If our schools are filled with "teaching places" instead of "learning spaces," what are we doing to change that?
All of us. What are we doing? Because whether you are in a national government, or you're a school superintendent, or principal, or teacher, you can be changing things, if that's what you want to do.
I had to write about this because of what happened with a Tweet from my friend William Chamberlain:
Choices in seating, in seating height, in gathering or hiding, and yes, fireplaces, all make the typical recent McDonald's interior a far better learning space than most classrooms.
"McDonald's has better learning spaces than most schools," Chamberlain wrote, and, of course, he is right. Dozens of teachers joined in and retweeted this which is good, except.. when we tried to shift the conversation to what teachers might do, there was far less uptake. Now, I'm all for complaining, I do plenty of it myself, but honestly, if your classroom sucks as a learning space... fix it.
Fixing it... third grade teacher Derk Oosting doesn't wait, he acts
"Fixing it" doesn't always require money or getting new things, it often requires more subtraction than addition, getting rid of desks and miserably uncomfortable classroom chairs. Kids prefer floors anyway, whether its kindergarten or university. "Fixing it" mostly requires a mindset built around the ideas of "Choice and Comfort" and "Instructional Tolerance" and "Universal Design."
We remove the cultural expectations which have nothing to do with how humans learn. We remove the cultural and religious expectations of discomfort as some sort of positive. We remove ourselves as arbiters of some sort of schoolhouse propriety. And in doing so, we enable our children to find their own paths to success in school and in life.
There is a problem here, of course, which lies with the way educators are educated. They are not, unless their career paths have taken them far from "education," trained in design vision or design thinking. Years ago I taught Intro to Architecture at the Pratt Manhattan Center in New York. By the third class session we'd go on a walking tour, and early in that tour we'd end up at the corner of East 53rd Street and Park Avenue. At that intersection stand three landmarked structures, Mies van der Rohe's Seagrams' Building, Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, and Charles McKim's Racquet Club. On the fourth corner is 399 Park Ave, a building completed in 1961 for Citibank - or as it was then called - The First National City Bank of New York. This building is on no one's landmark list. Why?
The why? requires learning to use Design Vision and Design Thinking, and also requires that observers step away from "I" statements. What makes three of these buildings great and the fourth a mediocre pile of steel and glass is really not a question of personal preference, it is instead an understanding of humanity and how humans see and understand. There are lots of clues to the failures of 399 Park when it is compared to its neighbors, from window shapes which violate the Golden Mean to an entry that's somewhat unfindable to massing which fails to meet the ground - and pedestrians - with grace, but the untrained observer will not see them - or will not understand what is wrong - without help.
Who helps educators do this? When an educator looks at a classroom, or a corridor, or a library, or a playground, or the school's entry... what do they see? How do they understand what they see?
Libraries - the Learning Commons
Middle School Library gathering space, connectivity everywhere
In the school system in which I work we invest very heavily in libraries. This counters a US national trend towards abandoning libraries and laying off librarians, but we see our school libraries as the center of our transformation from a collection of "teaching places" to a community of "learning spaces."
In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials
said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already
reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular
activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are
also changing some officials’ view of librarians: as more classrooms are
equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, [New York City Schools' city’s chief academic officer] Mr. Polakow-Suransky
noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously
might have required a library visit.
Now, I think we're smarter than Mr. Polakow-Suransky, and we've alway assumed that our libraries are more than a place for students to use the World Book, but we also know that if libraries are to be the Learning Commons at the center of our schools they must be re-thought, re-imagined, and re-designed in ways are far beyond "tinkering." In a century where all the world's libraries are linked to our phones, where information and books are no longer scarce but somewhat overwhelming, and where curation has become a mass participation exercise, the function of libraries as learning spaces requires radical change, and we expect our school librarians to not just change and adapt, but to be the leaders in our school buildings.
