Looking for opportunities in topics for the tools for self-understanding

I have just gone through a couple of weeks where students have been debriefing their experience and learning of an authentic task - the making of the college yearbook. Now we are onto to the next task... the launch of the yearbook.

So let's come up with an advertising campaign. What things could we do, what teasers could we use, what slogans for posters? We have a lesson of brainstorming. Then it is the weekend and I sleep on it. I begin to unpack the sort of excitable responses the students have made. I realise that I could now give them a little theory on advertising - look at the ploys used and ask them whether it is ethical. Usually I would do this at the beginning of the year, but producing an on-line magazine hasn't really required this.

I email my students a teaser for the following lesson... what ploys do you think you were using in coming up with advertising strategies (I give them a list to look at) and do you think it is ethical to use them?

Then I sleep on it. I remember their earlier debriefing where they unpacked what they learnt or who they felt they had become as a result of the yearbook project. Self-reflection is limited by the conceptual frameworks we are using. Perhaps my role is to help expand these frameworks... to help students build up their meta-language, to enable them to better unpack their behaviours and barriers. Perhaps I can also help them name some of the barriers they experienced which prevented them from participating in the project more effectively - so many of them have self-esteem issues, deeper fears or inhibitions and are struggling to self-actualize.

Hmmm. I now look again at my approach to advertising. Really, I have just been looking at the surface, but can I link this more deeply to ourselves, our development and our own needs? Can I help students develop a meta-language to explain their own self-science?

I now create a worksheet where I introduce Maslow's Needs Heirarchy and summarize Stage Development. On the back are a list of advertising ploys and I have added "cost benefit selling" - which is about selling how the product meets a person's need rather than selling the features of the product.

So it is time for class. We discuss emotional manipulation and what manipulation techniques (advertising ploys) they use with friends, family or teachers. Yes, using guilt is a preferred modus operandus! We brainstorm all the McDonald ads curently on TV - about 10 different ones - and unpack which of Maslow's needs they are targetting - and it becomes evident McDonalds are targetting every need!!! Students are a little astonished.

Later in the class, one girl wants people to go do something for her, she uses sighs, "you don't really care for me... if you did you would do this for me..." It is her standard way of manipulating people in the class. But no one is buying this time. I say cheerily, "Are you trying to use guilt, to make me do this? Now, is that ethical?" She looks at me a little taken aback.

So perhaps it starts... we have a language now to start naming behaviours and start discussing where we might be stuck. But I have only three more lessons to go until the end of the year. A bit too late really. Who might follow this up with these students?

It occurs to me that there is now room to make this more explicit in our development of the new curriculum framework of four learning elements. Perhaps in the learning element which relates to student development/personal pathways/wellbeing we should be asking what meta-languages might help students examine self, their self-development and their behaviours? There are a number of models. If we teachers could knowingly (and perhaps consistently) draw on them, and look for how they might tie in with particular topics or activities then we can build this into our courses, rather than seeing it as something separate.

For all my students, this was their first time that they were exposed to the Maslow's needs heirarchy or a theory of stage development... or even challenged to name behaviours. Don't we really care about emotional intelligence? If we did, we would be strategically incorporating its development into our teaching goals. (and am I now the one playing the guilt card?)

The transformative yearbook

I am continuing to debrief the making of an integral, soulful yearbook (see previous posts)... now I wish to unpeel the metpahors behind what we are doing...

When we are located in the curriculum metaphor - curriculum as content to be delivered - then the yearbook is likely to reflect achievement of gaining that content or skills.

When we are situated in the curriculum metaphor - curriculum as experience or currere - then the yearbook is an opportunity to reflect on where we have come from and where we are going - a more personal as well as collective journey.... with more emphasis on process rather than product... and a greater emphasis on who we have become as a result of that process, rather than what we have done.

So what are the transformational aspects and opportunities of the yearbook? Transformation can refer to changes in cognitive frameworks or changes in ego or other development lines. Kegan (The Evolving Self: Problems and Process in Human Development, 1982) suggests that as we move from one ego stage to another, what owns us in the previous stage becomes something that we can see and name and disengage from. We are able to play with it and thus try on new roles in moving to the next ego stage.

