The Parent Trap

On Saturday I went to use the Therapy Pool at our community aquatic center. The 90 degree Fahrenheit water lets me exercise my recovering leg for much longer than I can possibly do on "dry land," and this is a crucial part of the healing process.

The Therapy Pool has a separate "Special Needs" Locker (Changing) Room. A unisex space with private changing areas with showers, benches, lots of grab bars. For the most part people move in and out of these spaces as quickly and efficiently as their various limitations allow.

However, the Special Needs Locker Room is also utilized by another group, parents with children who choose not to use the large general Men's and Women's changing rooms. I can understand this - considering the generally unhealthy American attitudes toward nudity - most of these users are parents with children not of their gender: Dads with girls, Moms with boys - and they are afraid to either, let the children out of their site long enough to put on a bathing suit, or to allow them to glimpse naked adults. I'm not judging here. Americans are taught to be afraid of many things, and these are two of those things.

But there is something I will judge. If parents are choosing to use a facility supposedly reserved for people other than themselves, they ought to be demonstrating respect for others to their children.

So, on Saturday, as I witnessed mother after mother hustling their kiddies in to the private changing spaces as people with crutches and canes and walkers waited, I wondered what these parents were teaching. As I watched 8, 10, 12-year-old, perfectly healthy girls tie up the one accessible locker room toilet, I wondered what these parents were teaching. As I saw mother after mother smile as their children ran through a narrow corridor mostly used by injured senior citizens, I wondered what these parents were teaching.

This was not a case of class-based lack of social education on the part of the parents - at least not in my observation. Lower income community children tend to come unaccompanied, or have no problem with shared changing facilities. The parents I was watching all appeared middle and upper middle class. All were white. All, probably, as educated as it gets here, in "the second happiest place in America."

Then, finished, I crutched my way outside, where I noticed that a brand new Volkswagen Passat was parked blocking the curb cut in a "no parking" area. It had been there when I entered. I paused, crutches are still very difficult, and as I paused, a mother and her teenage son came out, carrying packages from a party (there are "party rooms" in the facility), to the Passat. "We probably shouldn't have left it here the whole time," the boy said. "It's a loading zone," the mother told him, "and nobody knows how long we've been loading or unloading." One more mom, one more lesson.

At a CIES2010 session last week in Chicago the Inclusive Education Special Interest Group met and listened to four presentations. One was about attempts to improve teacher training for inclusion in Northern Ireland. Another was about changing social attitudes on inclusion in Namibia. The third, about encouraging the study of inclusion in Germany. And the fourth on inclusion and society in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. They were great presentations.

Yet, if there was a common thread in these, it was not attitudes toward "disability," but rather the ways in which parents limit the opportunities for, and growth of, their children.

In Northern Ireland the progress being made on societal unification of all the children of that "place" (any other political descriptor is fraught with challenges for one "side" or the other), is constantly threatened by parental attitudes when the children go home after school. Parents, 90% of them, choose segregated schools for their children - in a possible glimpse of the American future if the Duncan/Obama charter school push succeeds - and parents resist, strongly, changes in the education system.

In Namibia a parent of a "disabled" child, who is also a teacher, won't send her child to school, or even take him to the store, for fear of social embarrassment.

In Germany, long held beliefs in separate education for those with "special needs" have parents of those students resisting inclusion.

In certain Middle Eastern societies parents will not "invest" in "disabled" children who seem unlikely to become potential supporters of the family, and so will not bring them to school.

The problem with allowing parents to make choices

Despite having been a charter school parent, and a very happy charter school parent, I have a problem with the concept of charter schools in the United States. And my problem is this - charters offer parents school choice, but they rob children of school choice.

The theory of parental choice is based in the very old notion that "parents know what is best for their children" - which sounds benign, but is actually an extension of the idea that children "belong" to their parents, that children are property. Americans basically view children this way (in everything but the abortion debate - only there do a sizable portion of Americans see offspring as independent entities, but only until birth). Americans will argue that parents must be in control of discipline, of what media children are exposed to, of whether children should be vaccinated, or should receive medical care. The view - even if we take the benign reading of this - is that parental judgment almost always trumps the judgment of society, or surely, of professionals.

But maybe that is not true. Almost ten percent of American parents, for example, risk their children's health because they believe fairy tales about vaccines causing Autism. More than that cripple their children's intellectual development by blocking their access to real science education. More still risk their children's sexual health by blocking access to information critical to any human who reaches puberty.

Hundreds of thousands of American parents overstress their children in bizarre pursuits of stuff like university athletic scholarships, or force them into "college application building" schedules so frantic kids become suicidal, less they have to receive a "less than Ivy" education.

And then, on perhaps a low-priority but still essential level, are the mothers I met Saturday.

Disastrous parental behaviors cross every socio-economic divide. They hurt kids of every type, from every neighborhood.

OK, wait...

Before this goes any further... I know there are lots of great parents out there, and - for the record - I am not proposing kibbutz-like societal child-rearing, though that seems to have been fairly successful. I just want to question the "parent-centric" arguments of a certain type of charter school advocate.

I have met three types of charter school advocates. The first, and the ones whose side I am on (to be honest in regards to my motivations), are educational theorists who wish to test out new ideas not yet in the educational mainstream. My child went to charters created by educators like this. On Twitter, @COCharterXaminr falls into this category - these people are creating significant alternate models. They oppose for profit charters, they are not "anti-public school," and rarely do they sound, "anti-teacher."

The second group are the free market pirates. As with everything else society ("government") does together for mutual benefit, they oppose public education because they are not sufficiently profiting from it (you'd think textbook markups would be enough, but...). So they plan to destroy public education so that they can charge everyone for it more effectively, and create new profit centers. They mouth the nonsensical mantras of "competition" (New York City used to have competing fire departments, it doesn't always work well in public services) and "choice" ("I choose the bad hospital!") and hustle 2006 Wall Street solutions, like merit pay based on illusory short term results ('test scores"). These are the same folks who sell your kids $30 Abercrombie T-shirts. And because they do that, they have the money to buy many politicians.

The third group is more difficult to discuss, and I don't want to dismiss or demean, but I think of them as "the colonized." These are people from traditionally out-of-power groups who have decided to fully "play the game" of their oppressors. They tend to wear the charter school ideology around their necks the way certain Nigerians and Indians and other "citizens of the Empire" in the early 20th Century donned British powdered wigs and joined the colonial governments.

It is tough to argue with much of what they say: They are looking to "save kids now." To open "real opportunities." To build "within the realities we have." And to argue with this is to engage in that oldest of battles among the colonized - do we achieve freedom and power on "their" terms, or "ours." Do we want our children to grow up as -and this will depend on the argument you are making - Brits and citizens of the world/Second-class Brits or to grow up as Nigerians, Indians, South Africans, Irish, Israelis/poor separatists in a global economy.

As with most great issues, the answers are not clear cut, not "black and white," as they say. We want our identities, we want freedom and possibility based in our culture, and yet, yes, we also live and work in a world designed and controlled by the powerful.

