Borderland

This coming week I begin teaching an after-school Web Tools for Teachers course. I’ve never done any professional development work, except on my own behalf, and I’m thinking about blogging and altruism today.

The idea of “sharing” is central to my understanding of blogging. I suppose that out of zillions of bloggers, others are guided by other principles, but my internal blogging compass is set to find and share ideas. The impulse that drives this practice is rooted in an ethos that resembles Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. Blogging, to me, is a way of caring for and contributing to a community of practice. Sometimes it means taking a position, sometimes it’s simply offering an observation, and other times it’s sharing a resource, or an alternative point of view.

When I hear edu-bloggers talk about change, as when Will Richardson observes “…there seems to be two natural camps evolving, those who say reform is next to impossible without totally blowing out the model, and those who feel that we already have some inroads to reform within the current structures…” I wonder about the utopian desire to fix and repair, as if we’ll somehow eventually arrive at a final solution to all our problems.

Wendell Johnson, in an excerpt from his classic book, People in Quandries, wrote that:

Another respect in which the ideals of the maladjusted are high is that they are highly valued….If not to succeed absolutely is to fail utterly, then to succeed absolutely becomes utterly important. It is simply that “success” becomes indispensable, as “failure” becomes catastrophic. “Success” becomes indispensable when it appears to be the only alternative to “failure” — and absolute success is, by definition, by virtue of a semantic trick, the only alternative to absolute failure.

The main problem most education activists have, it seems to me, starts with a general challenge to the sustainability of the current system. People who care deeply about it are impatient with the pace of change, and lots of folks want to bid for a say in how things will turn out when the revolution comes. Blogging about schools and education reform is driven by a certain idealism. And the tendency to get stuck in either-or thinking is very strong (for me, as much as anyone else). So Johnson’s suggestion that we think hard about what we’re hoping to accomplish seems like good advice for the blogging teacher. History and reason should tell us that an absolute answer – of either success or failure – isn’t going to happen. There may be many answers to the problems of achievement, engagement, and what schools should teach. Some will be better than others.

Back to Aldo Leopold, those of us who are sharing and caring online are contributing to a world-wide forum that is expressing self-organizing emergent properties, one of which is community. Leopold said, “When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread.” To me, this statement could as easily apply to education as to the land ethic that Leopold is advocating. He argues for a new ethos that is built on community consciousness, and it seems to me that much the same is desired by education bloggers and education activists. Leopold’s bread and stone metaphor, though, cautions against trivial solutions that fail to address real needs.

What is emerging, along with the edu-blogosphere, is a community consciousness among teachers which is contributing to a new ethos of schooling that resembles Leopold’s land ethic. The corporate capitalist challenges to the land ethic, and the tendency of individuals to to operate out of self-interest for short term gains are similar to the forces pushing for centralized control and measures of individual achievement in school. A new ethos of schooling, built on community, may be the “broader vision of systemic change” that Will mentioned.

And this is what I’m thinking about as I contemplate presenting these connectivity tools to my school colleagues. Blogging and teaching are both ways of “putting something back” for others to use as they see fit.