The Flatworm in a flat world

Two Us academics compare current schooling practices and reform efforts to the mechanistic industrial model and illustrate why this paradigm is no longer sufficient in this “flat world.” Schooling and school reform in the 21st century continue to be approached as if these are a flatworm capable replicating itself. They argue that a new paradigm is needed—one that builds on current knowledge and human resources, one that is created by those who work and live in a school or community—which we have called Indigenous Invention.

School Reform: The Flatworm in a Flat World: From Entropy to Renewal through Indigenous Invention

by Paul E. Heckman & Viki L Montera — 2009

Background/Context: Current research on learning, organizational change, and the context of the 21st century yields insight into the needed fundamental reforms in our educational learning environments. Despite these new insights, schooling and school reform in the 21st century continue to be grounded in ideas based on the industrial model of the 20th century. Reform efforts in today’s No Child Left Behind environment reify static ideas about schooling, resulting in organizational entropy.

Purpose: In this article, we compare current schooling practices and reform efforts to the mechanistic industrial model and illustrate why this paradigm is no longer sufficient in this “flat world.” Schooling and school reform in the 21st century continue to be approached as if these are a flatworm capable replicating itself. We argue that a new paradigm is needed—one that builds on current knowledge and human resources, one that is created by those who work and live in a school or community—which we have called Indigenous Invention.

Research Design: Indigenous Invention grows from new conceptions of learning, cognition, and development, and our work in schools and communities during the past 16 years. Examples of Indigenous Invention presented here come from a much larger case study and long-term action research project in five urban schools and communities.

Conclusion/Recommendations: Three areas are presented. First, we examine ideas that currently guide schooling practices and explore why these ideas have resulted in a decline of educational organizational vitality and are no longer sufficient for our in-school, after-school, and preschool programs. We suggest using new knowledge about human learning, cognition, and development to bring organizational energy and renewal to educational institutions. Second, the power of this new knowledge will not be realized with conventional school change models that urge fidelity in implementing packages and procedures developed far away from the school and its neighborhood. Replication may work for the flatworm. It does not work in complex systems like educational institutions. Third, we present the process of Indigenous Invention as one that holds promise in moving our schools from entropy to renewal.


Those who lived in the mid-19th century could only imagine the world of the 21st century. In their view of the future, few, if any, could envision the technological advances now a part of our everyday lives. Their main mode of long-distance travel was horse and buggy. The automobile had not been invented, and the dream of humans traveling by air was largely thought about in wishful and magical ways. Yet, the imaginations of that time brought forth the ideas that served to create the inventions that have drastically changed how we now live, travel, and communicate—inventions that evolve with new information and more imagination from those who are now living in this 21st century.


Our world has drastically changed from the world of the past. Yet, there is one organization in today’s world that has changed little from when it was created over 150 years ago. While the knowledge about the organization and its production has increased immensely and the environment surrounding this organization has fundamentally shifted, this organization’s form and procedures have shifted very little. Despite consistent and numerous calls for rethinking and redesigning this organization,1 it remains essentially the same in the 21st century as it was in the early to mid-19th century when it began. Ironically and sadly, the organization’s very purpose is to promote learning. Yet, learning in this organization has devolved away from the ideas of imagination and invention that have benefited humankind throughout history.2


This organization—the school—is and has been in a state of entropy. We argue here that current educational reform efforts intensify this state of entropy. These reforms and much of what is being argued as important for school and after-school programs in the No Child Left Behind legislation3 have characterized schooling since the 19th century by further standardizing the educational process and student achievement. The entropic unchanged nature of the organization and operation of schooling is at odds with current knowledge of learning, cognition, society, human development, and organizational change.


Organizational entropy occurs when energy, in the form of new information and knowledge from outside the organization, is not used inside the organization to respond to the environment. The result—doing more of the same—no longer accomplishes the required “work” of the organization. Entropy explains an organization’s declining effectiveness, decreasing power, and increasing disorder in accomplishing its intended purposes.4


To resist recreating and intensifying the use of the ideas and activities of schools of yesterday, we must move our educational organizations from the current state of organizational entropy to one of ongoing organizational renewal. This calls for embracing imagination and invention5 within our current educational institutions in order to recognize and use the new knowledge we now have about learning, human development, and organizational change. In so doing, those within our schools will bring in new energy required to combat the current entropic state through the process we call Indigenous Invention.


Our call for Indigenous Invention is important for the success of today’s educational programs and the strength of our democracy. Indigenous Invention resists standardization. It creates opportunities for those in-school, after-school, and preschool programs to challenge outdated ideas and be more inventive and imaginative. The demands of authentically educating today’s children to participate in and advance a strong democracy of tomorrow requires our educational programs and organizations to also engage in a democratic process of renewal through Indigenous Invention.


This article will examine some of the ideas that currently guide schooling practices and explore why these ideas are no longer sufficient for our schools, and after-school and preschool programs. Second, we present how current reform efforts merely recreate these existing practices and are insufficient to challenge existing practices and ideas. Last, we argue that the process of Indigenous Invention holds promise in moving our schools beyond entropy to renewal.