So when people like @dropoutnation argue for charters and vouchers as their "answer," it is not just a matter of being co-opted. They have convinced themselves that this is the only logical solution in the world they see now. And I can argue for greater faith in the future, for greater faith in diverse communities, but altering someone's fundamental world view is tough.

Social Reproduction

Thus, I will say this - even if you believe that "choice" is the way to go, you are giving choice to the wrong people.

The common characteristics that I find in what I describe as "the best schools" (see primary and secondary), that is, schools which "work" for the broadest range of students, is student choice. These are schools which help students discover their path, not their parents' path. These are schools which are willing to help students find success even if their parents are incapable, or destructive, or just uninterested.

Parent choice - the concept of charters and vouchers - is socially reproductive from the start. Charter schools really object if they are criticized for "cherry picking" students, but the fact is, the only students who attend those schools are those with parents who are capable and informed enough to make the choice, interested enough to make the choice, and, in most places, economically and physically able to make the choice (due to transportation issues, etc).  This means that even if charters are not "cherry picking" students (though most "for profits" are doing just that), they are, by their very nature, "cherry picking" parents.

Which means they are abandoning the neediest children. Which means, to me, that those in that "third group" of charter advocates are selling out huge parts of their constituencies in exchange for success of their elites.

This was common enough in the British Empire that the American Corporate Empire seeks to re-create. There were Irish who converted to Anglicanism, and Indians who joined the British Army, and, of course, many colonials who dressed their children like proper little English boys and sent them off to schools which seemed replicas of those outside of central London - parental choice.

But even without that sell-out, parental choice often works against child best interests. Parents pick schools based on status, on homogeneity, on sports, on reputation. The quite broken school systems of Northern Ireland are the result of "parental choice," as are the highly segregated schools of Scotland, as are the nightmares of our school literature - think Dead Poets Society.

All of this leads me to believe in great public schools. And great public schools have student choice. No two classes in the same grade or subject should be anything alike. No common reading lists or classroom management. No common grading system. No common organization. Ideally, even schedules should vary. Only with that kind of choice can students find what they need, not what even the most well-meaning adults find for them.

And great public schools are being made impossible by "choice" advocates, who pull a certain segment of students out of the mix, reducing workable choices for those left behind.

I'm a parent, and I like parents. But I've also known all kinds of parents, and I value children too much to leave all the decisions in parental hands.

- Ira Socol

Constructing Disability: The Second Class Citizen

In 2008 I wrote a post with a title similar to this about the construction of disability. Consider this "part two."

On Wednesday night I was at the Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. I was exhausted from a day of rolling a wheelchair over vast distances on very thick carpet. My leg hurt like a m..., well, it hurt in ways that pain meds weren't touching. And my arms, shoulders, and hands were burning from the "work out" of the day - which had begun with an 8.00 am presentation.

But I really did not want to hide in my room. The real reason anyone goes to a conference like this is to get to meet, and talk to, the brilliant, fascinating people who are there - people from everywhere on the planet. So I pushed through my room door, wheeled through the long corridors, rode down in the tiny elevator which barely fit my chair, and went down to the grand lobby where two big receptions for conference attendees were being held, one sponsored by my university, the other by Teachers College of Columbia University.

I rolled through the lobby and met a friend near the base of the stairway below, which led to one of the receptions:

Entrance to the Empire Room at The Palmer House

"Are you going in..." my friend asked, voice trailing off as he turned to look. "Oh." "Yeah," I said. Now - I'm sure there is another route. I've ridden in my share of kitchen elevators, etc. But as I looked, realizing there was no indication of a disability route, no statement at all of accessibility, I decided I didn't want to be carried in through the back door to this event.

So I said goodbye to my friend and moved toward the Teachers College reception in the hotel's Honore Ballroom. There, I met another staircase only entrance, also without disability signage. Worse, Teachers College - one of the foremost and forward-thinking education schools in the nation, had placed their "check in" table on a landing in the middle of the stairs. Again - I'm certain that there is a way in - but why should I, unlike everyone else, have to beg for admission.

Blocked from the free food, and hungry, I turned into the hotel bar. But service was either unavailable to those unable to climb the six stairs to the bar itself, or I was invisible, because I sat at a table for 20 minutes, attempting to corral a wait staff member, quite unsuccessfully.

So I went back up to my room, crawled into bed, and spent a small fortune on room service. As I ate, I realized that the Thursday night dinner, the "big event" of the conference for which I had purchased a $65 ticket, was being held in the Empire Room - that first place with the big, beautiful stairs. I called downstairs, cancelled my stay Thursday night stay, and arranged to leave early Thursday afternoon.

Now, let me pause to say that I have no complaints about The Palmer House. In fact, I have never been treated so well in any hotel anywhere. Except for the bar staff, every employee was not just helpful and kind, but positively wonderful, and - and this matters - was clearly perfectly trained in disability etiquette, offering help without pity, treating me as fully human at every turn. The service was so good I thought I was on the Titanic - without the whole unfortunate iceberg thing.

Monroe Street Entrance

And it is not the fault of The Palmer House that they are trying to fit modern function into a landmark 1871 hotel. I believe in aesthetics - I don't want them hacking through 130-year-old marble to install an elevator next to the Empire Room stairs. I could ask for better signage, sure, but historic facilities are historic facilities, and people choose their conference facilities either considering access, or not.

So, Michigan State University, as conference host, chose a facility without wifi (blocking many free accessible technologies), with poor 3G reception (blocking others), with long, deeply carpeted corridors that made mobility really difficult, with major reception rooms with stair-only main entrances, with many tiny meeting rooms which wheelchairs could barely - or simply not - fit into. This was not a "single oversight." Those checking people in to the conference sat behind a tall desk I could not see over. No conference signs referred to accessibility, either for mobility, or hearing, or vision.

There has been only a very few times in my "mobility-challenged" experience when I've been told more consistently, or more repeatedly, that I was not "fully human."

As when my university chose to favor football tailgate tents over disability access to an educational event, it was more personal, because this conference was organized by people who know wheelchair users, and knew wheelchair users were coming. It was organized by people I know.

It is not malice. No one organizing this event set out to make anyone's life miserable. But that does not make it better. I can fight malice. Instead, my disability was constructed by educators I know through complete indifference, through complete lack of empathy. That is much harder to fight, If any of these people read this they will likely be horrified. They will be apologetic. They may be even resentful that (a) I didn't help with the organization, and (b) that I didn't ask them repeatedly for help, rather than launching this "public attack." They may, even, in regard to those latter two issues, be partially justified. I did not help. I did not ask.

But should I have to? Back in 1998, when I was at Grand Valley State University, I was explaining to the Academic Computing staff why we were going to put accessible computers in to every computing environment on all of our campuses, and why we were not requiring "disabled" students to show some kind of ID card to use these workstations. One of my co-workers there got it immediately. "We don't ask anyone else to go somewhere special to use a computer," he said, "we don't ask anyone to show an ID to use a monitor or a keyboard."

