any night and hear Mike Huckabee repeat what he said then, "He (Obama) grew up more as a globalist than an American," Huckabee said. "To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." Old paradigms are very powerful. Have you ever noticed that we are the only country in the world with the greatest number of "We're #1" foam fingers (often made in China) that we wave constantly for every possible reason? As I travel the world I fail to see other countries waving these ubiquitous fingers.

Given the civil rights revolution of the late 60's and early 70's, however, it was clear that this paradigm of American exceptionalism did not include large segments of the "anomalous" population in the story. In fact, it was hard to find them in the books at all. In my father's United States History book from the 1920's by renowned Columbia University Professor David Saville Muzzey, all of these people-- women, African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and many other groups--are completely absent as the story is one of the relentless progress toward freedom and equality which ends with the American "making the world safe for democracy" in 1919. Muzzey's book (it should be noted that he was a Progressive for his time) was the coin of the realm from 1911 for the next fifty years. The best anyone was doing to change this narrative in the 1980's was putting a little added addendum on such topics as the Trail of Tears at the end of chapters on Andrew Jackson and the Rise of American Democracy or about Manzanar at the end of the World War II chapter about the vanquishing of Hitler and his racist policies. We could not figure out how to actually be Copernicus, we were just doing the equivalent of what Ptolemy did to further his theory by creating a "retrograde motion of Mars" to cover the deep faults. We were essentially re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

But this was not just a problem for historians. Sociologists used to say that American immigration could be summarized in a non-scatological version of the old bumper sticker that could read, "Assimilation Happens." The theory was that ALL groups will eventually assimilate. Robert Park, a colleague of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute, developed a widely accepted paradigm for sociology (see illustration of his theory below) at the University of Chicago that paralleled Louis Hartz's consensus view of American political history. However, sociologists have recently been looking at the data and finding anomalies that have challenged Park, and led to concepts such as the "segmented assimilation" of second generation immigrants (especially in New York City) and even to the idea of people developing a "transnational identity" rather than assimilating. New paradigms are just now being developed to explain new data and to question old assumptions. 


Obviously, my book did not pioneer the new paradigm either, but I did get the to explore some new metaphors that might replace the old one of the "melting pot" first created by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer in1782.  de Crevecoeur had seen the process of becoming American as the new immigrant "leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." You can clearly see in his thinking part of what will eventually become American exceptionalism. 

Carl Degler saw America as a "salad bowl," New York City mayor David Dinkins as "a grand mosaic," and some people as a "chocolate fondue with various fruits for dipping." John F. Kennedy in his 1958 book A Nation Of Immigrants had also joined the food metaphor club when he wrote, “...a ‘typical American menu’ might include some of the following dishes: ‘Irish stew, chop suey, goulash, chile con carne, ravioli, knockwurst mit sauerkraut, Yorkshire pudding, Welsh rarebit, borscht, gefilte fish, Spanish omelette, caviar, mayonnaise, antipasto, baumkuchen, English muffins, gruyère cheese, Danish pastry, Canadian bacon, hot tamales, wienerschnitzel, petit fours, spumoni, bouillabaisse, mate, scones, Turkish coffee, minestrone, filet mignon.’ ”

Appetizing as many of these new paradigms might be, they do not capture the central paradox of the unofficial motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unum--Out of Many, One." In the next blogpost I want to explore some paradigms that are central to the way we tell our national story and how they have been adopted in schools.

But just to give you a final example of the power of paradigms to shape our thinking, E Pluribus Unum was never the official motto of the United States and it refers not to the inhabitants of the country but to the joining together of the thirteen separate colonies to form one country. The official motto of the United States you can find in your pocket on any piece of currency--In God We Trust. The fact that we put it on our money probably matters as well.

When was that motto adopted?  1956. The year after Louis Hartz's book was published championing American exceptionalism. Always respect the power of paradigms to shape your thinking.

Coda Below: a visual paradigm mash-up of how we constantly create and re-create our own personal and national histories--