THE PAST IS PRESENT


The graded school, established during the industrial revolution in towns like Quincy and Lowell, Massachusetts, reflected the ideas within its surrounding environment.6 The mid-19th-century industrial revolution created factories to mass produce and manufacture goods. This process of mass production involved individual workers who assembled products one piece at a time. Each person made or assembled one piece of the product and then passed this piece on to the next person in the production line to add to the product. As the product passed through the line of individuals, each doing independent tasks adding to the product, the raw materials were changed into a finished product to be sold. In addition, individuals in the production line had only a limited number of tasks to perform on the product. As they performed their task over and over again, they gained expertise and speed in that task. Production speed was of major importance. The more items produced, the more items available for sale, and the more profits increased for the company. Owners and managers determined the average time that an average worker should produce or assemble each piece of the product. This average time was used as a standard in evaluating job performance and worker productivity and accountability.


When the graded school was created, it too reflected these ideas of segmented, linear, and time-bound production.7 The teachers were the workers adding specific knowledge segments to students’ minds as students moved from one grade level to the next. One teacher for each group of children who passed through their classrooms filled in the grade-level pieces of the curriculum identified for the children of that age. When the students emerged from the graded school after their years of moving from one subject and one grade level to the next, they were to be fully assembled knowledge products. Standards, explicit objectives guiding what students were to know at specific points in time, time frames determining the pace for gaining these pieces of knowledge, and tests to determine the degree to which students gained that knowledge guided the school’s operation and “production.” 8


These features of the school and schooling, akin to features of the 19th- and early-20th-century factories, have been present in our schools for over a century.9 Just as the industrial production process limited the amount of complexity with which the factory worker had to deal, the same was and is true for students and teachers in the graded school. Each year, during a nine-month period, students encounter prescribed and specified amounts of “grade-level’ material, determined by curriculum developers and others far removed from a local school site. Students and teachers have little influence over the nature of the material and the rate at which it should be learned. Students and teachers were and are actually encouraged, like the workers in the 19th-century production line, not to think much about the nature of these grade-level-learning tasks and structures. Instead, teachers and students face and accept grade-level material as if it is the “right stuff” to be taught and learned in the “right” time frames. While the world outside schools has changed, the world inside the school remains largely embedded with ideas and practices from the industrial revolution. The mentioned features continue today and are being further calcified in most current reform efforts that focus on standards, testing, and measuring the efficiency of the school’s production, excuse us—performance.


A story in the New York Times illustrates the irony between change in the world and stasis in our schools. Most universities have created wireless hubs whereby students may connect their laptop computers to the Web. Moving away from traditional pen and paper, computers are becoming dominant tools for students. A reporter documenting this phenomenon described his observation:


From the back row of an amphitheater classroom, more than a dozen laptop screens were visible. As Prof. Jay Mallek lectures graduate students on the finer points of creating and reading an office budget, many students went online to Blackboard.com, a Web site that stores course materials, and grabbed the day’s handouts from the ether. But just as many students were off surfing. A young man looked at sports photos while a woman checked out baby photos that just arrived in her e-mailbox.10


In many classrooms, now and in the past, students sit and look at the teacher. The teacher talks and directs what students will do. The teacher may mightily strive to make the material interesting enough that students will at best focus on what is being presented and, at least, not wander off to doodle or, in the modern version of wandering off, to surf the Web. The teacher is the worker in this factory of learning. The students (the raw materials11) are passive in their daily classroom tasks and lives. Their role involves listening to what the teacher says. They spend their time doing what others tell them and thinking about matters that others think are important. It is understandable that this kind of learning environment may have far less relevance to students than surfing the Web looking for answers to their own questions and interests. The fundamental nature of classroom life hasn’t changed much even though the use of computer technology gives the appearance of educational change.12


A NEW FUTURE IS PRESENTLY REQUIRED


Contrasting current knowledge about learning and our world to the features of schooling highlights the importance of moving beyond the entropic state of our schools. Three longstanding regularities of schooling are illustrations of organizational entropy and offer evidence that schools do not now have sufficient conditions to rejuvenate and regenerate themselves.


Regularity I: Learning Happens in Fixed Time-Bound Increments and Orderly Pieces.


Recent insights in cognitive science suggest that children’s emotional and cognitive development happens in periods of several years, not several months, and certainly not in nine-month segments as promoted in schools. As Jerome Kagan explains,


Sensory awareness is absent at birth but clearly present before the second birthday. However, cognitive awareness and awareness of control do not emerge until four or five years, at the earliest. . . . Further, most young children are not able to exert moderately consistent control over their fear or anger until they are six or seven years old and do not become conscious of most of the important symbolic categories to which they belong until they are nine or ten years old.13


This longer time span for development and the great variation in what children know, understand, and do at a particular age interferes with the discrete and fixed time-bound learning of school. The range of cognitive skills and knowledge, social skills and behaviors, and physical and motor skills varies greatly from one child to the next of the same age.14 In addition, at any point in time, any rank ordering of children in any domain of knowledge and/or abilities will certainly change at another time and change further over time.15 Children’s learning and development is more of a moving target than a moving conveyor belt.


As children and adults participate in the world, they see and therefore learn about that world in wholes, certainly in larger chunks,16 than the bits and pieces of the graded school curriculum17 that presently frame learning for children in school. Jeff Hawkins, who created the Palm Pilot, explains recent insights about memory from neuroscience research in this way: “We don’t remember or recall things with complete fidelity—not because the cortex and its neurons are sloppy or error-prone but because the brain remembers the important relationships in the world, independent of the details.”18


The graded school is guided by beliefs that children of a particular age have a narrow and similar range of attributes, that children learn best when focused on small pieces of school knowledge, and that these bits of school skills will be applied at a later point in their development or lives. That is not what recent developmental research suggests about children’s development and learning. The graded school structure has to be challenged, and new organizational structures for grouping children have to be invented to better correspond to the multiyear, multiage contextual development of children.