That was 12 years ago. I don't know if the term "Universal Design" had entered education yet - surely I had never heard of it - and yet, people knew what was right. Today the expectations should be much higher.

There were many fabulous things about this conference. Great people. Great sessions. Great ideas. Great conversations. I would say that I would love to go to CIES2011 in Montreal, but at this grand international event, my fellow educators, grad students, and researchers were willing build my disability into something so big I felt not just like a Second-Class Citizen, but as someone less than fully human. If they'll do that here, to me, what are they doing to the students in their classrooms?

I hope the person I gave my dinner ticket to enjoyed... I hope they had no problem with the stairs.

- Ira Socol

How Social Networking Liberates Teachers

This week I presented a second version of the paper on Twitter as Teacher Liberation Technology that I presented last fall at Kent State University. This time, for the 2010 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, I discussed Social Networking as Liberation Technology for Teachers and Students.

Teaching remains one of the most isolating professions I can think of, especially since lighthouse keepers have largely disappeared, and this isolation not only has profound effects on the individuals who teach, but on all of their students as well.

Even in large urban schools most teachers spend the day essentially locked within their own classrooms. Contact with their fellow professionals is limited to short lunch moments, conversations in the parking lot, and poorly designed professional development sessions. There is none of the "just-in-time" consultation which the other "professions" - doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers - have, almost none of the collaboration which routinely define those professions. There are not even "post-mortems" to challenge and advise when things go wrong.

Of course in much of the world the isolation is near total. Rural teachers may be one of two or three, or even the only teacher in a village. They may be hours from other teachers, and completely removed from any possible physical connection to teacher training institutions.

In addition to this lack of collaboration and internal support, these teachers also lack real visions of change, real alternate solutions. Teachers don't see examples of the best schools. They don't see what a real universal design school looks like. They don't see schools-without-walls. They don't see multiage or great mobile learning, unless it is right in their building.

Finally, teachers' "sight" and "reach" are constantly being restrained by national and local hegemonic power systems. Those who fund education, those who make "the rules," are politicians imposing their own vision of social reproduction on teachers. These rules - or the design of teacher education itself - constrict the sense of possibility in education. It might be the time schedule - what you can do with students in a 50 minute period is so different than what you can do in a flexible schedule. It might be how teachers are trained - in the US Teach for America workers have just six weeks of training, often devoid of alternative ideas or ideas for differing students, while in Northern Ireland, a single-year program, "just does not give us enough time [to really transform new teachers regarding inclusion]," a University of Ulster professor told us on Tuesday, and in many education programs Special Educational Needs are, at best, a tiny sidebar and Universal Design is not demonstrated at all. It might be barriers erected to learning - teachers given laptops which block certain content and certain social networking sites, or which prevent teachers from installing and discovering new learning technologies. It might be national laws - which prevent invention and experimentation. It might be locally instilled fear - many of us have seen or heard the "be scared of the internet" presentation given by poorly educated educators, politicians, and law enforcement personnel.

The result of this isolation is teachers who get stuck, who get frustrated, who are left alone to problem-solve without support - and students who too often sit through unimaginative, unchanging pedagogy.

 

A small primary school in Scotland met the scientists at the New York Hall of Science because the teacher was willing to let the students crowdsource a question about gravity and the vacuum of space

Social Networking changes the space in which teachers act
Social Networking allows an altered flow of power

I combine concepts from two philosophers to explain what I think happens when social networking tools such as Twitter and blogs enter the lives of teachers. From Michel Foucault I bring the idea that we best observe human action by watching what they actually do in a conceptual transaction space. That "space" - the "playing field" on which we operate, is shaped  by the limitations we have constructed through our own cultural experiences. And from Antonio Gramsci I bring the slightly advanced Marxist Philosophy view of power - that all humans have power in some way - that there are ways in which people resist and attempt to subvert structures imposed from above (the colonial imposition of hegemony), and it is important to watch those flows of power to understand.

Teachers seem to begin using these tools tentatively. First blog posts are often a basic question, or a happy report on something in their classroom. First tweets are typically a "hello," followed by a period of lurking. Many teachers go no further. Many of those who go no further describe the experience as "boring" or "confusing."

But for those who stick with it, those who are active enough to allow themselves to be drawn into conversations, start to see their transaction spaces change. New ideas flow into them which begin to widen horizons - they meet a classroom team running an inclusive classroom, they meet a latin teacher working without paper, they meet an American special education teacher challenging convention - or an Australian one. they see classrooms unimaginable to them, they meet new professors with different ideas - and the walls which have surrounded their perceptions - and which have appeared to limit their possible actions - begin to fall.

At this point, they begin to reach out and ask for help, they begin to wonder about possibilities, they begin to document their own experiments - which expands the circle. And then, teachers begin to collaborate.

They collaborate on pedagogy, often linking classrooms together - sharing book groups, blogs, skype calls - across their nations and around the globe. And they collaborate on power, asking for assistance in changing policies and structures, and getting it. These power collaborations range from technical advice on blocked internet applications to support for tenure.

And, once this happens, students begin to see the benefits, both indirect - teachers willing and able to attempt change, and direct, actual classroom involvement in the world.

Liberation through Social Media

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

- Ira Socol

Transactional Disability and the Classroom

I've written on this before, but this week I introduced the idea of "Transactional Disability" to my class at Michigan State University as we discussed classroom strategies for ADHD. One major disussion the students had involved the question of whether ADHD was a "socially constructed" disability or a "medical condition." This was driven, in part, by an article we'd read looking at a comparison between Sweden and the US, and the vastly different rates of ADHD diagnosis and the very different ways this "disorder" is accommodated. It seems important, so I wanted to bring it up once more...

The debate between the “social” v. “medical” models of "disability" are endless and ongoing. This is often seen most clearly when international, or intercultural comparative studies are done. In the case of the ADHD study comparing Sweden and the US, the sharp differences in the number of children seen as having “a medical disability” (and thus needing medication for “symptoms”) in the two-nation study demonstrates both sides of the debate. Across cultures we see the “differences” and yet, across cultures, we operate very differently.

One of the things which began troubling the Disability Rights/Disability Studies movement in the mid-1990s was the question of “the body” in the social model of disability. This first emerged as the Queer Studies movement’s thoughts (see Judith Butler) began being heard within Disability Studies, and was amplified by Deaf Community Activists who made their physical/sensory differences the heart of their culture. “Where is the body [in disability theory?” asked both Tom Shakespeare and Michael Oliver.

In this question I think of Michel Foucault, who, according to my favorite Foucault scholar, wanted to investigate not identity, and not causes, but the movements - the acts - we make in the "spaces" between us when we interact. “Don’t look behind the text,” he suggested, look at what people are “doing.”

So, beginning in the mid-1990s Tom Shakespeare joined the social model of disability to the body directly, yet without resorting to the medical model. He wrote about disability occurring at the "intersections" - the "places" where our bodily capabilities meet the world "as it exists."

