Innovation, creativity and traditional school?

I am about to conduct fieldwork to explore teacher experience with innovation in the classroom. Many, including myself are wanting teachers to shift their practice away from an authority of knowledge to what the Alberta government calls in Inspiring Education an, “Architect of Knowledge”. We want students to use technology as a tool to support innovation and discovery. Good heavens have we stopped for a moment to really look at what we are asking here? Do teachers know themselves how to use technology as a tool to support their own innovation and discovery?

I sat today and played a little with a thesaurus and the three words, innovation, creativity and tradition. This is what I came up with:

Creativity is:

• artistry

• cleverness

• genius

• imagination

• ingenuity

• inspiration

• inventiveness

• originality

• resourcefulness

• talent

• vision

Innovation is:

• addition

• alteration

• cutting edge

• departure

• deviation

• introduction

• latest thing

• leading edge

• modification

• shift

• state of the art

• vanguard

The thesaurus came up with what seemed to me a pretty positive list for creativity and innovation while a rather mixed list for tradition. Regardless of the list it appears, at the moment this 'shift' we want teachers to maneuver is an easy one step for some, and a great leap into the darkness for others. I look around and wonder what gives? I never lost my kindergarten curiosity, so I played around further with the collection of words from the tradition list a little and this is what I came up with:

We are asking teachers regardless of their age and experience to leave behind stable firm ground, a secure place of wisdom, heritage and a culture of established practice. Tradition is an accepted, familiar comfortable place founded on a confirmed, tried and true verified method to get the ‘job of school’ done. It has been endorsed by the popular, everyday way of thinking about school by society in general. It is a system instituted and entrenched by time-honoured tradition. While at the same time acknowledge as a universal over the entire planet. Tradition is old, it is old school, old hat and without thinking it produces same old, same old teaching. I think the problem for some that travel in the teaching landscape is that they may have been pulled into a rut, fixed there firm on custom. Perhaps becoming too familiar leads some teach more out of habit, playing it safe with the conventional and happy with the ordinary. Based on the collection of words I came up with. Tradition can be both a wonderful and constrained place if the rules become fixed and the stories of experienced are hushed. I think at the heart of this is perhaps the question of what school is for has shifted as we leave the industrial age. School in the industrial age was meant to be efficient. Teachers were just ‘cogs in the wheel’. School became a place of ‘teacher musts’ sent from a place that did think deeply about what school was for. Traditionally teachers were never really invited to participate intellectually in curriculum as John Dewey suggested about 100 years ago. I am more interested in the question of how do we shift a the system that once discouraged participation to now encourage teachers to engage in mindful, thoughtful interaction with why we have school? The rug that teachers stand on has just been pulled. The question should not be what is wrong with teachers? We need to ask how do we support teachers to find their own feet? As a teacher do I really own my own learning? How do we give teachers a voice to their own questions in their own learning and to treat them like participatory citizens that Dewey suggested?

The questions that continue to concern me as a teacher/researcher are:

1. What opportunities do teachers have to make sense of their experiences with innovation and change?

2. We do not make it easy for students to be innovative by making it difficult for teachers to be innovative. Can we describe clearly what is standing in the way of teachers becoming both creative and innovative?

3. Technology changes quickly, teachers regularly come into contact with technology they have no experience with. How do we help them gain this experience and reduce their frustration?

4. To become an architect of learning requires teachers to teach differently than they were taught (we can not give what we do not have). How can we support teachers to build their own profession learning networks during working hours?

5. Given that People not technology will be the solutions to problems, how do we adjust the structure of the working environment to allow for the free flowing exchange of ideas to support their personalized learning?

The Capacity of Story

John Dewey has left behind a story that I believe I might be able to re-introduce. In his story he told us that a participatory citizen requires a competence to tell and understand stories; also that we do not make it easy for students to learn, by making it difficult for teachers to learn. Participatory citizens in culture means it is possible for us to learn from the stories we tell each other. In culture there is no solo voice. “All human experience is social: it involves contact and communication” (Dewey, 1938, p. 38). Dewey would teach us that experience is a moving force, like a vine growing on top of itself.

Good teachers try to organize the conditions of experience for their students, they then allow their students to personalize their experience by re-tell their story in their own words. I would add that stories that teach, are re-created and co-constructed with each telling, in this way good teachers let the ‘experience’ be the teacher. Good teachers do not expect the future telling of a story with educative power to be the same as it was in the past telling. Teachers thus become the architects, designers or gardeners of learning rather than transmitters of a static finished product. Some call it lived experience.