Regularity II: Teaching and Learning as the Transmission of Knowledge.


The norm of teacher talk, information transmission, and student passivity19 makes sense if children know little when they come to school and can and have to be given much knowledge to learn and develop. However, this norm is also challenged by new research evidence. All children already have in their minds an abundance of “prior knowledge”20 when and after they enter school. This is the case whether children are wealthy or poor. This prior knowledge influences how children understand new knowledge:


How we solve the puzzles of everyday life, whether or not we work them out according to the canons of sound logic, depends on how the content of the puzzle interacts with the worldly knowledge in our heads. When what we know coincides with the logical structure of the problem we are trying to solve, we can be as brilliant as Aristotle. When those two conflict, we become irrational.21


In this case, more effort in classrooms has to go into finding out what children already have in their minds instead of telling them what they have to have in mind.22 This suggestion is based in the cognitive and learning literature that has recently revealed the importance of metacognition, what Ellen Langer calls mindfulness.23 Metacognition promotes learning and suggests that children should be telling teachers much more about what they have in their minds than now happens in schools. Children should be listening far less to what teachers’ know and want them to do and learn. Instead, teachers urging children to express what they know and how they know it and spending more time listening to and exploring what children have to say will increase learning and achievement for all students. It will also help teachers by giving them important information to use when trying to hit that moving target.


Regularity III: Vital Knowledge and Skills Remain the Same through the Ages.


In his recent book, The World is Flat, Tom Friedman makes the case that, because of global trade, advanced and high-speed telecommunications, including the Internet, and new computers, the world is flat. Information, money, and knowledge flow freely across national borders with the click of a mouse. He also argues that, in this flat world, any skill that can be routinized and standardized is going to be done by a computer or outsourced to less costly labor markets in any part of the world. With his insights about this flat world of the 21st century, he asks, “What do we tell our kids?” His answer, “You have to constantly upgrade your skills . . . every person should figure out how to make himself or herself into an untouchable.” Friedman describes untouchables as “people whose job cannot be outsourced” nor standardized and advises today’s citizens to “acquire new skills, knowledge, and expertise that enable you to create value . . . to know how to learn . . . and to be skillfully adaptable and socially adaptable.”24


Daniel Pink, in his book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, embraces a view of the knowledge and skills needed for success, today and in the future that is similar to Friedman’s: “The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s rewards and share its greatest joys.”25


New knowledge and skills required for 21st-century success, like those noted by Friedman and Pink, have to be identified and instantiated in education rather than continuing to promote the standard curriculum that has changed little through the last century. Compare a textbook from the early 20th century to one of today. The layout and print quality have improved, but the content is strikingly similar.


ENTROPY EXPANDING TO AFTER SCHOOL


As well-intentioned efforts intensify to link (align) school, after-school, and preschool programs, the replication of industrial regularities and organizational entropy that exists in schools is increasingly starting to take hold in after-school and preschool programs.26 For example, children are frequently grouped by grade level for activities and instruction. Much of the after-school program, albeit more active (dance, recreation, and so on) than most schoolwork, is largely adult directed and adult determined. In addition, more and more of these action-oriented activities are becoming secondary to a focus on the need for children to first complete their homework during the after-school “homework time.” Ironically, homework completion at the elementary school level contributes little to gains in test scores and academic achievement.27


In economically poor neighborhoods, after-school programs and preschool programs such as Head Start can provide, and often have provided, more enriching experiences for children than they experience in their school day.28 They have added to children’s lives in much the same way that extracurricular activities provide benefits to children from middle- and upper-middle-class families. Therefore, having programs look and be much more like the schools we now have makes no sense.


The strongly accepted culture of schooling and its increased influence on after-school and preschool programs make it difficult for educational programs to attend to recent insights in the cognitive and learning literature and the new environments surrounding them. The proclivity for after-school programs to become more like outdated school programs is more likely to happen than not unless efforts are mounted to counter educational entropy. To override this proclivity, conditions for the renewal and reinvention of school and after-school programs must now be established.


Citizens who have the nonroutine tendencies, knowledge, skills, and dispositions called for in this century will only develop when school and after-school and preschool programs are no longer doing school in routine ways and promoting the static knowledge and skills that schools have promoted since their inception. Ironically, the flat world calls for adaptability well beyond the current practices in schools. Moving from the information age to the conceptual age will be a leap, like time travel, for schools that are still operating on principles from the industrial age.


REPLICATION: THE FLATWORM IN THE FLAT WORLD


Consistent with the standardized industrial paradigm is another prevalent feature of schooling that dominates educational change literature and reform efforts known as the research, development, dissemination, and implementation model. Outsiders (researchers, curriculum developers, publishers) far removed from a local educational site develop new practices, organizational structures, and materials to be implemented by educators in local educational settings, irrespective of the neighborhood and who the children and teachers are in these settings. The intention is that through the implementation of these ideas developed by those outside the school setting, the educators inside the school will then replicate and implement the program in each educational setting. This approach to change assumes that all educational settings are the same and follows with the change process used in the manufacturing settings. Those away from the factory develop new methods or machinery for the workers (teachers) in the factory (school) to use in creating (educating) the product (student). This paradigm is present in current reform language, such as alignment, scaling up, fidelity, and replication.