So an example for our students in a socialised ego stage is that of mindlessly buying into student sub-cultures and being subject to peer pressure. Perhaps in moving out of this stage to more self-authoring one, where there is a sense of self-confidence in one's individuality, one needs to be able to name what has been "owning" one.

So part of a rite of passage is telling the stories of who we are/were, dis-identifying with them and thus being able to move on.

So the creation of the yearbook can be an opportunity for the participants to engage in this process, as well as something which might create praxis in others - help them be more playful about who they are and what they might be buying into. It could be something which allows students to both celebrate their journeys as well as shed some aspects of the self which took those journeys. It becomes then for the reader a cultural snapshot of that time when I "believed this" and "was this".

We produced a comic page called LOST which is all about identity crisis ... Who am I? Where do I belong? The main character tries on the different roles of student subcultures - nerds, jocks, musos, tenny-boopper plastics, goths... only to decide to be herself, realising that it might take a lifetime to work out what that is.

Was the very collaborative process of visioning this, photographing it and then coming up with the words a process of a transformation for my class? We had certainly talked about sub-cultures previously but I suspect that creating this product/performance about them embodies the learning... starts to speak to the deeper unconscious. It is more than just a critical analysis.

Will the readers experience something as well... will it sow seeds? Will they shrug it off because they have already been there, done that? Who knows, but hey it is fun thinking about the deeper potential of what we are doing as teachers.

And what could be in a yearbook that might illuminate the process of moving from the self-authoring stage to the next one which is more about plurality, care and meaning? Perhaps we already have exemplified this in the very process of creating it? Is it invisible to the reader and do we need to make it visible? Perhaps there is a role for The making of the yearbook which unpacks the dilemmas my students had to face and helps the reader to take this journey as well... but in our debriefing we are not quite there yet... perhaps part of transformation is not trying to take students through stages too quickly. We need to sit and live with what we have learnt for a while.

The soulful yearbook

Continuing my debriefing of the production of an integral yearbook...

When I took over the journalism class in April this year, I didn't know that it had been a tradition that the class was responsible for doing the yearbook. I had been there and done that! I was hoping to take the students on a different journey. When I looked at the College's massive yearbooks of the last few years (80 to 100 pages) I felt the energy drain out of me. I felt mindless. A suppression of my soul. It looked so tedious. I wondered where the learning was for the students in collecting all the material... where was the journalism?

Not that many of my students were interested in being journalists. Why were they in this class then? What sort of experiences would help and support their own growth... help lighten the dark spaces...? (and believe me many of them had major issues - soul suppression, no sense of passion, depression, insecurity, drugs). I sat down and wondered about the potential of the yearbook for supporting healthy human development - there's and mine!

Hendersson and Kesson suggest when looking at curriculum that one should bring seven modes of inquiry into play:

1. Techne – craft reflection – how do we do it?
2. Poesis – soulful attunement of the creative process – what is whole and beautiful in what we do?
3. Praxis – critical inquiry – what are the underlying power structures? Whose needs are being served?
4. Dialogos – multi-perspectival inquiry – different voices, enabling dialogue.
5. Phronesis – practical, deliberate wisdom - unpacking the reasons behind things.
6. Polis – public moral inquiry - what are the underpinning values and ethics?
7. Theoria – contemplative wisdom – what is the purpose of education, what does it mean to vision?

One of the first things that struck me was the concern of poesis. How is this project beautiful? How is it creative? When I first showed students past yearbooks, they like me wilted. I realised that they too needed to do something that was inherently creative - that enabled them to vision... something that might capture their imaginations ... enable them to be revolutionary (most of my students see themselves as 'alternatives' and like to be pushing the edges (though not necessarily their own.) Why put so much time and effort into something if your soul can not be inspired?

My next concern was one of praxis. Whose agendas were we being subject to? What were the power plays going on in the school? Who did a traditional yearbook serve? And as you can imagine, behind the scenes there was the usual political game playing. And I took the students on this journey as well ... helping them see that it just wasn't about creating a magazine based on their own ideas, it had to meet a variety of needs and we were jugglers as well as sellers of our vision.