HackerSpace in one of our high school libraries seating choices from bean bags to pub-height bar, technologies, tools
What do we look for? We look for flexible, adaptive, multiple media learning and creation environments. We look for student comfort, student choice, student-centric spaces. We look for students dropping in - all day long, whether elementary or secondary - so we know this is not "just" a scheduled space. We look for flexibility of design and the ability of students to alter that design as they need to - what we call "Student-Crafted Learning Environments."
"Student-Crafted Learning Environment"
We expect our libraries to be MakerSpaces. Our libraries have legos, music studios, construction areas, one has a Makerbot 2 replicator, which students - quite "casually" - come and use to prototype things they've designed.
Students come with lunch and snacks and drinks, move the furniture, grab technology or bring their own, settle in, and work in contemporary environments.
Our libraries are far more kitchens than supermarkets these days, which makes sense. Our information supermarkets now reside in our hands, our quiet study places now reside in our earbuds and headphones, but our gathering places, our "Learning Commons," the places where we come together, for communion and contagious creativity, those are often what we are missing.
We've done this with money - creating a "Glass Room" quieter space at one high school, buying shelves which roll in many elementary libraries - and we've done it without money - dumping old VHS tapes and magazines and other stored items, and eliminating librarian offices to create quieter spaces, music studios, and maker spaces in others.
We've done it buying new soft seating and we've done it with kids and volunteers padding windowside shelves and turning them into window seats. We've done it with commercial furniture from Bretford and Turnstone and we've done it with stuff from the seasonal clearance piles at Walmart and Target.
A hand-me-down created "quieter space" created from what was, for ten or more years, storage.
We've cut down or eliminated space-hogging circulation desks and bought boxes of wet wipes to clean up food and drink spills. We've created open computer networks which let kids connect their own devices and we've built "tool cribs" of differing devices for our students to use.
Changing "Teaching Places" into "Learning Spaces" is primarily about the attitudes we adopt.
The point is that the time for excuses and complaining is over. Whoever you are, wherever you are, outside of say, a KIPP school or maybe the city school districts of New York and Chicago (thanks to mayors Rahm Emanuel and Mike Bloomberg), you have the power to undo your teaching place and create a learning space in its stead. The trick is to begin.
The film of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose: "...where are the books?"
The origin of our word "library" (or the French word for "book" or the old European words for "money") all stem from the ancient Indo-European term, "leub,” meaning, "to strip,”"topeel.” The obvious understanding is that information was preserved on - first - strips of bark, of leaves - then of "paper" made from such. But in my adaptation, the concept of "to peel" is the key: the library is a place where we peel apart the known world and begin to reconstruct it, for ourselves, and for our futures.
Image problem? Librarians in Movies - Part 1 (above)'
and Part 2 (below)
Libraries can be vaults, the safekeeping spots, used to preserve and/or to limit access to knowledge. (see Umberto Eco'sThe Name of the Rose)
"Incendie Alexandrie" by Hermann Goll (1876)
The safekeeping thing often hasn't worked out as well as has been hoped, despite current whining about, "what happens if the electricity goes out?" (see Alexandria Library Fire). Libraries can also be the Carnegie-style "supermarkets" of the 20th Century, a place where certain forms of knowledge and information are distributed in certain ways to certain classes of people.
For awhile I lived near Muskegon, Michigan. In the 1890s a "lumber baron" named Charles Hackley decided to reconstruct the then wild lumber town (which had recently helped rebuild Chicago after the Fire, but was running out of trees along the Muskegon River) into a "20th Century City." To do so he built schools, a hospital, started a bank, created parks, even founded social service agencies, but first, roughly alongside Andrew Carnegie bringing his first US library to Pennsylvania, he funded and built a contemporary library.
Muskegon, Michigan's Hackley Public Library
The library was intended to offer informal but effective education to the residents of the city. Certain books could be taken home, others, of course, could not. Certain types of books were on the shelves, but, surely, others were not. The learning might be "informal," but the library spaces were not. They were sacred-styled environments, hushed and reverent. The books were in English - with a few in Greek and Latin but none in the immigrant languages of Polish and Norwegian. Clean hands and clean minds were expected.