Replication is useful for simple organisms, but not so for complex organisms. Stephen Jay Gould29 used the planarian flatworm to illustrate this difference. When a flatworm, made up of simple cells that are alike, is cut in two, the flatworm is able to replicate its lost half by regenerating (replicating) its simple cells. However, complex organisms—human beings or organizations such as schools—cannot simply replicate themselves, their ideas, or their parts to survive and grow. Like biological systems, organizations are complex systems. For a complex system to move beyond entropy and incorporate outside knowledge and energy, a different orientation to reform is required. That orientation is one of renewal rather than replication.30 The renewal of the organization is necessary for the long-term survival and flourishing of an organization. Educational organizations must create new processes for responding to and bringing in outside energy from their environment to renew themselves—processes that are different from merely bringing in and acting upon the implementation and replication of outsiders’ ideas. The tried and tried and untrue ideas of implementation and replication of innovations developed away from the school by others have not and will not transform our schools. The idea of replication of innovation is akin to a flatworm in this flat world. The simple-celled flatworm will not develop beyond itself. Yet, this complex flat world calls for adaptability, flexibility, and change. Complex schooling organizations cannot replicate complex ideas and innovations of others into their complex contexts.


BEYOND IMPLEMENTATION TO INDIGENOUS INVENTION


Through the implementation/replication approach, outside energy is brought in the form of new programs, policies, and/or procedures. However, there is a great deal of evidence that demonstrates, despite this new knowledge entering the system, that the system remains in a state of entropy since it does not use the information to transform itself. Instead, the organization, more often than not, adapts the knowledge to fit the organization, which leaves the system largely unchanged.31 For a system to renew itself and resist entropy, it must not only bring in outside energy, but that energy must be used to transform the system. We must move beyond school reform through the implementation of outside ideas to a new approach, one that embraces inside innovation, imagination, and invention as being called for in a flat world.


Instead of starting with outside knowledge and implementing that knowledge inside, the starting place for transformation is within the school, with school inside knowledge. New outside knowledge and/or energy must be brought in, as we have argued, but it enters the organization quite differently than in the implementation replication approach. It is sought and used to power the inventiveness of those within the organization. Rather than implementers of others’ ideas, those inside the schools and their communities are the inventors of their collaborative ideas—ideas created indigenously through a process we call Indigenous Invention. Those who are closest to and most involved in enacting what happens in a unit, activity, or organization are the ones to identify and address what is problematic in the organization and to create the appropriate inventions for defining and addressing the presented problems and opportunities.


An example of the power of indigenous invention is the famous Skunk Works unit of Lockheed Aircraft. In the Skunk Works unit of Lockheed, engineers and others who were part of the unit were encouraged to incubate, hatch, and invent innovative aircraft and aircraft products. In doing this, the Skunk Works unit broke the mold of conventional design ideas by encouraging those involved to follow hunches and to be playful with new ideas and possibilities for aircraft products. The members of the Skunk Works unit were free to invent and create outside the conventional bureaucratic rules of the larger corporation. In addition—and this is critical—a belief existed that those in this Skunk Works unit with their colleagues could figure out what to do in cultivating progressive ideas and products.32 In the case of the Skunk Works unit, the engineers could and did invent and break the mold for aircraft design and put Lockheed in the forefront of aircraft design beginning in 1943. This happened because the environment in the organization encouraged these engineers to find compelling and alternative ideas that contrasted with what had previously served them well in guiding past practice. They argued, debated about, and tried out alternatives until they agreed that they these ideas could push them beyond where they had been. They then invented new designs for aircraft and new aircraft products and renewed the organization.


The complexity of the schooling enterprise and the knowledge that we now have about human learning and organizational change do not match the simplistic, linear one-way transmission process of the research, development, and implementation model of current reform efforts. Rather than simple implementation, what is called for is a more complex process of invention. Indigenous Invention in educational institutions has similar features to those of Lockheed’s Skunk Works unit.


ADVANCING INDIGENOUS INVENTION


Indigenous Invention has the power to negate organizational entropy and address the substantial issues and challenges facing education in the United States. Indigenous Invention moves away from the implementation of others’ ideas to embracing imagination and invention of those inside educational institutions. Through our work and research in schools, after-school programs, and neighborhoods for the past 16 years,33 we have identified several conditions that must be present to promote local invention.


CONDITIONS FOR INDIGENOUS INVENTION


First, those who live and work in the school or community are most responsible for both the creation/invention of the change and its implementation. Therefore, Indigenous Invention is site based. Teachers and administrators—those indigenous to the program—invent and enact new educational guides, practices, activities, and programs. These individuals must be encouraged at their site to advance breaking the mold of traditional schooling. Additionally, the context for the work is the dailiness of the classroom and/or school experience.


The second condition is frequent and regular opportunities for those educators at the site to come together to discuss what they are doing and thinking (their dailiness), examine why they are taking these actions, and explore alternative ideas and practices for use with children. Through previous and ongoing work in schools and after-school programs, we have discovered the critical importance of these opportunities that we call Dialogues, in which educators are encouraged to express what they really think and believe. These opportunities are far different from typical staff development or group discussions. It is important that these occur frequently and regularly, unlike monthly early-release days or designated intermittent in-service days often provided by districts. They are as much a part of the educators’ work lives as planning their lessons. However, they are not opportunities for planning to do better what educators are already doing. Instead, during Dialogues, educators are urged to describe their practices and ideas guiding these practices. They examine and question these ideas guiding practices, review and consider alternative ideas in light of others’ knowledge, and work with each other to explore alternative ideas in inventing alternative practices. We often refer to this as a 3-D process—description of the dailiness and debate of the ideas and actions—but we know that there are many more dimensions involved. In Dialogue, no idea is a silly one, no explanation unworthy.


