“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”.
Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education.
When I added this to the end of a SET Journal article I wrote, I kinda hoped it would jolt some people into action:
Jane’s (name changed) experience in SHAPE is an example of the power of taking a holistic approach to the development of learners through creative agency. She entered SHAPE a troubled student, perhaps more familiar with the door of the dean’s office than most classrooms. She left school at the end of 2020 to enter into tertiary study, full of confidence in who she was and that she had a place in the world. The following is her story, as told in conversation in August 2020.
“[SHAPE] took a lot of stress out of my life. I used to dread coming to school. Now I have the control to be able to make sure I find what I’m doing purposeful to me.
“You sit in another class. You get given a sheet. You work through it. Teachers help a little bit, but most of the time they ignore you. I’ve just done a whole page on how something works in science but that will be the last time I hear anything of it.
“Everyone has to do the same thing. You have to learn it in the way they want you to learn it too. Like, there’s no learning through doing things. If you want that you have to request it and most of the time you get ignored anyway. It’s very stressful.
“I think the teachers in SHAPE care a lot more. I’m going to be listened to. My belief in myself has strengthened because the teachers care. They encourage. They care more than teachers; feel like a relative, looking over your shoulder. Care has a lot to do with learning. Not everyone has this at home, someone who believes in you. This inspires you.
“I feel more appreciated. Feel there’s a reason to be confident. Before I felt like a dumb rock. Now I feel intelligent. I felt stupid any time I sat down in a class. Now I know how to teach myself. Now I feel more confident.
“SHAPE said it was OK to try doing other things in different ways. SHAPE says people with diverse learning needs can learn.”
Lots is being said at the moment about a return to the basics. When kids say things like this to me, I can’t help but think that perhaps the basics are something other than how we’re talking about them. Because how we feel about the learning matters. For this kid, and countless others, learning feels like control, oppression, and isolation. These feelings shut kids down. These feelings mean we don’t get to see who these kids are. When kids feel like this, it’s hard to learn anything, even The Basics.
Let’s be honest – these are the emotional undercurrents that are driving our education system and the reason why so many kids disengage. But we’re too afraid to name this truth. Instead, we recognise disengagement but posit nice, pretty, non-threatening approaches like ‘being holistic’ as the answer. They may be good things to aspire to and enact. But they don’t happen without first confronting the emotional undercurrent.
And this means the classroom is a political space.
“Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.”
Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
There are a lot of saviours running around in education, speaking of the urgency with which we must act to save the children. They speak of potential and empowering kids, of ensuring they achieve well academically, with the implicit assumption that this will lead to ‘options’ (which I guess is their version of liberation). And yet, if you look at their methods, we see nothing but tools that control, oppress, and isolate.
The idea of cognitive load is a key concept in their methodology.
Step by step, learning unfolds in a controlled manner, according to script, they believe. It’s all mapped out by these great saviours to ensure that the learning doesn’t get too overwhelming. Learners are objects, acted upon by a nicely designed sequence.
It’s a reductionist, impoverished view of children which betrays a lack of trust of the very people they’re on a mission to save.
In a recent Idiosyncratic Classroom Chat, Guy Claxton referred to this approach as ‘educational brutalism’.
It’s brutal because it doesn’t give the learners a say. Problems to do with learning are defined and solved by those who aren’t learners.
Let’s pause and think about what we’re trying to do with education. Whatever we may want to think, the classroom is a political space - it reflects our beliefs and values. These direct what we give our attention to and deem important.
One way to think about that is to consider what we are teaching: people or subjects.
Freire argues that there is one project that all people are involved in, and that is the project of becoming human in all its wondrous shades. This is not an optional project. Fundamentally, it is a project rooted in the pursuit of liberation, which if allowed to happen leads to the flourishing of a person as they build upon their unique strengths and inclinations. Is this something schools should be actively involved in? I think so. Schools are full of people, after all. But a view rooted in educational brutalism disregards this and reduces learning down to a ‘core’ of subjects – The Basics.
