Borderland

I hijacked David Weinberger’s book title for this post, which is inspired by Grace Lee Boggs’s appearance on Bill Moyer’s Journal [transcript] yesterday. Boggs was introduced as a woman who, at the age of 91, “has been a part of almost every major movement in the United States in the last 75 years, including: Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s Rights and Environmental Justice.”

Boggs’s appearance on Moyers’ show gave me an idea for a way to address Will’s comment on my last post. He said that we need to “articulate in clear ways the value and the values” of using read/write web technologies in school. He’s creating a list of talking points for the Edublogger/Con Unconference. I’ll come to that in a moment.

I was intrigued by this exchange:

BILL MOYERS: What will it take for this next round of change that you see as promising? What would it take?

GRACE LEE BOGGS: It takes discussions like this. I mean, it takes a whole lot of things. It takes people doing things. It takes people talking about things. It takes dialogue. It takes changing the whole lot of ways by which we think.

BILL MOYERS: Do you see any leaders who are advocating that change? I mean, people that we would all recognize, anybody we’d all recognize?

GRACE LEE BOGGS: I don’t see any leaders, and I think we have to rethink the concept of “leader.” ‘Cause “leader” implies “follower.” And, so many– not so many, but I think we need to appropriate, embrace the idea that we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.

Boggs said that the Civil Rights Movement taught her that positive changes spring from cultural change, and not from government. She said that we have to stop depending on government to initiate social change, and she explained that “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” which Martin Luther King spoke about in 1967 still haunt us because the struggle against them hasn’t been accompanied by the revolution of values necessary to effectively confront them.

Moyers asked her why, at the age of 91, she came to speak with him, and she told him she hoped the Beloved Communities Initiative she’s involved with now might show people a way to begin working toward positive social change.

Her vision sounds remarkably similar to what Paul Hawken described in an interview with Amy Goodman. He sees the

…rise of a movement that is a shift between a world created by and for privilege to a world created by community, and it details the rise of over one million organizations in the world who address civil liberties, social justice and the environment. And even though they’re atomized and there’s many of them and they don’t seem connected, due to modern technology — cell, texting, internet — they’re starting to intertwine, morph and come together in ways that is making it much more powerful than it has been before.

He has a wiki called WiserEarth, intended (presumably) to bring some coherence to this anarchic movement. I’m not sure about that.

Back to Boggs, she shared some of her personal history in an article on Transformational Organizing, and she elaborated on her vision for change and the “revolution of values.” She urges people to become activists – but not activists in the sense of seizing power from the State or from each other. Boggs recommends that we take the initiative to make positive contributions to our local community by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors because “change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.”

She said that her participation in the Civil Rights Movement taught her that our challenge now is to create new cultural institutions, enlarge our concept of citizenship, and directly take responsibility for our communities in small ways that will collectively make the world a better place.

A vision for educational technology that builds on those challenges might combine social action with digital storytelling:

1. Involve kids in local community activities.
2. Have them find things to do that return something positive to the community.
3. Teach them to research, plan, and publish their projects using a variety of media.
4. Involve their parents and families.

These, and the challenges Boggs mentioned, are the talking points I’d recommend for Will.

When kids begin to see the connections between what they and others are doing, they’ll become more globally conscious and locally conscientious. A “revolution of values” may, or may not, follow. But I believe that experience is the prerequisite for understanding broader issues, and that students need to connect their personal experiences to larger social contexts in order to understand the world.

These ideas are not the product of long-standing convictions of mine but come from a growing realization that education advocacy should address a larger domain than individual cognitive benefits or cultural deficits. I haven’t been satisfied with my own students’ use of technology, which has seemed too unfocused and narrow to me, and I’m thinking about my approach for next year, here.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that teachers should somehow subvert the authority or values of parents or school boards – but quite the opposite. School projects should advance the development and expression of community values. We need to include all members of the school community in these projects, and encourage everyone to bring meaning from their own lives to the work of creating a shared narrative and compelling reasons to engage it. The discussions that result from those projects is what will promote the critical understandings.