Experience that educates (the story told in lived experience) is valued and judged by not only those remembering the event as the storyteller but also those who imagine themselves in the story as listeners. Stories that educate need to live. Dewey taught us that experience potentially is a teacher, but there will be no learning without the story of experience. How we access educative stories is dependent on our connection to each other, and our ability to listen is effected by our attentiveness to this connection. With our tools of technology we have built a structure around the earth. We live within it. As Marshal McLuhan (1968) expresses, the environment has become a technological thing. Nature is not separate or at war with technology, both are included in this environment. Our tools not only extend our humanity but also have become a place we live and connect. Good or bad we are now connected in a more powerful way. “We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect to each other regardless of geography" Case 2010. This technological environment is just helping us behave more ‘human-like’ in our storytelling ways. As humans, whether in an artist, scientist, or storyteller mode, it is unwise to disconnect from the tools we make, the value choices we make in their use and the experience we have with them.

We are a creative, curious, storytelling people. Should we think of stories as disconnected tools in teaching and learning or is it better to think of them as partners in learning? Can we really put down our creations once we have made them or do they come with us as we move in experiential learning? With this 'capacity' of story, what might happen if we make teachers storytellers? Could their story then become a teacher? What might happen if we bring together two voices that do not normally have common dialogue with each other, such as teachers and school reformers? What might I learn if I place myself between them?

This thinking was imagined while reading, “Letting Stories Breathe” by Arthur W. Frank and revisiting the following:

Case, A. (2011). We are all cyborgs now | Video on TED.com. TED Talk, . Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now.html

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY, USA: Kappa Delta Pi.

McLuhan, M., and Mailer, N. (1968). Debate on CBC Television, . Retrieved from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5470443898801103219#

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | Video on TED.com

The kind of experiential learning that this talk beautifully describes requires teachers to teach in a way that they have not experienced themselves either as students or in becoming a teachers.
So... I ask how do we (School) then make is easier for teachers to think of themselves as learners? How do we make is safe for them to fail?

Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes | Video on TED.com

Storytelling in a digital landscape

We are a storytelling people and we live in a story telling landscape. That is if we choose to participate. I first noticed this when I was a young mother and I would tell my childbirth experience to other mothers, they always came back with an interesting story of their own. Over the years I have heard many stories each of them weaved and connected with shared experience. We live our life stories like bubbles blowing in the wind, floating between all alone yet never far always seeking each other. In the nod of a head we may gently cradle fragments of each other’s story in relationship for brief moments and connect what is similar our lived stories. “There is a reflexive relationship between living a life story, telling a life story, retelling a life story, and reliving a life story”(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 71). Following Dewey my goal is to look for connected experience, not to go chasing after certainty but to tell a reflexive story that others can learn from. With my inquiry I want to be active or rather participate with my own curiosity. What makes me curious is my confusion. Teachers are being asked to become digitally confident and to create learning environments were students could develop fully as digital citizens. What confuses me is how teachers are expected to gain confidence when many teachers report that their students know more than they do about the digital landscape. When teachers have no personal experience with technology they also worry about the time to learn something new. They also complain that it takes so long to get IT help when the network goes down and they are not able to personalize computers by adding new applications when they feel they need them. There are many barriers for teachers using technology in the digital landscape but none more frustrating than attempting to give something you do not have. I hope that my research may reveal possible paths to smooth the crumpled tension I believe many teachers experience daily as they endeavor to teach digital citizenship to students.

The place I wish to situate my research is in a reflexive landscape because I believe in the power of lived knowledge best described in experience. Yet I fear that standing in the middle of this ever-changing vista may cause me to loose my balance. As a reflexive narrative researcher I expect an unending negotiation to maintain my flexibility and openness. I think it best to settle in, to work alongside teachers and make myself useful. I risk perhaps putting myself out on the edge like an uninvited guest, while I explore the gap between the teachers narrative experience and my own. I understand that the negotiation of the most precious research relationship is ongoing and unending throughout the whole inquiry but in the end is only a snap shot, a brief moment in time. “Good narrative working relationships carry with them a sad and wistful sense born of the possibility of temporariness”(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 72).

Clandinin, D. G., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

How do you become a participatory citizen in a digital society?

