If there’s something in what I wrote on Tuesday, and judging by the replies I’ve had in response I think there is, it’s worth digging a bit deeper into the power of combining inclusiveness with aspiration.
Culturally, we’re down with aspiration. It’s on many school vision statements. It’s a word used comfortably by politicians. Parents want their kids to aspire to things.
Most commonly, we associate aspiration with goals and hard work, with the pursuit of excellence and high expectations.
But it’s worth remembering that aspiration is also relational, in that it’s the world around us and the affordances of its social structures, relationships and opportunities that enable us to aspire to things. In fact, they actually determine to a large extent the things we are able to aspire to.
On Tuesday I wrote
Without aspiration, what we have are ‘opportunities to do’ that aren’t clearly linked to a vision for why they’re worth doing.
Let’s add some nuance to that thought.
In addition to providing children with easy ways to get started on projects (low floors) and ways for them to work on increasingly sophisticated projects over time (high ceilings), we also need to support many different pathways between the floor and the ceiling (wide walls).
SOURCE: Mitch Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten, p. 139-140.
Low floors and wide walls are a great definition of how to think of an inclusive approach to participation in learning. We can say the more the context reflects this definition, the more inclusive it is.
The higher the floor, and narrower the walls the more exclusive the learning context is because ways to access, engage and work with the learning are limited.
Equally, the higher the ceiling, the more the learning context supports aspiration.
Inclusion means participation in learning is open to those who want to be involved, regardless of ability. The more exclusive something is, the more one must be qualified to join in (eg, skill, experience, potential, culture, social position).
Imagine a page with four quadrants.
The horizontal axis is participation: inclusive on the left to exclusive on the right.
The vertical axis is aspiration: high at the top to low at the bottom.
In the two quadrants above the horizontal line, we’re likely to see a sense of purpose and quest for mastery evident.
In the two quadrants below the horizontal line, a sense of purposelessness and aimlessness are possible, perhaps even probable.
It’s a framework that lets us see that learning can be aspirational, regardless of whether access to learning is inclusive or exclusive.
What comes to mind when you look at this framework?
One thing we can think about is the kind of things that might be said in each of the quadrants.
We can also think about the way power is expressed at each end of the participation line. When participation is inclusive, the relationships are more equal (this is not the same as saying there is no authority present). Exclusive participation, by its very nature, carries with it a heavier hierarchy.
Another point for consideration is which quadrant we’d like to be in, and why.
Or, we can think about how we would think about learning, including how it’s recognised, in each of the quadrants. A starting point for this is whether learning is seen as a process or an outcome.
We might also think about where and how dreams are present, and how a particular quadrant allows people to relate to them. For instance, in the exclusive participation/high aspiration quadrant dreams are likely to be goal-oriented (I dream of being an astronaut) but need to be earned and are thus far away.
Dreams are squashed in the exclusive participation/low aspiration quadrant.
On Tuesday, I argued that the cricket tournament, which I think is in the inclusive/high quadrant, allowed the kids to inhabit the dream. They got to live it.
I wonder if things can be carried across the horizontal axis? By that I mean, something might start as inclusive (as the North v South cricket day does) but become exclusive. In this instance, does the way in which dreams manifest carry over, for example? (Remember the power of the as if world for those kids?) What happens if it goes the other way?
(Does anything go the other way? - I have pro sports in mind here)
Let’s make the shift into schools and pedagogy, using play as a lens.
Play, as a pedagogical approach, is inclusive in that it offers learners multiple means of engagement in learning: it has low floors and wide walls. But play can also be a pedagogy of low aspirations, where things can go nowhere, lack focus, fizzle out, and lack depth.
When this happens, I’ve heard teachers refer to it as loose play.
(Loose play should not be confused with free play.)
I wonder if this happens when play is disconnected from a dream (what I mean here is the inner world of the kid is not fired for some reason), or perhaps because the dream that exists isn’t recognised, honoured, and responded to?
What needs to happen for play to be a pedagogy of high aspirations?