I am not knocking this. The Hackley Library, the Carnegie Libraries were huge successes, offering generations of Americans paths to knowledge, connections to culture, and vastly expanded world views. One need only look at the amazing series of gifts the New York Public Library has received from former immigrants who owe their education to the "free lending libraries" and classic library reading rooms provided throughout the last century.
But that was last century, and the tools of this century are different, the needs of this century are different, and the libraries of this century must be different.
Your Life Work: The Librarian "love for books and love for people"
It is common for a certain class of librarians to mistake "library" for a place of physical preservation and "book" for a bound, paper-based, collection of pages with ink stamped upon them.
"Google notwithstanding, good, reliable information is only scantily
present online," Mark Y. Herring, the library director at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, wrote in American Libraries in 2011(!),"The bulk of trustworthy, reliable information still
resides only in aggregated databases, some of which are affordable only
to libraries, since access costs literally as much as a compact car.
While striving to be green, libraries still depend on the printed word.
Moving to an electronic format exclusively (which, by the way, some
libraries have tried) has been unsuccessful so far. “Nothing is more
common" in experiment, wrote the famed late-18th-century chemist Joseph
Priestley, “than the most unexpected revolutions of good and bad
success.” Well, we may get to “electronic-only” one day. But so far our
digital-only experiments have met with “bad success.” When we lose our
physical libraries, where will the great masses of us find
reliable information?"
When this attitude exists, libraries become museums, and sadly, increasingly irrelevant museums. And, in schools, museums usually do not get funded, especially irrelevant museums. If your school library is silent, used by schedule only (or "mostly"), focused on print, categorized tightly, "a place to read," or to "work alone," you have a museum - and you have already been replaced by: the internet, the coffee shop, the public park - you, the librarian, just haven't lost your job yet.
Today's library, especially the single-generation serving school library, must be something essentially different. It must be the Communal Kitchen of Intellectual Creativity. It must be a place of resources and collaboration, of tools and inspiration, of communication and, yes, "making."
It must be a place that is both noisy and which has "caves" for quiet. It must be a place of comfort - from furniture to food and drink - so that users can concentrate on creativity and learning, not rules and discomfort. It must be a place where information flows through every possible tool, in order to create the widest, and most effective, access.
A place of shared creativity, a physical place but one tightly bound to the universe through digital tools. A place of energy and excitement - if we crave solitude and the paper book, well, we have our own spaces for that - books being portable and all. A place of open access - our computers, our tablets, our phones all link us to every conceivable library - why would we enter yours if you offer less?
And a Maker Faire, a place where creativity, learning, and problem-solving are contagious and where creativity, learning, and problem-solving break through boundaries.
Today, the "vault" lies in our servers, spaced strategically around the planet. The supermarket sits in our pockets, we can tap a four or five inch screen and access, well, anything. But the kitchen remains a physical place. A place of creation, of comfort, of human communion.
That is what your school library must be, or it will not be at all in a very short time.
It has taken me some time to get words into pixels after a hurricane weekend at the School Library Journal Summit in Philadelphia.
At first I wanted to write about, "What are school libraries for? Who are school libraries for?" because that seemed to be an essential set of questions that appeared as Pam Moran and I presented our "unkeynote" - a challenge to the how, why, and what of the school library in this century. But then, sitting trapped in a hotel room, staring out a window at the magnificence of Philadelphia's Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, I watched some videos of students "reading and writing" in schools, and I found deeper questions.
Sometime after our unkeynote - a set of challenges to existing harmonies rather than a focus on one - and after Chris Lehmann's keynote the next morning, the SLJ Summit arrived at the business of the Common Core. And it was in that shift, from broad conversations on openness to mechanical conversations on closed processes, that the questions began emerging.
Why do we read? Why do we write? How do we bring reading to children? How do we encourage children to write? Will we accept a true democracy of voices? Or do we continue to pursue the colonialism of conversion, the colonialism of standardization?