(Updated from last week)


The tools of technology have built a system, “a house” around us (Franklin, 1999, p.1). I believe it has become a place with potential, a “fixer upper” provided we keep the renos up. Just as I live in my house on my street it is a place we may or may not want to participate in, regardless it is there all around us. A participant is not only a citizen that inhabits a place but also one that socially engages in activities that benefit all people that belong. Before this house was built you had to physically be there in order to learn and interact with others. With this technological network there are many other ways to “be there” and learn from each other. Almost one hundred years ago Dewey (1916) wrote about his philosophy of the importance of democracy and education. He believed that schools and its teachers were responsible for building a productive and responsible democratic society. He spoke about communication as a way in which we discover what we have in common in order to form a community. “Any social arrangement that remains vitally shared is educative to those who participate in it” and that the very process of “living together educates”(p.6&7). With that in mind I wonder in the year 2010, in a digital community, how do we live well together? Is it really all that different than what Dewey described oh so long ago? How is it different for teaching and learning? How do we teach students how to participate well, if we ourselves have no experience in this newly renovated house? Who will tell them to pick up their socks? What concerns should we have as parents and teachers if our children live and grow up in a house without us? I am reminded of an old Star Trek episode “Miri”(McEveety, 1966) in which children known as “onlies” (a contraction of only ones left) grew up without grups (“grown ups”). Their life without parental influence had devastating consequences. Dewey speaks of a self-renewal process that he believes occurs in education largely in transmission through communication. What effect would muted voices have on this self-renewal? Dewey would say that life goes on in continuous sequence and the continuity of life means a constant re-adaptation of the environment. Those that do not readapt die out. I am not saying we are in danger of dying out but rather we are in danger of disconnecting with our students and missing the opportunity to participate in an important part of their social lives. I believe we, as teachers need to be there with our students participating as digital citizen for without us how does our wisdom pass on?

This is all well and good yet I do not believe that even if teachers want to learn to become digital citizens that it is easy for them. Teachers are not comfortable not knowing. There is a stirring as if something has disturbed the water. It is in this potentially empowering yet scary place of tension that I want to explore in narrative with teachers as they live the experience of becoming digital citizens.

Dewey, J. (2005). Democracy and education. Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing.

Franklin, U. M. (1999). The real world of technology. CBC Massey Lectures (2004th ed.). Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.Google Books

McEveety, V. (1966, October 27). Star Trek: The Original Series. Miri. Retrieved from http://fliiby.com/file/289602/4jzdqi8ha2.html

What is Digital Citizenship?

Empowering the Potential of Digital Citizenship for Teachers in Narrative

As I sit with my colleagues in our staffroom and listen as the new digital citizenship strategy is revealed, I see a wave of fear and confusion slowly spreading across the faces of the teachers in the room. What is it we have to do now? What is this digital citizenship stuff people ask? Why can’t kids just get up off the couch and talk to each other? They’re going to bring computers from home? Who’s going to fix it when it doesn’t work? I don’t know how. Being an educational technologist I am quite familiar with all of the terms but the others are not. They are uncomfortable and confused as to what is being asked of them.

On it’s website the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) states that it is committed to helping its students thrive in the 21st century and that digital technologies are a key component for students to reach their full potential within the CBE and beyond. That digital citizenship should be practiced in every course, throughout the school and at home.

Given the reaction from my staff I wonder how teachers have come to experience what the CBE is calling digital citizenship in their professional lives? As teachers what opportunities do we have to personalize our learning? Are we able to choose who and how we collaborate with other teachers? Much research and effort has gone into examining the barriers for teachers in using technology in their classroom but have we really taken the time to explore the tension that is creative for teachers when we ask them to give something they have little experience doing? My experience as a classroom teacher and a doctoral student has opened an awareness of the need to describe the lived experience of teachers as they endeavor to create these safe, personalized and collaborative learning environments for their students within a digital landscape.

The CBE and the university of Calgary are currently involved in a research project around digital citizenship and mobile learning that are similar to my interests. So while the CBE’s research focus questions are:
1. How can the use of mobile devices inform the CBE's digital citizenship strategy?
2. How might mobile learning support the personalization of learning?
3. What impact on student achievement will these devices have?

I wish to explore possible tensions between what teachers are being asked to provide for students and what they have experienced for themselves regarding the democratic use of technology in their classrooms. My research questions would highlight the teacher’s experience and voice:
1. How does the digital citizenship strategy impact you and your teaching?
2. As a teacher what you feel you are a citizen of?
3. What ways do you use technology to collaborate with other teachers?
4. How are you able to participate and personalize your learning what digital citizenship means?

I will bring many voices with me on this journey but the theoretical landscape in which this work lives has grown out of the work of John Dewey in experiential learning and democracy in education. To fully uncover the stories teachers have to tell of their experience I believe will best be told through narrative inquiry.