Last year, a Twitter-pal with a visually impaired child made this very clear to me when she wrote: "Going to get son to walk around lake with me in the dark - he won't need his cane, but I'll need flashlight."

Transactional Disability

Somewhere between "the medical model" - difference described as a medical illness the way North Americans do - "a person with cancer" "a person with a reading disability" - and the "social model" - difference described as only a problem created by societal norms, lies what I have begun calling "the transactional model." Yes, we are all different in various ways, including our set of capabilities. But these differences only become "impairments" when we - the differently capable - find that we cannot negotiate the world, or a specific corner of the world, the way others have set it up.

I may not be disabled when I watch a movie. Nor when I watch television, listen to the radio, listen to a friend or a teacher, listen to music, look at art. In fact, I think my capabilities are at least "average" or better when I meet these tasks. I become disabled when people choose, instead, to present information in alphabetical code. Those former information transfer systems I can navigate with ease. The alphabetical code leaves me tripping over myself. There is nothing "wrong" with me, nor is there anything wrong with the alphabetical code - the problem occurs in the transaction space - where print and I meet.

Similarly, I am fairly short. This is not a problem in most things, but at the grocery store, top shelf items are out of my reach. Thus, my height becomes a disability. At Aldi (no shelving units) this is not a problem. At typical Walmarts (very high top shelves) it is a big problem. Now, how do I deal with this?

One way is for me to climb the shelves to get what I want. I actually have done this many times. It gets you yelled at, as many of the ways kids cope in school gets them “yelled at” or much worse. (One group of university researchers suggested about 10-years-ago that Nicotine and THC were one excellent way to reduce the tensions related to ADHD (here’s one article) which may explain much of the ‘self-medication’ you see in secondary schools.) Another way is to wait and ask for help, but I think this diminishes me as a “whole human,” and over time saps my initiative and any sense of independence. But what if there were step ladders in each aisle, something library stacks often have? That tiny shift in the “transaction space” might eliminate “my height disability.”

The challenges of wheelchair shopping

However, this winter I have been in a wheelchair. This physical reality changes things in important ways. I can’t, for example, get into the MSU police building without help to buy a parking pass (just had to throw that in). But back to the grocery store: So now, Aldi is hard, but Meijer and Walmart become impossible. 90% of items are out of reach, and the cool stuff, “gourmet” cheeses, etc, and many fresh vegetables are completely out of reach, and sometimes out of sight. No step stool will solve this – perhaps an old fashioned “grocery grabber” hung in each aisle might help – but large parts of the store would need to be completely re-conceived to make independent shopping possible for me.

However, where (and when) I grew up, grocery stores were different. The clerks stood or sat behind a counter. You went in, handed them a list or told them what you needed, and they went back to the shelves and got your order. Or you could ring them, and they would get your groceries and deliver them. This was also true of the butcher and the green grocer and the pharmacist. In fact, one of my first jobs was delivering prescriptions, and as part of that I would go into the customer’s kitchen, and if they had arthritis or a broken arm, I would open the childproof cap for them.

In that world, the wheelchair was much less of a disability while shopping. Same physical facts, different transaction space, different result.

So there is no doubt that the mother and son in the Tweet at the top have actual capability differences. Their vision capability difference is not merely a trick of societal construction. Yet there is nothing "wrong" with either. This need not be a "diagnosis." As the mother knows, the description of "disability" changes as the light does - thus it changes as the seasons change - and changes as the location changes. Walking around the lake in the dark she needs Assistive Technology, her flashlight, while he needs none. Moving across a street in the daylight, he may need supports, and she not.

This is important. I really believe it is. Right now we describe both the son above and myself in pathological terms. There is something "wrong" with us. But who decides that? That is society abusing some to raise up the power of others. The person who can't translate a construction document goes through much of their life without problem. But when they end up with a pillar in the middle of their office (I actually saw this almost happen) they are having a "transactional" problem – we need not label them "a person with a construction plan disability." The person who cannot find their way around the NYC subway system is not described as having a “directional disability,” instead we put up maps for everyone to use.

Changing the transaction space in the classroom

Which brings us to the classroom. Consider the child who is "fine" until you ask him to sit in a chair for an hour. Is he disabled? Must he be diagnosed? There's nothing inherently wrong with the chair or the child, just what happens when they meet. Alter the transaction space, or the rules of the transaction space, and the facts of the "disability," the actions of the “disability,” may not exist.

The child who can not decode alphabetic text, Is she disabled? Must she be diagnosed? What if she can understand and work with any information given to her auditorally? There is nothing wrong with alphabetic text, or the child. But the transaction as defined by the "space" - the teacher handing her the book - is failing. Text-To-Speech software and audiobooks might change that space, and that failure may not exist.

I once sat in an IEP for a fourth grader labeled ADHD and EI. “He does really badly on all of our timed math quizzes,” the teacher said, “he gets all nervous and then starts acting out.”

“How does he do if the quiz is untimed?” I asked. “They’re all timed,” she told me, “all the kids like to race.” “Well, not all,” I muttered.

So, a student with, perhaps, a definable brain difference. And a transaction space designed for other types of people. And the result is “disability.” We moved this child to another school with a Montessori type program. I checked in after his first week. The teacher came and met me in the hall. “You said he had IEPs at [x],” she said, “why?”

Change the space, the transactional area is altered, and thus the actions themselves are altered. If we follow Foucault's dictum and, as this new teacher did, and refuse to look "behind the text" - refuse to see anything but how the student is acting/functioning now, the disability has become non-existent. It has not just vanished - it has never existed in this new space.

- Ira Socol

Sarah Palin's Disability Disability

Sarah Palin hates people with disabilities. I knew that before I knew anything else about her. She introduced herself to America by holding up her baby and telling all the world everything that was wrong with him.

That's despicable.

If she really viewed her infant as a human with real potential she would have either left him and his siblings at the hotel (like a responsible parent) or simply introduced him, rather than claiming some kind of hero status because she chose not to have an abortion (a choice, by the way, which she implied was hers to make).

That plus the simple facts that Palin opposes a universal health care system (the only thing which would actually move the "disabled" toward equality), opposes adequate educational funding, opposes hate crime legislation, and opposes federal regulations which might ensure that people are treated equally in America. She also, of course, opposes parental leave laws and increased welfare benefits which might make it possible for parents to care for high needs kids.

Now we have Sarah Palin vs. Family Guy, a cartoon politician debating an actual cartoon. And, well, I'm with the actual cartoon, and here's why:

Just as The Simpsons, for all the criticism leveled at them by America's right-wing, remains the only show on television where the family eats breakfast and dinner together daily and goes to church together every week, Family Guy and South Park are the only two shows on American TV which deal consistently with disability issues in the context of normal life.

Wheelchair-user Joe, on Family Guy is - by far - the most competent male on the show, but that's not the thing... the thing that Family Guy does is face the issues. Yes Joe is a hero cop, but it won't get him into the brewery tour (see above), and yes Chris can go out with a strong, determined girl, but people will still make fun of him for dating a... yeah, you know the word. That's a kind of reality brought into American living rooms which pretty stories on the Nightly News can not offer, and which all of Sarah Palin's whining about "haters" can not touch.