And then there is dialogus - the dialogue which enables disparate views to come together... to leapfrog off each other, to listen carefully and pull out an essence in what people are saying - to capture that and build on it. We wished to allow student voice in the yearbook - through interviews focussing on students as well as quick vox pops. Every interview gave us new perspectives about the story and the culture of the College - so our initial themes for the yearbook morphed and grew. For example, the pages on "hanging out around college" turned into the theme of friendship - what does friendship mean to you? Pages looking at individual student stories became a theme of following your passion - What is your passion?

So my students are learning how to be ethnographers. For some, this entering into the essence of the 'other' was a key in helping them move away from ego-centricity (from being concerned with the 'I' to being more concerned with the collective). It also helped them become more self-reflective - what were their own values and why and how were they different to others? I saw a growth in ethical sensitivity - Can we really say this? Can we put words into someone's mouth?

When I ask my students what they gained out of this project the first overwhelming feeling is a sense of pride - of being part of something new which they birthed. And then there is the sense of belonging, the people skills, the confidence. I now have only a few weeks until the end of year and I feel that for many of the students this project has opened a door where they are only now ready to learn.... I wish I had another 6 months with them to build on the gains we have made.

For example, one boy wanted to be in control of the graphic design of the book but despite the opportunities I gave him to train in a new publishing program INDESIGN, he preferred to stay safely with what he knew (Photoshop). He and I have subsequently unpacked this - what is it that stops him from learning something new and what are things he hangs back from? How can he name his fears and start to move on? So although he missed out on some aspects of the yearbook, he is now tentatively moving out onto his learning edge in other areas rather than staying safe.

I could have moved on from the task of the yearbook into the next task but I have spent several weeks in various modes of debriefing. I think this is where the learning happens. So perhaps this is the purpose of education - to help students be integral beings, to have integral experiences - to learn to be and to become. To be comfortable in reflecting on themselves and their experiences - to celebrate who they are and to vision where they might want to go. Yes, we have a created a physical product but to see that as all that has been achieved is missing the entire point of education.

But the beauty with a heartfelt project of this kind (one which expresses the soul of the participants) is that it not only works at many different personal levels but also at different layers of the education holon... hopefully it will be sending out ripples beyond our classroom. We hope it might help the students and teachers really see themselves. I hope that it might spark debate about what the purpose of education really is!

Beyond a modernist and postmodernist yearbook?

The space that I have been in the last 8 weeks has been mad headless chicken mode. Yes, I have been project managing the production of a revolutionary concept of the yearbook for our College. Luckily, before (and now after) that mode I had time to do a little reflecting, or what might have happened would have been less than revolutionary.

Our brief was to bring the yearbook concept into the 21st century and the first response to that
might be looking at the technology ... make it digital... and yes there is a multi-media DVD to go with a print format. But what is different about the 21st century is the sensitivity we now bring - our culture has moved from modernism well and truly into postmodernism and possibly into the beginnings of a more integral view.

Perhaps a modernist yearbook might document student achievement (academic and sport) and have subject reports about what the class did that year. But a postmodernist yearbook is more interested in capturing the essence of experience, giving voice to the participants and celebrating the learning and growth... more interested in the being and becoming, rather than the doing. It captures the mood and the culture. It uses metaphor to tell the story. Through highlighting individual stories it tries to speak to the reader in helping them remember a way of being in order to re-tell their own stories to themselves and each other.

So we have a printed full colour 24 page magazine (instead of the usual 80 - 100 primarily black and white pages) which brings in some of the postmodern sensitivities - consisting of themes and metaphors - the notion of college as a movie, a game, following your passion, meeting challenges, going deep into the heart of you and identity crisis.

Where is the usual stuff? Well some of it is on the DVD... but now the DVD represents far more students and their work with music video clips, videos of the snow trip and the major production, dynamic photostories of classes, events, video class products, podcasts of poetry, radio plays as well as an extensive photo album .... and only a few text based subject stories.

Together they perhaps make an integral yearbook... the doing and the being, the individual and the group. And perhaps in the space in between the soul is to be found!