Umberto Eco, the brilliant European semiologist and novelist, says in the afterword to the English-language edition of his 2010 novel The Prague Cemetery that, well, first that he hopes that readers are not to derailed by his "fairly chaotic" non-linear narrative, and that second,he worries about readers - and in both cases this perhaps applies primarily to English and American readers - getting trapped by "the fatal imbalance between story and plot," or, he offers the Russian literary terms, "fabula and syuzhet," in Wikipedia's description, "The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized."' If you read the linked New York Times review by novelist and professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein you will find that fatal tension obvious. Goldstein reviews the plot, and in doing so, misses the entire story. Eco is not, of course, telling us the origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Prague Cemeteryanymore than he wrote a history of the 14th Century Church in The Name of the Rose, rather he is writing a highly contemporary tale of the methods of public opinion manipulation by governments and others, something incredibly relevant to all of us right now.
[I probably should have put a note similar to Eco's at the end - or at the beginning - of The Drool Room, but that I didn't perhaps explains why the book is more popular in Ireland than in the US...]
Goldstein, a very smart person, missed the story, but that's not surprising. She's an American educated academic, raised by "school as we know it," so to her, plot is what matters. We know this, it is the heart of how we read in school, of how we want kids to write in school, it lies at the heart of the Common Core, in all the standards in those documents, which are NOT flexible, because they form a rigid frame within which any reading must be jammed... That rigid frame which prevented Rebecca Newberger Goldstein from finding the story in Eco's writing.
What is the plot of Ulysses? or The English Patient? or Sophie's Choice? Sophie's Choice is one of the most powerful stories of the 20th Century, yet the plot? Well, it's - to be blunt - "how I first got laid." Ulysses? a walk through Dublin one day. The English Patient? You know the plot, in order to make a movie for Americans the story was stripped out of the book - leaving just the plot.
the stunningly rich tale of consent to imperialism in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient becomes a simple love affair and cautionary tale about boundaries via Common Core arithmetic
"I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. I knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I’d be banished. If I tied the wrong kind of knot in a tie I was out. Was it just ships that gave you such power? Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses?
"Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world.," says Kipp in The English Patient, as he damns the Common Core idea along with 'the way we teach.' "What do you think will happen next?" we ask our students, focusing on the Anglo-American plot rather than the rhythms, emotions, sensations, evoked memories which drive writing in so many cultures. Can you produce an "accurate and concise summary statement"? one of the teaching videos I watched asked. Really? Who wants the damn summary? What is that for? Why must you imagine what happens next in order to experience a story? What is wrong with the moment? What is wrong with taking something complex in, and not simplifying it?
"You write like a European," I was told early in my doctoral studies, and though i said, "Thank you," in response that was meant as a criticism to be corrected. "They" meant that I do not write in a simple linear form, they meant that I do not adhere to North American philosophies. They meant that my sentences were often crafted with rhythms, not just words. And they meant that all of that is wrong.
We are not usually so obvious in our stated biases, but every day in schools I see students punished for their voices, punished for their culturally ingrained reading styles, punished for refusing to over-simplify, because we teach reading and writing in the same way the English like to teach tea drinking.
So, school librarians, and teachers of the English language, here is a recent story of mine... Can we find an "accurate and concise summary statement"? What do you think will happen next? What is the plot?
In the summer when I turned thirteen I swam across Long Island Sound to the lighthouse on Execution Rocks.
At
thirteen there are nights when you cannot sleep. Not because of actual
reasons for terror in the house, nor because of worries or pressures.
And really not even because the hot, humid Gulf Stream air swamping New
York is too still and sweat coats your skin. But because there are so
many things to hope for, so many wishes, that your brain cannot file
them all away fast enough to let the silence come. This was the morning
after one of those nights, and perhaps, not just for me.
Ten
of us, maybe eleven - it is hard to count or even know all the faces
now - mostly boys but not all, mostly members of the YMCA's Swim Team
but not
all, stood in the long gazebo at Hudson Park which overlooked the beach
and the Sound. Late July, and the early morning light mixed with the
incoming salt of the rising tide, and the seaweed and fish and the
plants of the marshes. The flag in the park hung limp, only showing
flutters of life around its edges.