Just as on South Park, where Timmy and Jimmy are truly part of their school's community, of their town's community. They are not "surprisingly successful," because, damn, few of any of us are. Instead they are real kids who sometimes do things well, often can not, who are sometimes picked on, and sometimes befriended.

Let's bring in the Jeff Shannon of the Seattle Times here, commenting on a BBC Ouch! poll which found Timmy to be the favorite disabled character on TV in Britain:

"So why would disabled voters choose an animated, learning-disabled, wheelchair-using fourth grader as "The Greatest Disabled TV Character"? A misfit kid whose vocabulary is almost exclusively limited to garbled repetitions of his own name, yet who has gained a minor cult following as lead vocalist for a heavy-metal garage band called The Lords of the Underworld?

"The simple answer is that Timmy is downright hilarious, but for disabled "South Park" fans, closer examination of the character's popularity (like that of "Stevie" on Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle") leads to a startling revelation: Comedy Central's controversial cartoon series, featuring a foul-mouthed batch of fourth graders in the "quiet mountain town" of South Park, Colo., is the source of the most progressive, provocative and socially relevant disability humor ever presented on American television.

"With his jagged teeth and can-do spirit, Timmy appears, at first glance, to uphold the condescending disability stereotypes that are gradually fading from mainstream entertainment. But like everything else in "South Park," he's actually challenging preconceptions, toppling taboos and weaving his singularity into the fabric of the show. Insensitive, unenlightened viewers may laugh at Timmy, but the character's popularity is largely determined by those who laugh with him.

"That this is happening on "South Park" — a series routinely condemned by conservative watchdogs — comes as no surprise to anyone who understands what the show is all about. Co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (who financed the excellent documentary about disability "How's Your News?," available on DVD) may seem like juvenile provocateurs with a liberal agenda, but "South Park" would not have become a pop-cultural phenomenon if there wasn't a method to its madness. Parker and Stone are equal-opportunity offenders, and when nothing is sacred — not even the seemingly unassailable image of the late Christopher Reeve — the satirical playing field is level, and timely issues become ripe for outrageously comedic scrutiny."

You see Sarah, holding up your baby for political gain is hate speech, bringing the disability community into the mainstream is not. I hope that when Trig grows up, Sarah, he explains that to you.

- Ira Socol

What is Technology?

What is "technology"? What is "assistive technology"?

Before we can talk about accommodations in the classroom, we need to begin to understand humans and their tools, and thus, the definitions of technology.

The issue is that schools are not at all "anti-technology" - quite the opposite. Schools embrace all the ed tech introduced by Horace Mann and Henry Barnard in the mid-19th Century. Desks and individual seats with backs. Rectangular classrooms with windows on one side. Black-Boards (or their successors) hung in the front of the room. A school day in which everyone was expected to attend from "bell to bell." Printed books ("the most significant technological invention of the last millennium" according to The Guardian). The school calendar. The idea of dividing children by age into "grades" (a radical idea imported to the US by Barnard from Prussia). Maps on the wall, the flag in the corner. OK, yes, paper had been introduced earlier, pencils would come a bit later, but all of these were intentional inventions of humans who were designing an educational system. So was the "standardized test" - that 1867 invention of the New York State Board of Regents.

All of these technologies have been "naturalized," of course, so we no longer see them as technologies. And we need to wonder how fair that is to those who might do better, be more comfortable, with newer, or other, technologies.

So I asked my students to join me in a VoiceThread investigation of what "technology" and "assistive technology" means.

I began with this: from the discussion tab in Wiktionary - 

"Technology is a word that is made of two greek words. Techne and Logos.

"Techne is the greek word for Art. Logos is the Greek word for "reasonable language" or "reasoning about". Therefore a direct translation might be "the reasonable language of art" or "reasoning about art" . So this is not confusing we might substitute the word "technique" for art. For example, a technique which is an "art form" even though it is quite technical in nature. The resulting literal definition might then be "reasoning about techniques."

"Technology is therefore "thinking about the best way to do things. - Eric
 
"Etymology of these both words is more complicated than that. Techne (also spelled tekhne) means art as in skill or craft (if we want to see a difference between art and skill). Logos means "language", "reason", "reasoning", or even "world". Also, technology isn't just "thinking", it is also constructing and manipulating the world. wikipedia:Martin Heidegger saw technology as a mode of thinking where everything that is, is seen from the perspective of manipulation. He said this the prevailing mode of thinking today. - Nikke"

The narrowest point in the East River in New York City

On the VoiceThread, which you can listen to right here, each slide begins with me introducing a technological challenge. What skills, what capabilities, what tools do you need to travel between New York neighborhoods? To absorb a story written 90 years ago? To bring a refrigerator home? To get to the 88th floor of the Sears Tower? To write a story in a way that others can read it?

After we began our VoiceThread conversation, I sent my class the following note, title: "What is technology?" 

Let’s begin with the first VoiceThread slide, the trip from Canarsie (on Brooklyn’s Atlantic coast) to the Turtle Bay neighborhood in Manhattan (the UN area). I chose these because they are two places clearly settled long before Henry Hudson first sailed in to the harbor 401 years ago.

Imagine the trip in the present, then imagine it in 1609.

Manhattan in 1609 via The Mannahatta Project

In the top image here you can see the “narrow spot” in the East River, a fast flowing tidal strait that moves with the tide action. In the next picture you see a vision of Manhattan in 1609 (the shadow represents the current landmass – see http://themannahattaproject.org/). The “narrow spot” I just talked about is just out of the scene to the right, but if you look north you can see another opportunity for crossing, where what is now called Roosevelt Island splits the river. Of course getting to that spot from Canarsie might mean covering lots more forest, and perhaps crossing a major stream which we call Newtown Creek and which divides Brooklyn from Queens (you can just make out the entrance into the East River to the right of the picture).

I bring all this up not as a history lesson (though it is a fun history lesson), but to demonstrate how our ideas of technology change and “naturalize.”

In 1609 a Manahatta or a Canarsie making the trip – and make the trip they did (it has oft been rumored that it was the Canarsie who “sold” the Manahatta’s island to the Dutch in 1625) – would have considered moccasins technology, and the clothing that prevented brambles from ripping his/her skin, and surely the dugout canoe which probably beat swimming for it. Plus the trail that crossed Brooklyn from the shores of the Atlantic to the East River (now called Flatbush Avenue).

Today, we might not even see the roads, railroads, and bridges as technology, though just a bit more than a hundred years ago those items pretty much defined technology.

So, like the teacher who says, “All I need is a chalkboard, some books, and a classroom,”(1) we tend to assume that anything we are familiar with – anything “invented before we were born” – is not “technology” but “natural.”

In schools books, desks, chairs, pens, pencils, papers, chalk-boards, the school timetable, eyeglasses, the cars which bring teachers to school, even the stairs which make it much easier to get to the second floor, have all been “naturalized.” Yet all were once “introduced” into education, many controversially.