To set up conditions that limit, impede, or deny the pursuit of this project is a political choice, and it’s one that must, of necessity, shut down the pursuit of the project of becoming human. It must rest on a bed of oppression.
So, what are the conditions that impede the pursuit of this project?
They are environments where:
An external authority has control over my experience: what I do, when and how often I do it, how I do it, why I do it. ‘Jane’ had no say.
There’s a reliance on fear / coercion / force to keep me focused and productive. ‘Jane’ had to do everything as planned.
I am seen as an individual unit to be progressed through something deemed important by someone else. ‘Jane’s’ needs were ignored.
My academic achievements are valued more than my emotional experience or any other form of learning. ‘Jane’ felt like a dumb rock.
Control. Oppression. Isolation.
You’ll never get a glimpse of your learner’s ‘becoming human’ project while those emotions reign.
“Rather than being files to be accessed, memories are representations and to see them in our mind’s eye requires us to re-live the experience, often with a wealth of emotional baggage attached … Berggren discovered that trait anxiety places greater pressure on cognitive load, thus reducing the ability to focus on the task in hand (Berggren, Richards, Taylor, & Derakshan, 2013). Ojha found that negative emotions increase cognitive load of individuals with lower levels of intelligence but have no impact on those of average intelligence (Ojha, Ervas, & Gola, 2017).”
Our mind is not like a computer - a metaphor the saviours lean on heavily - learning merely a process of memory building and retrieval, only constrained by cognitive load and space in the brain’s memory.
It’s never information that makes me feel cognitively overloaded. It’s always negative emotions.
We are human. Emotions matter when it comes to learning. Those emotions create feelings either of oppression or liberation. We either feel constrained or free to be, comfortable or uncomfortable. We learn more when we are in spaces of liberation, freedom and comfort. This is a basic fact.
Imagine kids engaging in literacy learning with those basics attended to.
A good guide for a teacher, I’ve found, as to whether the emotional tenor of the room tilts towards oppression or liberation is whether they get pleased or surprised by what kids do.
We are pleased when things go according to plan, when things pan out as we expected.
We get surprised when someone does something we didn’t expect.
On balance, we want a classroom where we get surprised, delighted even, now and then, not one where we are only ever pleased. That’s a signal that kids are stepping forward. That’s a signal that the fundamental project we’re all engaged in is being pursued in the room. You know this to be true: we only step forward in this way when we feel good, where we read the space as safe to do so, where we see it as a place where we’ll be cared for and our risks valued. Isn’t this the basic foundation upon which all learning that matters can occur?
So how do we get surprised more often?
‘Jane’, our guide at the start, gives us some clues.
The classroom is a political space. The choice we must make is whether we want our classroom to be one where the pursuit of that universal project of becoming human is oppressed, or one where our learners are at liberty to pursue it. There is nothing neutral or apolitical about that choice.
Companion pieces
Think about the va and the words you use.
Well put! I have one thing popping in my head through reading this. I was first introduced to play based / relationship based learning in the late 80s at my own secondary school I was attending. I employ many of the same techniques/situations/ approaches those teachers (sorry I’m talking about 4 or 5 of my teachers ) used in that environment. It was all about questioning and ‘what iffing.. and fun learning. But what I remember most was how all these teachers wanted just to get to know us and seemed to accept all the different/diverse people we were. Enjoying and encouraging our idiosyncrasies. It is bizarre in some ways to reflect on this, because it was at a coed catholic school in Palmerston north. None of us enjoyed the catholicness at all and we were even allowed to make fun of it and mock the silliness we saw in it. I often think that maybe as there wasn’t just one value narrative in that school (ie top academic achievement) - but a variety - we were spared from any single indoctrination.
I know this is not everyone’s experience of their secondary education, but for my experience, “back to basics” is always about relationships and not attainment and pre assigned outcomes. It’s about allowing and seeing people grow into who they are.
I wonder if back to basics is about how you interacted with people in your local community , and how you helped them out when they needed it, or sat them down with a cup of tea and some scones and 20 minutes of your time , or picked up the shopping for them?? Just because you treasured the relationship.