It began with a
dare, because that is the way stories of thirteen-year-old boys usually
begin. Someone suggested we swim across Echo Bay, the small enclosure of
the Sound which held the city's municipal marina and rowing club, and
which, 280 years before, had seen Huguenot refugees of the St.
Bartholomew's Day Massacre arrive to form a new home in a new land. But
Echo Bay seemed both too easy - maybe somewhere between a quarter and a
half mile - and too dangerous - the other side housed the rich, we'd be
arriving on some rich person's lawn - and too familiar - we swam every
day at the Hudson Park beaches here.
"We should swim
out to Execution Rocks," I then might have said. The kind of crazy
statement I could make at times like this. Execution Rocks, which had
held a lighthouse since the early days of the American Republic, was the
farthest outcropping of the City of New Rochelle, lying more than two
miles across the Sound, much closer to the Long Island shore than to any
point on this side, and marking the shipping channel through our
rock-infested choke point where the Sound became the East River.
Decades
later, I would stand in a gourmet food store before a shelf of various
sea salts and wonder if I could season my foods with memories. Could I
use the salt from this particular branch of the Atlantic Ocean? Or from
the surf off Coney Island? From Lough Foyle or the Forty-Foot in
Ireland? From Cape Disappointment where the Columbia finds the Pacific?
What dreams might those meals awaken?
A
thousand yards out, that's 40 lengths of the 25 yard pool we swam in
under the Y gym, where the low ceiling held the chlorine captive so you
could not smell the difference between air and water, my arms felt fine
but my legs were beginning to drag behind me, and I let myself pause,
coming upright in the pond-flat green water, my legs in a slow bicycle
pump that stretched the muscles in different ways. I was still in
coastal waters, tiny Huckleberry Island, legend told us of an old "Shore
Club" and a great fire but who really knew?, still lay over a thousand
feet away. But here, I breathed as deeply as I could now and saw the
world from that exact point we call "sea level," was a wondrously safe
spot. I could still see and hear my friends on shore, they were waving,
and I waved back - slowly to indicate that I was fine, not frantically
as in a call for help - and thought of not returning. And then I turned
and began swimming toward the little island's rocky point.
They
had said the swim to the lighthouse was "fucking insane," and "really
stupid," and when I had argued that neither of those things were true
they had dared me to try it. So we'd gotten on our bikes and ridden down
the hill out of Hudson Park, turned left onto Hudson Park Road, then
left again to climb the little hill at the start of Davenport Avenue -
we could have ridden the flat route along Pelham Road and Church Street
but it was not going to be that sort of day - and curved around the long
reach of Davenport Neck until we tore down the vast grassy hill of
Davenport Park and came to the giant tumbled rocks at the water. I'd
swim it, but I wasn't going to start an extra half-mile away. We all
knew this was not just the closest spot, but that it also had an island
sort of halfway, a safety factor of importance.
Here,
further out in the Sound, a slight breeze cooled us, but couldn't ripple
the water. And the tide was reaching its top now, creating the calmest
waters. I pushed my Keds off, pulled my socks off, and dropped my jeans,
leaving just the purple Y Speedos most of us wore under our pants that
summer. My shirt had been off and tied around the bike's seat post since
I'd gotten on it that morning. "Scream if you're drowning," Billy said.
"Yeah," I said, and walked to the one spot on the rocks we knew was
safe for diving at this moment, and jumped in. "You're buying me pizza
when I get back," I yelled after coming up to the surface. "Don't race,"
Peter said, kind of softly, "just go slow." I turned and headed south.
