A few weeks back, while visiting the NSF, a colleague and I met, an engaging, passionate advocate for an alternative future for education. One of the first things he said when we met stuck in my head, “if we believe that each of our children are different, then education should make them more so.” This is one of his core beliefs about education-and mine too. We talked about how to develop 21st century workforce skills, the role of technology and the role of teachers in catalyzing change.
Great educators start with the kids. He began there too, asking, “how are very young people currently using technology and developing skills that are not being taken advantage of in the current education model?”
Consider your computer music library. Mine is not organized. I loaded all my CDs into it a few years back. The music sits there in a huge list-not sophisticated at all. Young people are bringing a much higher level of sophistication to their music libraries. In fact, they are creating ontological structures that allow them to sort and access massive data sets. The technology and the kids are co-creating new types of literacy. How should education build off of these emerging technologically enhanced literacies?
We also discussed the technology in young people’s pockets. How about the new iPod Touch’s ability to shoot video, share video, video conference and geo-reference the information. This technology could enable highly individualized learning. With it, kids can link up across great distances around common interest in their educational pursuits. I began to imagine island students in Alaska, Maine and the Carolinas compiling and sharing storm surge data along with interviews of fishermen’s experiences of storm events as a way to begin discussing the potential impacts of an increasingly unpredictable climate.
We quickly moved to a discussion about the role of educators in drawing out the kids’ strengths. The program officer talked about starting his own school back in the ’60s in Oregon. The school shared some of the strengths emerging in island and remote coastal schools: non-hierarchical, technology enhanced, individualized learning. Our discussion explored recent efforts by six outer-island schools in Maine that may contain additional hints at how we might achieve this quantum leap in education.
To provide context, the six islands of Cliff, Monhegan, Matinicus, Frenchboro, Isle au Haut, and Little Cranberry have begun a remarkable project. Each of these schools operates in a one-room school house and has fewer than thirteen students in a kindergarten through eighth grade setting (Cliff is k-5). A few years ago, the teachers at these schools formed a Critical Friends Group (CFG), so that they could share solutions to their challenges. As of September, the CFG employs a staff person from the Island Fellows AmeriCorps program run by the Island Institute.
Their staff person is charged with aligning the teaching efforts across these schools, connecting the students to one another through field trips, and coordinating the use of distance-learning technology. Also, because teachers on the outer-islands often work alone or with an assistant, the CFG will assist with efforts to train new teachers when they come to the island.
New distance-learning technology in each school enables these remote classrooms to begin operating as a community of learners who share common place-based experiences. Teachers in these schools see themselves as facilitators. They are not afraid of technology-they actually lean toward using it. Furthermore, they are taking existing technology and deploying it to help kids connect around their own interests.
Perhaps an island student is interested in engineering. She may find a community of likeminded students on the other outer-islands. And, perhaps her peers will emerge through online schools elsewhere. For example, she may choose to access Florida Virtual School, a school that served 97,000 students last year. The extent of a students community of interest could be quite large regardless of their physical location.
We may be falling behind as a country-but not so on the islands. The current work of Maine’s outer-island schools offer a window into the future.
Rob Snyder is exectutive vice-president at the Island Institute.