Because Dialogue is tied to the dailiness that surrounds it, it is also connected to action in which educators try out alternative ideas and practices and bring this information back to the Dialogue session. Individuals involved in Indigenous Invention simultaneously act, reflect, and reveal what they think inside and outside Dialogues. Those actions clarify their meanings. Together, everyone is socially constructing reality.34 Making explicit what is constructed and being constructed brings greater clarity to what is going on and builds a common understanding in a more organic way than dictating or mandating a change.


A third condition of Indigenous Invention is the role of a person or persons we call the Third Party, an outsider who works with insiders and seeks to understand the school as an insider. This individual plays a critical role in the inventive work and has a significantly different role from that of a traditional staff developer, trainer, or researcher. The Third Party is not there to solve participants’ problems or provide “expert advice.” Third Parties are partners with outside knowledge that is a part of the deliberations, as is the inside knowledge. They ask questions and seek understanding and explication of ideas beneath the actions. They inquire, explore, and invent with participants. Third Parties facilitate and participate in Dialogue sessions with school staff. They encourage reflection, new ways of thinking, and new ways of acting through mutual participation in invention.


Third parties also seek direct involvement in the classroom lives of teaching colleagues in each school. This support work in the classroom involves working side by side with colleagues and building significant levels of trust with them. Third Parties also encourage teachers to try out in their classrooms what has been discussed in Dialogues. Colleagues in the schools are urged to take action and engage in activities about a particular idea, concept, or question in their classrooms with their other school colleagues and children and/or Third Parties. In this way, Third Parties are truly participant/observers. They are involved in up-close and inside work in a school culture with an emic view35 of culture. This emic view involves seeing what is going on as an insider and being trusted by those inside as one who truly seeks to understand the culture. Emic understandings reveal the real nature of what is happening in the involved schools’ culture.


WARES VERSUS WHYS: CORE VALUES OF INDIGENOUS INVENTION


Educators are consistently being sold on something. A common discussion among reformers involves gaining “buy-in” from those at the site who will be implementing the wares that others have developed. In a field fraught with wares, a great deal of cynicism has been created. In Indigenous Invention, buy-in is less an issue since no product or program is being sold. Instead of promoting others’ wares, Indigenous Invention puts front and center those who are in the organizations, their “whys’ in hope of creating wise antientropic organizations. Therefore, three core values—trust, choice, and partnership—have to be held by the Third Parties and encouraged in building relationships among those at the site. Third Parties have to trust in the power/ability of the educators. Conversely, educators at these schools had to trust the Third Parties and our motives. They also have to trust each other. But this trust does not develop overnight or simply because we described it as an essential condition. Trust arises as educators are involved in the process we outline above.


The second value involves choice. Choice is usually not part of the culture of the school. Requirements are. Consequently, each person has to know that he or she has a real, not a contrived, choice about his or her involvement and participation in the Indigenous Invention effort. It cannot be “just another project” in which people would have to participate because someone else decided they would participate. Instead, their involvement is their decision; they do not have to be involved if they do not want to be a part of it. There can be no collusion or manipulation. No participants overtly or surreptitiously try to change any educator’s mind about their decision to be involved once they voice their decision. And no decision to participate is final. As the work develops, individuals may opt in or out. However, such a decision, as all decisions in this process, is discussed and explored with others.


Finally, those of us from the outside, Third Parties, have to become real partners. We do not want to be seen as, or be, the typical reformers or university researchers whose primary interests are in gathering data and leaving with, at most, a thank you, only to return at some later date to give a report. We are there to work alongside teachers as much as possible, to be participants in, rather than observers of, the events happening in the school. Throughout the process, these ideas and values are consistently in mind and encouraged in all that is said and done.


As questions are investigated, current practices make less and less sense in today’s world for these educators. Opportunities for further examination and invention arise, and the renewal continues. Dispositions toward new ideas and practices can only happen when a set of sociocultural conditions described earlier is created and in place within an educational setting. Establishing these conditions/features and holding and promoting the core values are critical to encouraging these dispositions. One without the other will result in more of the same.


DIALOGUES, THIRD PARTIES, DAILINESS, AND ALTERNATIVES


Over the past 15 years, these conditions influenced groups of educators who voluntarily agreed to examine and question their usual educational practices and structures and to consider and attend to alternative explanations through Indigenous Invention. In each of the elementary and middle schools, regular Dialogue sessions of three hours have taken place with a Third Party. There have also been regular, and sometimes daily, opportunities for Third Party individuals to interact with teacher colleagues in their classrooms after each weekly Dialogue. Teachers came to Dialogues with ideas, questions, and issues. These often led to the expression of traditional views and expanded into a myriad of areas that make up these complex places called schools.


One fall Dialogue session,36 in a school located in an ethnically diverse and low socioeconomic neighborhood, a preschool teacher expressed her frustration with what she perceived as a great difference between the four-year-olds and five-year-olds in her class. She had taught kindergarten for the previous nine years and felt that her expectations of what the children should learn were not going to be met. This touched a chord with the current kindergarten teacher, who said that she often hears the first-grade teachers complain that the children hadn’t learned anything in kindergarten: “I feel they have!” Sensing the tension being created by the teachers’ concerns about meeting each other’s expectations, a third-grade teacher quickly responded, “[These] children lose a lot during the summer, since they don’t do much.” The principal then offered a solution—the idea of connecting children to the library—to which the third-grade teacher stated, “the kids that don’t go [to the library] are the ones who need it most.” The preschool teacher concurred, explaining that she takes children to the library and gets them a library card, but “parents don’t follow through.” The third-grade teacher then suggested that they should “all work on raising the value of school with the parents . . . [ I ] don’t feel they value school.”