And my argument is that every technology both enables and disables – it simply depends on the individual.

So, the human “default” method of getting from Canarsie to Turtle Bay would be walking and swimming, protected by your own skin. For climbing 900 feet high it would be, yes, climbing. Carrying a heavy object? Picking it up and carrying it, or collecting enough other humans to join you if it is really heavy. Transmitting stories? You speak, they listen, or vise-versa. Everything else which “assists” is “technology” – from shoes to roads, from stairs to ladders, from straps to wheels, from paints for cave art to paper to radio.

But with each technological “advance” there are some who can take advantage of it and others who cannot. A person without eyesight is not nearly as “disabled” in a place of verbal information transmission as they are in a world of visually transmitted data (think Homer). The learner who cannot “sit still” is not “disabled” until the classroom and the chair are joined together.

Is there a difference between “technology” and “assistive technology”? What is “unassistive technology”? Is it technology which does not help “you,” the individual?

How does our definition of technology impact how we view “disability”? If the only way from Brooklyn to Manhattan was swimming, and for survival reasons you had to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan, would the “disability” label be applied to different people than it is right now?

It took Europeans over 260 years of living in the New York area before they managed to bridge the East River (here the Manhattan Bridge – the bridge closest to that “narrow point” – is under construction in 1909)

And for those of you who were going to drive to the 42nd Street and First Avenue area of Manhattan: if it costs you $65 to park there, does that change your capabilities? What if you could not afford the $4.50 round trip subway fare? In other words, how does socio-economic status impact our ideas of “ability” and “disability”?

If you have the wealth to own and insure a car in New York City (and to have paid to get a drivers license) and the wealth to pay for Manhattan parking, the inability to walk 20 blocks at a time, four times a day, is not “disabling,” but if you cannot afford that, and you had to walk from your home in Canarsie to the bus stop, then climb the stairs from the bus to the subway, then walk from the subway to your job through a very hilly part of Manhattan, then do it again when work was done, a little “shortness of breath” can keep you from your job. But we would rarely call a car “assistive technology.”

I often say this: I am “disabled” if you give me paper and a pencil. I have dysgraphia. I am disabled if you give me an “ink on paper” book to read or you ask me to read your handwriting on the chalkboard or whiteboard, I have dyslexia. I am disabled if you expect me to sit in a chair, in a room, for 40 minutes straight, I have ADHD. But if I am working on my computer, able to move as I need to, with the TV on at home or, say, dozens of people chatting around me in a coffee shop, I am not disabled at all. I am very able.

What about your students?

- Ira Socol 

(1) "All you need to teach English are books, desks, paper, pens, and a chalkboard. You don't need any technology--just use what's there." - a university professor quoted in Steven D. Krause. "Among the Greatest Benefactors of Mankind": What the Success of Chalkboards Tells Us about the Future of Computers in the Classroom."  The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33, No. 2, Computers and the Future of the Humanities (Spring, 2000), pp. 6-16.

The future of information (a Super Bowl post)

Most of the Super Bowl ads sucked this year, let's just agree on that. Misogyny and with "men in underwear" jokes that were stale in 1959 are, hopefully, simply extreme wastes of marketing money and opportunity.

My personal favorite was probably the Volkswagen ad, a very slick transgenerational bit of minimally explained comedy...

but no ad said more than Google's...

The Google ad owes something to Michael Wesch and Kansas State University's Digital Ethnography class videos, but it also breaks out to fully explain the full reach of our contemporary information gathering tools, from the academic to the frivolous, from the mispellings ("louve") to the mis-searched (needing to add "France" to Paris is one search), from the maps to the photos to the comments on a location. This, for all those wondering what "students need to know," is what students need to know.

The Google ad was completely platform and device independent, which is key because we now search everything everywhere. What restaurant? Where is that customer? What is that professor interested in? What has this potential employee created? Is the florist open so I can bring flowers? Where do I sleep tonight? Can I make train reservations? What does ethnography mean anyway?

Whatever it is, we need to know how to efficiently, effectively search, and we need to know how to be searched, and how we, and our works, and our lives, will be searched. We will need to know how to participate as well. Who put that picture of the Parisian church up? Who put up the reviews? What is "slug bug"?

Don't tell me these are genetically encoded skills of the "digital generation." That is nonsense. I see enough teens and young twenties to know that most know very little of this, and many, nothing at all. That's because their education has failed them. They've been battered with information on footnotes and citations and APA style and MLA style, and borders and type-sizes in the schools which were supposed to be educating them for their futures.

But the schools were training them in mapping skills for the last century, and they come to universities not knowing that Google Scholar exists, and not knowing what you can find on the discussion pages of Wikipedia, and not knowing how to even refine a Google search. They are strangers in their own land because they've been led by educators still locked in some ancient time.

Let's change that. A year in which the New Orleans Saints become champions is surely the start of a new era, right?

- Ira Socol

Game Changer?

What is changing?

When Steve Jobs came out of his Fortress of Solitude last week to announce the iPad, I heard the phrase "game changer" over and over.

The iPad will save newspapers, end the Kindle experiment, completely alter education, change the design of computers forever, its potential, or the potential of this style of device, will alter the world.

Now, at the start, I'll admit that I don't believe in historic "pivot points." Yes, those are convenient solutions for history quizzes ("America was discovered in: (a) 1342 (b) 1492 (c) 1817 (d) 1776") but they always suggest the heroic breakthrough of the individual rather than an ever changing, ever evolving ("evolve" used in a non-progressive sense - is an elephant really "better" than a Mammoth? a panther better than a Sabre-tooth Tiger?) human race.

Humans change, their environments change, and thus their needs change. As those needs change, humans - the world's greatest tool makers - the world's most consistent tool users - start to look for solutions, and begin to invent answers. Multiple people went after the "voice telegraph" (the "telephone) in the mid-19th Century, because people wanted more than the telegraph. And multiple people "invented" it at the same moment. Multiple people went after the "moving picture" in the late 19th Century because people wanted more than photography, and multiple people "invented" it at the same moment.

On his blog, Shelly Blake-Plock and I have wondered about the impact of the iPad, and Shelly makes the assertion that perhaps this is the moment when those in power in education truly begin to learn the value of digital community. If so, it will be a "moment" - perhaps transformational.

Breakthroughs do occur, even if they are public conception breakthroughs. Looking back through my "new social history" lens, I've found a random few such moments:

The cheap Polaroid camera: Edwin Land had introduced (not invented) the Polaroid instant film camera in 1948. I can remember my father bringing home a massive, bellows style one using black and white film and a "do not ever touch this" leather case in 1962 (obtained used from Lord-knows-where, you would'a need to know my Da), but these were strange niche market items. In 1965 however Polaroid slashed prices on a new plastic-bodied camera and changed the perception of photography.

Prior to the Swinger photography was about memory, now, photography was a concurrent social activity. Digital photography, Flickr, etc enhanced this, but the creation moment happened 45 years ago.