Three
weeks or so later there was a meet at Saxon Woods, a huge county pool
up near White Plains, with 50 meter lengths and teams from Ys and
recreation programs from all over and the heavy smell of Coppertone and
girls, lots of girls, even girls we knew. That day too was way too hot,
and between heats the sun would weigh on our skin, pushing against us,
driving us into the narrow strip of shade along the bathhouse. The
girls, we understood, were there to see us, not to see us swim. They
stared at our groins the way we stared at their rapidly growing tits,
with not quite fully defined fascination. We then became completely
aware of our own bodies, in ways that those of us who choose to hide in
the water could not yet deal with. In September of that year, sitting in
Cindy's bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, she put her hand on my thigh
and asked, "What does it take to get you, you know, umm, excited?" As she found out, I remembered her looking at me that day at Saxon
Woods. How had she gotten there? What, exactly, had she been looking
for?
When
I pushed off the Huckleberry Island rocks I felt good, if vaguely
thirsty. From here, a bit more than a mile maybe, maybe more, I guessed
it would depend how far the current pulled me off course - a hundred
little corrections adds up in distance, and the target now was a tiny
spot in the water, still, at this moment in time, occupied by a
lighthouse keeper, and home to deep-voiced steam foghorn which sang me
to sleep on the stormy nights of autumn. And here, beyond that coastal
zone, the water rose and fell, forcing a change in stroke to make
breathing a conscious decision every time, and the smells of land
vanished, and the water temperature dropped, and the world narrowed to
just me and this sea, both my closest friend and my mortal enemy.
I
pulled myself up onto the rocks in full, but not panicked, exhaustion,
and lay gasping for air and feeling like my shoulders could not rotate
one more time. I closed my eyes and felt the sun, and the warm stone,
and listened to the waves splash against those rocks. Those rocks, that
was our Halloween story. It was called "Execution Rocks" our story went,
because the British had chained prisoners to these rocks during the
Revolution and then waited for the tide to rise. When I looked again, I
was staring up at both the lighthouse and a man in a blue uniform, who
held a large green thermos out to me. "Did you just fuckin' swim here?"
there was no wait for an answer, "drink this you crazy moron."
He
gave me a salami sandwich on dark brown bread and lots of water as we
sat on folding chairs in the shade of the island's house. He asked about
my swimming, where I went to school, what I knew about the currents
here. He never asked my name, or where I lived, or why I had just swum
two miles to his spot on the map. I refused the boat ride back, though
there was no doubt that he would shadow me in his launch back toward
Huckleberry. For reasons I could not name this seemed to be alright with
me.
I climbed back out of the water at Davenport Park
three or three and a half hours after leaving. Maybe it was four hours
or more. Time is not a specific thing here. I pulled myself up the rocks
to a lot of whoops and stuff from now impressed friends. And they
wrapped their towels around me, and I looked out, and saw the lighthouse
keeper in his boat, just beyond Huckleberry. He waved. I hope I waved
back, and then I stumbled to the grass. And then I think I slept.
(c) 2012 by Ira David Socol
I asked the questions above this story for reasons both personal and professional. You see, first, though I felt that I really needed to write this story, I do not know why that was so. This is a story - in my mind it is one fully coherent tale - but I know neither plot nor theme. And second, I read and write stories 'like this' all the time. Not just "fiction" either, for I have found that "reality" - whatever that may be - often looks a lot more like this than the writing in any high school history book.
And so I wonder, (a) where does my communication fit into your school? your Common Core? your library? your classroom? and (b) where does that democracy of voice fit in? How do we embrace that and not squash it?
The world is a place of constant reinvention. If we all follow the rules, the paths, nothing changes. There is a reason the books of the colonials so often fill the Booker Prize shortlists, there is a reason Irish fiction and poetry are prized so much more highly than that of the English or Americans.The rules have never fully taken root away from "the Queen's English," and the paths begin in very different places, and it is the uncommon, not the common, which has extraordinary value.
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have
swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of
wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have
hidden in as if caves.
"I wish for all this to be marked on by
body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by
nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men
and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We
are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience." - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
)
anymore than he wrote a history of the 14th Century Church in 
, but that I didn't perhaps explains why the book is more popular in Ireland than in the US...]
? or 
? Sophie's Choice is one of the most powerful stories of the 20th Century, yet the plot? Well, it's - to be blunt - "how I first got laid." Ulysses? a walk through Dublin one day. 