This brief example of an early Dialogue discussion illustrates the many and yet predictable and taken-for-granted ideas and directions that are present and can be explored and challenged in Dialogue sessions when the dailiness of life in schools is the starting point. Instead of immediately problem solving with the teachers about ways to help parents value school, the Third Party saw opportunities to explore the idea about differences in age groups, what children are to learn at a specific age, what children do during the summer, or the value that parents hold for schooling. Pursuing any of these questions would have led to the exposure and examination of taken-for-granted ideas that have long held sway in schools. In this case, the Third Party raised a question about a possible gap between school knowledge and the knowledge that the child may have about his or her world outside school. The Third Party went on to ask the educators to consider the following:


Maybe we are asking parents and children to have two worlds? What if we see it not as a parent deficit, but that they may value another kind of learning that is different from ours? Perhaps we need to ask what is their [the children’s] knowledge rather than asking them to fit into our knowledge.


Another teacher who was aware of some recent research on children’s “funds of knowledge”37 wondered how this research would apply to her students, and she asked, “What do students bring to school?” Another colleague thought out loud about a recent experience she had with her students in a neighborhood butcher shop. She explained the experience and then concluded, “They do have knowledge . . . but what is the link between what they know and what I want them to know?”


The Third Party then identified a gap that the teachers had raised during previous Dialogue sessions. “You have often discussed the gap you see between the stuff students must know and the stuff they don’t know. Could it be that we are making some assumptions here that are holding us back?” These probes and questions launched teachers on an exploration of what children do know, what knowledge they bring to school, and what are children’s queries about their knowledge. As in the invention process, it was not an orderly or predictable process. Teachers worked with each other and the Third Parties to explore children’s knowledge of their worlds. They sought and considered research about how children, even at a young age, have thoughts and questions38 and of the importance of urging children to be mindful, metacognitive.39 As they considered these findings, they continued to debate and examine their ideas and data in the Dialogue sessions. In this process, they also began to challenge and undermine some of the regularities of schooling that were previously identified: the orderliness of the grade-level curriculum, teaching and learning as the transmission of knowledge, and vital knowledge as being static.


The exploration and challenging followed several paths, each providing opportunities for further examination, imagination of alternatives, and invention. Two teachers found themselves exploring the accepted structure of separating students by language. The norm of separating students by language (an English track and Spanish track at each grade level) in the school had spread to the playground, where children voluntarily separated themselves by these groupings and were often in conflict with each other.


These two teachers, who taught these separate groups of children at the same grade level, began to bring their students together for a few activities. They observed during these times positive interactions among the students and were themselves feeling positive about what they were doing. However, the long-term conflict between the two groups of students erupted on the playground during lunch recess, when the students from these two teachers’ classrooms began throwing rocks at each other and name calling. Understandably, the teachers were angry and hurt by their students’ responses to each other away from their classrooms. They were ready to throw their own book at the offenders through student suspensions and isolation. For the teachers, the rock throwing threw into question the viability of what they had been doing, their positive views of the students’ interactions that had been emerging, and their own efficacy as teachers.


The Third Party, working with the teachers, sought to further understand the event and the thoughts and feelings guiding each of them as they together figured out what happened and what to do about the event. Core values of trust, choice, and partnership were upheld as they considered that neither the teachers nor the students were at fault, even though that would have been the easy and taken-for-granted explanation. They sought deeper understandings and explanations. Could the grouping arrangement of separating the students by language and by age be accounting for the vitriol shown by the students’ actions and words on the playground? The students from the bilingual classroom, who were Spanish dominant, were being called “wetbacks” by the Latino/Latina students from the classroom that consisted of predominantly English-speaking students. In turn, the predominantly Spanish-speaking children were calling the English-speaking students “gringos.”


The teachers and the Third Party turned to the research literature on interracial group interaction in schools undergoing court-ordered desegregation.40The insights about the effects of segregation helped provide an alternative perspective to the one of blaming individuals in the rock-throwing incident. The students had experienced language separation throughout their several years in this elementary school. The initial efforts of the two teachers to bring students together, while positive from the teachers’ point of view, had not undermined the long-term negative views that the children had of each other. However, the cooperative learning literature, like that of Slavin’s research noted above, indicated that as efforts in schools undergoing desegregation used cooperative learning ideas, more positive views of the “other” were engendered.41


In addition, the literature on sociocognitive apprenticeships was also helpful in identifying important insights about how experts and novices working together in meaningful and significant tasks and contexts learn together.42 This helped the teachers to reconsider the separate structure behind the rationale of language development. Bringing the children together, irrespective of their language competence, seemed to have great potential if the work and context of what they were doing were also meaningful and relevant to the students. This literature supported an alternative to the segregation that existed within the school and at each grade level.


Rather than separating and suspending the students, the teachers and the Third Party decided to bring the students together in mixed-language groupings. They created, over time, with their imagination and that of the children, learning activities that tapped into children’s prior knowledge and expanded their awareness of their local worlds—both for the adults and the children. These activities also focused on the importance of children’s meanings and addressed the gap between their knowledge and school knowledge.