The penny newspaper: In 1830 a newspaper appeared in Boston which was priced at 1/6th the price of any other newspaper in the United States. The Boston Transcript cost a penny and, for the very first time, allowed average people to carry readable news with them. And thus, the "penny newspaper" was born. It represented something else as well, the first time "published information" was provided to a mass audience far below cost because the bulk of the costs were born by advertisers (essentially, the penny cost was covering only the distribution network).

The idea spread wildly, across the US and the world, dramatically "lowering" journalistic standards (mass sales became essential to attract advertisers, thus heavy coverage of sensational crime news) - read Jack Finney's Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Storiesfor an amazing view of this - and destroying the old elite journalism which had carried the nation since colonial times.

From this point on, the model which so built US network radio and television, and which is now so despised by most newspapers, was invented. Users paid for the "delivery device" - not the content. If you bought a radio or TV the content came free. If you needed newsprint you paid for the newsprint and the delivery. The New York Times may rage at the unfairness, but it is their system. It is they who want to change the rules now, not the rules which have changed.

The dial telephone: The telephone had existed for generations before it became "self-service." Surely the phone was transformational, and yet, its function changed forever once you didn't have to ask someone to make a call for you - and perhaps - once you didn't assume people were listening in on your conversations (this is the period between the introduction of the dial phone and the George W. Bush/Tony Blair era).

So the dial telephone created a new form of non-face-to-face communication. A new kind of immediacy and intimacy not possible before. It also created the first distance communication system in which the "technology" began to become "invisible." You didn't know how it worked, you didn't care - you just picked it up and used it.

The Sears, Roebuck, and Company Catalogue: I almost included Amazon here, remembering, as I do, how Amazon was a national laughingstock in the year 2000 - "the world's largest non-profit" - because the idea of Amazon sure seems transformative - except - it wasn't really. The idea had been perfected more than a century before.

Was Sears the first? Of course not. Aaron Montgomery Ward beat him to it by more than a decade, Hammacher-Schlemmer by over almost a half-century, but Sears made shopping from home "the big thing." He transformed our way of "wishing for products." No longer did we just walk past shop windows, now we sat and browsed through a book of representations, and began to depend on descriptions and labels ("Sears-Best" "Lady Kenmore").

The arrival of the Sears Catalogue was that moment when it became "perfectly OK" to stay home and dream about consumer goods, stay home and research products, stay home and shop.

The Lisa Computer: A computer with a non-code interface. Now that's revolutionary. I recall standing in front of an Apple dealer's store window staring at thing thing, with its "desktop" and its ability to print out a real image.

You may want to skip the five minute intro, but you can look back at a time when Apple thought multitasking was really important

The Lisa was absurdly expensive and pretty much "nobody" bought it. But, and in this Shelly Blake-Plock's concept that the iPad will transform leadership thinking becomes relevant, the Lisa demonstrated that a personal computer could be used by people who were not trained technicians and the Lisa demonstrated that computers were something more than highly evolved adding machines. That was "game-changing."

Steve Jobs and his followers proclaim, of course, that the iPad is "magical." That now people will be able to go anywhere and read, write, communicate, watch video, view pictures, listen to music. "Magical" perhaps, but if I look around, if I say, walk through my campus, or my town, or ride the El in Chicago or the Subway in New York or the Luas in Dublin or the Tube in London, I see just about everyone under the age of forty, and many above that line, reading, writing, communicating, watching video, viewing pictures, and listening to music on small digital devices. The transformation, of course, has occurred. It is the packaging that has changed. Think floppy disk to flash drive, not invention of the railroad (which, although still an evolution of transportation systems, did allow - for the first time - for humans to move as rapidly on land as they could on water).

So, is the iPad transformational? My thought is that the transformation has already happened - the game has already changed. But I also know that we won't really know that for a long time. Games change when we least expect them to.

- Ira Socol

Teaching Government

A few summers ago I sat in a class - for both masters level and doctoral students - on teaching international education. Many of the students were Michigan social studies teachers. It was a fascinating course taught by a brilliant professor, but it was also horribly revealing. The teachers really did not know that people in other nations might define "democracy" as something other than "majority rules." Most did not know how Canada selected its government. None knew much about America's imperial history - wars in the Philippines, occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the seizure of Hawaii.

So I asked a question: How many teachers taught in schools where student council elections were held in a way other than "the American voting system"?

The response was, "How else would anyone vote?"

So I pulled out something which looked like this - vote counting in Ireland's Dail (parliamentary) election:

This immediately confused everyone. Once I explained that "1st Pref[erence]" meant the voters "first choice" they were more confused. As you can see, the number one "1st Pref[erence]" vote recipient did get elected, but finished third. The number two "1st Pref[erence]" vote recipient was not elected.

Americans, only knowing, only learning about, "first past the post" elections, are, logically baffled to learn that this isn't the only way. So this district in the north of Dublin elected three people to their parliament from three different parties. Drilling down in the analysis, it also suggests that about 96% of voters got one of their top choices elected. In other words, quite the opposite of America's gerrymandered, 49% angry, elections, this is "democracy" based in the idea of consensus. Then there is the role of smaller parties. In the US a protest vote usually is a vote for the candidate you like least. Ralph Nader voters in 2000 were voting for George W. Bush no matter what they say. But in Ireland you get to vote, say, Green, and select Labour as your second choice. If the Green candidate is eliminated because of too few votes, your second choice vote is counted instead, you haven't voted for Fianna Fail.

Whether this produces better government than the American voting system, or the French voting system, or the German voting system, isn't the point. Nor is the question of whether it produces better politics. Ireland's Green Party has surely proven that this system is no guarantor of integrity in the past year. But it creates a fundamentally different sense of politics, government, and democracy - and that is important.

But if Ireland was too much, I asked if they understood how New York State votes. Of course, they did not know that either.

New York is a "first past the post" electoral system with single-member constituencies like most of America (we would call Ireland a "Single Transferable Vote" system with "multi-member constituencies"), but it is a multi-party system with "Fusion" voting: Candidates can run on multiple parties and their totals are added together. This theoretically allows voters to support a candidate but not a party. This has given great power to "smaller" New York parties throughout history. the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Working Families Party.

Again, better or worse isn't the question, it is a different system. Just as a parliamentary system is fundamentally different than a "presidential" system, especially a Presidential system with a super powerful executive such as in the US, France, Russia, or Venezuela - all of which might be called "plebesceterial" (in the mind of Bush-era folks like Dick Cheney and John Yoo), in which the executive is, essentially, unchallengeable during his/her term.

I think our US students need to know these differences. Not just because they should know that they live in a society which has made certain choices, but because they will have to engage with the world in their lives. And they can not do that if they have no idea of how the rest of the world makes decisions.

So, next time your school chooses student leaders, pick a different system, or allow your students to pick a different system. Vote like the Irish, it will improve the math skills of vote counters. Vote like New Yorkers, your art students can make all those little symbols. Vote like the French, angrily, in multiple rounds. Vote like the Brits, and let people run for office in classrooms they don't "reside" in. Do one thing this year, another thing next year. Keep it changing. Keep them learning.