Dialogue sessions provided opportunities to be metacognitive about what was happening in the dailiness of school life. It was the teachers’ opportunity, like those at Lockheed’s Skunk Works, to argue, debate, and discover, challenge taken-for-granted ideas, and imagine alternatives. Back in their classrooms, they together invented new classroom designs, returning to Dialogue for further discussion of the evolving organizational structures and practices that were being created. As new energy (knowledge) was sought and brought into the school and considered, local invention began to negate the organizational entropy that had existed.


As educators involved themselves in this kind of inventive process and their own form of Skunk Works, the norms of questioning and seeking alternatives began to characterize the culture of the school. By the spring of the following school year, teachers in the Dialogue sessions were asking much different questions from those of the early fall session presented at the beginning of this section. They were focusing on “the essence of what is important for children to know.” Is writing really about knowing how to indent each paragraph? Is math the mechanics of addition and subtraction, or is it problem solving and the children’s communication of their thinking process? Would a historian and a mathematician look at a phenomenon differently? Teachers were also considering how historians or mathematicians do their work and the differences between that kind of work and school history or math.


The educators had begun working with children on community study projects, building on the knowledge within the homes, families, and community and discovering that children were more engaged in learning and successful as they did this. Students were becoming scientists in the community surrounding their school as they were lobbying local politicians to get help in addressing some of the community issues. They were studying and discovering family and neighborhood gardens. They were reading, writing, charting, and presenting information that grew from their knowledge and questions in these investigations, rather than from a textbook or the formal school curriculum. This kind of meaningful work based in children’s interests and prior knowledge was happening in classrooms where students were grouped in mixed-age (sometimes in three-year spans) and mixed-language (Spanish and English dominant) groupings. The gap between what they were to learn and what they knew narrowed.


Indigenous Invention embraces the power of individuals to collectively act and create in their setting. The belief in the power of individuals in an organization and society to together create what is important and necessary to flourish is congruent with the features of democratic life that we hope our educational institutions will encourage in the young. Indigenous Invention is not about acting in-dividually, but rather acting in-community. For school, after-school, and preschool programs to embrace the features of democratic life for the students, the adult educators also have to experience democratic participation and action. These features have to be cultivated in the organization’s internal environment.


Important ideas about democratic participation are at the heart of our conception of change and Indigenous Invention. We believe in the capacity and power of the individuals within a school and community to work together, learn, and invent a new way of being. Indigenous Invention, which embraces democratic principles, holds the promise for schools to respond to the rapid changes and requirements of our postindustrial world. We advocate, through our work, the belief that “Democracy (whether capitalistic or socialistic is not at issue here) is the only system that can successfully cope with the changing demands of contemporary civilization.” 43


A CALL FOR INVENTION


The longstanding notions, practices, and structures of schooling reflecting a bygone era must be challenged. Instead, the first educational reform legislation of the 21st century, the No Child Left Behind Act, instills a “more of the same, just stronger and improved” way of doing school. In addition, this legislation has fostered the trend to extend the outdated practices of the school day to after-school and preschool programs. The tension between the pressure to further instantiate current schooling practices in school and in after-school and preschool programs, and the recognition of the reality of the changing environment outside the schooling organization is, we hope, growing. Several states, the National Education Association, and some school districts have filed suits against the federal government opposing this law.44


The world of today differs significantly from the world of the 19th century. The children and youth of today face fundamentally different realities than our great-great-grandparents. The replication process of a flatworm clearly is incongruent with our current complex “flat world.” These facts, and the analysis of entropic educational worlds that we have provided throughout this piece, should cause everyone concerned about children, youth, and the future of the United States to be motivated, driven, and encouraged to provide resources so that Indigenous Invention happens and the prevailing mold of education is broken for every child.


Creativity and imagination at the center of Indigenous Invention are more necessary today than ever before. As we previously noted, Thomas Friedman and Daniel Pink have argued that creativity and imagination will be the drivers for a high wage economy:


Many of today’s knowledge workers will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes. They’ll need to do what workers abroad cannot do equally well for much less money—using R-Directed abilities such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component.”45


However, the economic reasons dwarf the educational, social, and democratic reasons for urging creativity, imagination, and thus Indigenous Invention. A democratic society in a turbulent and global world, with all its class and social divisions, requires moving all its institutions away from long-held social structures and dispositions. This will take large amounts of individual and social inventiveness on the part of many, not just a few, of our citizens.


The Indigenous Invention framework for renewal and innovation holds the promise for creating school, after-school, and preschool programs that reflect what is now known about human cognition and learning and that correspond to the 21st-century world. When the conditions for Indigenous Invention arise in each setting where children are educated, powerful outside ideas will challenge and diminish existing realities of schooling. School, after-school, and preschool programs will then become like a Skunk Works unit—breaking the mold, challenging long-standing ideas and practices, and doing what has been thought to be impossible—successfully engaging and educating every child, especially children of color who are poor, so that they receive political, economic, and personal benefits equal to those received by the wealthiest in the larger society in the United States. By reigniting imaginations, which have moved us from our horse-and-buggy days, we can move our educational organizations to new ideas and also travel through time—from entropy to renewal through Indigenous Invention.


Notes


1 John I. Goodlad, Educational Renewal: Better Teachers, Better Schools (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994); National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1983); Theodore Sizer, The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

2 John H. Lienhard, How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

3 No Child Left Behind Legislative Act of 2001, U.S. Government Printing Office and Public Law 107-110, the (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2001).

4 W. Richard Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), 84; J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 11.

5 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Pat Fallon and Fred Senn, Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

6 Lawrence A. Cremin, Traditions of American Education (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 50.

7 David L. Angus, Jeffrey Mirel, and Maris A. Vinovskis, “Historical Development of Age Stratification in Schooling,” Teachers College Record 90 (1988): 211–36.

8 Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

9 John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984).

10 John Schwartz, “Professors Vie with Web for Class’s Attentions,” New York Times, January 2, 2003.

11 Raw materials such as wood and steel are also without consciousness and intention.

12 Larry Cuban, “Computers Meet the Classroom: Classroom Wins,” Teachers College Record 95 (1993): 185–210.

13 Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 48.

14 Barbara T. Bowman, M. Suzanne Donovan, and M. Susan Burns, eds., Eager to Learn: Educating Our Preschoolers (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001), 59.

15 Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, eds., From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Child Development (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000), 28.

16 Jeremy Campbell, The Improbably Machine: What the Upheavals in Artificial Intelligence Research Reveal about How the Mind Really Works (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 50–51; Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 156–58.

17 The recorded knowledge of humankind, while extensive in the mid-1800s, in no way approximates the record of knowledge that now exists in the 21st-first century for all fields of study. It may have made sense in the 1850s to take what was considered important human knowledge, list it, and then break into chunks to be learned in nine-month periods. Such listing and breaking into parts makes far less sense in today’s rapidly changing world and developing knowledge bases.

18 Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 75.

19 Goodlad, A Place Called School, 93–129.

20 Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (New York: Harper-Collins [Perennial Edition], 2001); John T. Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning (New York: Free Press 1999).

21 Campbell, The Improbable Machine, 69–70.

22 John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), 10–11.

23 Ellen Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

24 Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 235–239.

25 Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 1.

26 Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, “Time for Achievement: Afterschool and Out-of-School Time.” SEDL Letter, May 2006, http://www.sedl.org/pubs/sedl-letter/v18n01/SEDLLetter_v18n01.pdf.

27 H. M. Cooper, J. C. Robinson, and E. A. Patall, “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987–2004,” Review of Educational Research 76 (2006): 1–62; Lyn Corno, “Homework is a Complicated Thing,” Educational Researcher 25, no. 8 (1996): 27–33; Lyn Corno, “Looking at Homework Differently,” Elementary School Journal 90 (2000): 529–48.

28 Lawrence J. Schweinhart and David P. Weikert, “Lasting Differences: The High/Scope Preschool Curriculum Comparison Study through Age 23,” Monographs of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, No. 12 (Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1997); Lawrence J. Schweinhart and David P. Weikert, “Why Curriculum Matters in Early Childhood Education,” Educational Leadership 55, no. 6 (1998): 57–60.

29 Stephen Jay Gould. “What Only the Embryo Knows,” New York Times, August 27, 2001.

30 Paul E. Heckman, “School Restructuring in Practice: Reckoning with the Culture of the School,” International Journal of Educational Reform 2 (1993): 263–72.

31 Paul Berman and Milbrey McLaughlin, Federal Programs Supporting Educational Change: Volume 8: Implementing and Sustaining Innovations (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1978); Thomas Popkewitz, B. R. Tabichnick, and Gary Wehlage, The Myth of Educational Reform: A Study of School Responses to a Program of Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

32 See http://managementlearning.com/topi/mngt.skun.html and http://www.lockheedmartin.com/aeronautics/skunkworks/ for a more thorough discussion of Lockheed’s Skunk Works unit.

33 Paul E. Heckman with Ana Marie Andrade, Sue Bishop, Marianne Chavez, Christine Confer, Laura Fahr, Delia Hakim, Linda Ketcham, Rebecca Romero, and Elsa Padilla, The Courage to Change: Stories from Successful School Reform (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 1996); Paul E. Heckman and Carla Sanger, “LA’s BEST: Beyond School as Usual,” Educational Leadership 58, no. 6 (2001): 46–49; Viki L. Montera, “Bridging the Gap: A Case Study of the Home-School-Community Relationship at Ochoa Elementary School” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1996).

34 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1967).

35 Thomas N. Headland, Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris, Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).

36 This example is taken from Education and Community Change (ECC) Project staff field notes of a dialogue session held in the afternoon on September 17, 1990. The ECC Project was based at the University of Arizona from 1990 to 1998. The other examples in this section come from this data set and were taken from field notes, transcriptions, and analyses of videotapes of dialogue sessions.

37 Norma Gonzales, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, eds., Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005).

38 Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1987).

39 Ellen Langer, Mindfulness (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989).

40 Robert E. Slavin, “Effects of Biracial Learning Teams on Cross-Racial Friendships,” Journal of Educational Psychology 71 (1979): 381–87.

41 Ibid., 386.

42 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 29.

43 Philip Slater and Warren G. Bennis, “Democracy Is Inevitable,” Harvard Business Review 68 (1990): 167–76.

44 Janelle Brown, “It’s Revolting: School Districts Rebel against the Education Mandate,” Edutopia, November 2005, 43–44; Robert A. Frahm, “Rell Backs Lawsuit by State: Agrees to Challenge Federal School Law,” Hartford Courant, July 26, 2005; Avi Salzman, “N.A.A.C.P. Is Bush Ally in School Suit versus State,” New York Times, February 1, 2006.

45 Pink, A Whole New Mind, 39–40.