We might even raise a generation which thinks about how they are governed, rather than which passively accepts their inheritance.

- Ira Socol

History through Fiction

As an undergrad I took a course in the history of Europe in the first half of the 20th Century, that is, 1914 to 1945. (Step one, of course, is understanding that "historically" the 20th Century in Europe begins in 1914 and ends in 1989. I might suggest that the century is much longer in the US, beginning in 1898 and ending in 2001, but that's another story.)

The course was fabulous on many levels. We had great history students in there, and a great professor. We could debate every event from "the big four perspectives" - British, French, Russian, German (my role being - until we got to 1933 - to present the German/Central European view) - and we didn't fall for the standard "causation" theories of simplistic history. But the best thing was the final assignment.

"I want you to do something," the professor said, "which demonstrates a real knowledge of some part of this period. Do whatever you want, and tell me your sources. Those are the only rules."

I wrote a short story. Well, really I wrote an unfinished novella, calling it off and handing it in at about 75 pages - which was deemed sufficient. My story was of a German Storm Trooper (think US Special Forces, not the later Nazi version) coming home from the front in the winter of 1918-1919. I made him a Czech, an Austrian citizen who had chosen to join the German Army. I placed his fiance in Munich, living with a relative during the war. This allowed my protagonist to travel by train from France to Hamburg, and then Hamburg to Munich. It allowed me to describe Germany at that moment of defeat. And in Munich it allowed me to bring him into the bizarre story of the short lived Bavarian Free Republic and its mercurial Marxist/Artist/Philosopher leader Kurt Eisner, which was the historical tale I wanted to tell.

Eisner monument in Munich on the site of his assassination (Wikipedia)

Eisner was fascinating, since his primary pre-occupation seems to have been ensuring that new authors, playwrights, film-makers, and painters were supported - this being about democracy in art, not just government. He's historically important first because it was his government which released the "German War Guilt" telegrams between Berlin and Vienna from 1914, and more importantly, because the right-wing backlash against this leftist state turned Munich and Nuremberg into hotbeds of fascism and antisemitism. You've heard of Adolf Hitler, I presume.

The story may not have been perfect writing, but as a history lesson it was the very best. By creating a protagonist that had elements of myself in him - I too have some Czech ancestry - and it was written in the first person, I allowed myself to walk through this history. With each historic discovery I made in my research, be it the state of the German National Railroads at the end of the war, or a job offer in the Foreign Ministry of this bizarre little government seeking recognition as a separate nation by the victors, I had to push myself back in time and navigate the experience. Each step forced more research: Would I have been pro-Czech independence? Which city, Prague or Munich, would have been more appealing? Would German Army service have been accepted in Prague? Was Eisner really just following Bavaria's artistic history under the Wittelsbach dynasty? Why were Munich Marxists so different than many in Berlin?

This simple assignment turned me into an expert on this little known historic moment.

Others in the class wrote plays, made videos, one did a painting, there was a dance performance, and there were other stories, and even some "academic papers." Yes, it was all good. But let me focus on the historic fiction for the moment, because recently @bryanjack asked me - via Twitter - to help mentor one of his high school students regarding a historical fiction project.

I think that, for at least a large group of students, asking them - or allowing them - to merge their creativity with their emerging writing (or video) and historical research skills is one of the most powerful ways to teach history. As is the sharing of those projects - which bring these individual, or small group - zones of historic expertise together.

Think about this. Kids are already really good at projecting themselves into different worlds. They were great at it when they pretended to be knights in the Victorian era. They were great at recreating the "old west" or World War II in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the arrival of video games, these skills have actually accelerated, as everything from The Sims and Civilization to the "first person shooter" games is based in this projection skill.

They're not only good at it, they enjoy it.

But what we, as "educators," can add is reality. We can help them research and find the realities which will change the play into play plus real knowledge acquisition. Munich was still beautiful Munich in the winter of 1919 I discovered in my dive into this kind of fantasy, but it was often easier to find beer than many kinds of meats or the manufactured products that middle class Europeans were used to (the result of a British blockade that went on long after the fighting stopped). This didn't hurt the story I was telling, of course, it created whole parts of the story. Bringing home good soap was a wonderful romantic gift. Sausage was an extravagance, and the addition of meat meal to an evening out was important.

Your students, turned loose with their stories and their online search tools, will discover similar wonders around every corner. If you want to give them hints, and they are in Middle School or above, you might try a Thomas Mallon novel such as Aurora 7 or a Jack Finney novel like Time and Again, both stunningly researched historical fiction pieces. There are fine Finney short stories which might work for students as well, such as some of those in his collection About Time: 12 Short Stories. "What," you will be asking them, "did this author need to look for in order to tell this story?"

Just a suggestion, of course, but I see so much history made so boring in school, when, it seems to me, history is the greatest collection of stories - and kids love stories. So maybe it's worth a try.

- Ira Socol

Iron Educator America

It began as a Conan-kind of joke. NBC, the self-destroying US television network (when your home studio is Rockefeller Center how can you be so bad?), suddenly has five hours of prime time to fill. Sure, I thought, I'd like to bring back Homicide, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, etc, but, I wondered out load on Twitter, couldn't they give us one of those hours to get Americans thinking about education?

I proposed Iron Educator America. We could take Tuesday night, picking up that giant Biggest Loser audience.

Yes, it's a joke, but it's still a real idea. The chance for Americans to think about really doing education differently, just as cooking shows, from The French Chef to Iron Chef America, have changed Americans' ways of thinking about food.

I proposed that we start with Iron Educators Alec Couros (@courosa) and Shelly Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) going at it - demonstrating their exceptional skills. Dr. Couros could show us the open hybrid college course. Mr. Blake-Plock could show us a Latin class run without paper. Will Richardson (@willrich45) was tabbed by our Twitter crowdsource as "Chairman" (nimble, entertaining, and vegetarian). Few challenge "the norms" in education as effectively as Will does. Chad Ratliff (@chadratliff) got the Alton Brown host role. He is one of those exceptional synthesizers, who forces out the complex explanations behind education practice. Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo), educational reporter extraordinaire, would take the floor reporter position.

our nimble chairman, Will Richardson

Imagine: Week after week, we'd see two master educators do things differently, excite students, pull the whole class in. We'd pick "winners" because America always wants there to be a "loser," but just like Iron Chef the point would be how great both were. We could cover a wild range of styles and every grade level. See Lisa Parisi (@lparisi) and Christine Southard co-teach with Universal Design. See Michael Wesch (@mwesch) run his digital ethnography course at Kansas State. Eventually, probably during sweeps, Derrell Bradford (@dyrnwyn) and I will go at it.

Imagine: People could see what their schools might look like, instead of simply relying on their own self-serving memories of school.

Imagine: People might actually debate educational practice at "the water cooler."

Iron Educator America is a joke, of course. But maybe it's a joke whose time has come.

- Ira Socol