Design Thinking Paradigm and The Article and Paulo Freire

Teachers and their methods of delivering curriculum are constantly under the public microscope. Parents, students and teacher themselves want to ensure that their child, themselves or their students are learning what is set out in the Prescribe Learning Outcomes or what has been outlined in government mandated curriculum packages. But what if there was another way of doing things? What if it should be the entire educational system under the microscope? I have used the beginning stages in the Design Thinking Paradigm (Empathize- Define- Ideate- Prototype- Test) to analyse one of my favourite articles on this very subject.

Empathize (with the beginnings of Define)
Every time I read This Article, I cry. I have to take several nose-blowing breaks and wipe the back of my hand across my eyes before I can continue reading. When I am finished, I feel like I have had the wind punched out of me. I also am filled with hope.
 

The Article, “How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses,”  outlines how one elementary teacher in an impoverished Mexican border town rejected formal teaching methods and allowed the students in his class to take ownership of their own learning. This lead to truly awesome and inspirational results. The Article gripped my heart from the very beginning with its harsh descriptions of life in the Mexican town of Matamoros, but it was the following which dug deep into my soul:

“…the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested." (The Article)

A friend first posted The Article and I read it by accident. I sat there and bawled because it spoke to my soul and my soul was saying “Other people have not given up on education. Other people have found a way to fight the factory system and to change how we learn. You can do this too.”  The Article was the soul food that I needed after working several weeks in a factory style classroom. There are things that I try to do differently, there are ways that I try to break the factory machinery, but working against such a well-oiled system is exhausting and often degrading. And quite often I find that my tools break before the machinery does. Nevertheless, The Article has become my motivation to go to work each day. It is my motivation to, bit by bit, disassemble the educational machinery that has been hard at work for several centuries. It is my personal call to action.

The same friend that posted The Article also recommended I read Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” She was taken aback that I had never even heard of it before. “It is teacher soul food,” she said. “It will become your bible.” A few days later, my course instructor responded to a piece of expository writing that was to jumpstart our term papers. He also mentioned Paulo Freire. Not a coincidence. It was time that I had some Paulo in my life.

Define
I have been taking Freire with me everywhere: the bus, the train, the couch, the classroom, the library, the kitchen floor, the bed, the bath… We’ve been everywhere together it seems. My friend was right, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is fast becoming my teacher bible. What The Article refers to as the “dominant model of public education [that] is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it,” (The Article)  Freire refers to as the “banking concept of education.” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 72) Together with The Article, Freire has implanted some ideas in my mind that are starting to sprout. Where once there was hopelessness about my job there is now budding optimism and anticipation. Sergio Juárez Correa revolutionized his teaching. I can too.

Ideate
Juárez Correa recognized that for children to experience powerful learning, they must be in control of their own learning. He based his rationale on research conducted by Sugata Mitra, “a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers. Without any instruction, they were able to teach themselves a surprising variety of things, from DNA replication to English." (The Article)  Juárez Correa was well-read and despite instincts rooted in his formal training, he continued to step further back from the role of teacher and stepped closer to the role of mentor and facilitator.  Joshua Davis, author of The Article has obviously done his research on the subject and supports Juárez Correa’s method with data from a variety of brain studies. My little community of educational frustration has given way to an entire world of research and experiences! When I add Sugata Mitra to my reading collection I just might have a pedagogical holy trinity! I will have the tools to complete the "Ideate" stage in the Design Thinking paradigm and begin the "Prototype" and "Test" stages.

I still need to write my term paper and I don’t want to use all of my material here.

I will end with a quote…

To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. (The Article)

And a question:

How can we, trapped in the factory, break down the machinery and start a revolution? What tools would you use and to what purpose?

Remembering through peace

There are two main approaches to health: pathology and salutogenesis. The pathogenic approach focuses on finding treatments for diseases whereas the salutogenic approach focuses on making healthy life choices to avoid becoming unhealthy. In other words, “dis-ease versus health-ease.”

As I sat through yet another Remembrance Day assembly that is supposedly honouring veterans I started to wonder why educators don’t have more of a salutogenic-style approach to Remembrance Week and Remembrance Day.

If you were to ask the average elementary school student about the meaning of war, you would get a multitude of responses all involving guns, fighting, combat gear, tanks, land mines and bombs. The names of their favourite war video games would also be thrown in. Children know all about war, even if they have not lived it themselves. When asking my children this week what peace means, I was met with blank stares and fidgeting. This was obviously a new and uncomfortable question for them.

The main focus for Remembrance Day activities in most elementary schools is war. Students talk about wars that have happened and where they happened. Statistics about how many people died are discussed. Destructive technology is studied and ogled. War is glorified.

At assemblies, students watch videos depicting war- bombs being dropped, no man’s land, barbed wire, artillery, troops in combat gear, tanks, bodies being shovelled by a backhoe, children playing on burnt-out tanks. Every time an explosion happens on the screen or a picture of a gun or tank appears, there is a collective murmur of “Whoa, cool!” that ripples through the assembly. War is glorified. War is “cool.” The children then go outside for Recess and play war while the supervisors yell “No gun-play at school!” In the staff room you can hear “Why don’t they get it? We just had an assembly on why war is wrong!” Not quite. Somebody(ies) obviously missed the point.

A colleague of mine told me that a member of the armed forces came to speak to the intermediate students at her school. When asked “Have you ever injured or killed anyone?” he replied, “I never answer that question. It is too personal.” In not answering the question he has answered the question. Do you think children are stupid and can’t see through your lack of bravery to speak the truth? If you have the guts to pull the trigger or set a land mine, you had better have the guts to tell the truth about it. There is no honour or bravery in avoiding the truth.

I’ve taught students who have had their houses bombed, whose parents have had their eyes gauged out in torture, whose parents had to run for their lives while their neighbours hunted them down. I bet those students don’t think war is “cool.” To them, someone being injured or killed is a reality, not an embarrassing question.

I spent an entire day by myself at Vimy Ridge. It was peacefully grotesque. The pock-marked ground juxtaposed starkly with the all too orderly white headstones. The bright green grass was dotted with tall skinny trees replanted by the German government as part of the war reparations. The white limestone memorial piercing the sky seemed to pierce my heart at the same time. I had the park to myself yet I felt crowded by the horror of the past. Underneath my feet, on the very ground I was walking, lay the dead. Young lives, cut short by gun-fire. This was nothing to glorify. This was a tragedy. This was a nightmare. Everything at Vimy was still ripe with conflict, yet is was a place of sacred peace.

Many years ago, my sister went to Guatemala shortly after the Guatemalan Civil War had ended. While she was met with much pain and suffering, she was also met by a movement of peace. Where North American culture would hang on to pain and let resentment and the desire for vengeance build, the Guatemalan people are finding empowerment and peace through their pain. They are choosing peace. In a church, where many indígenas were tortured, raped and murdered by the militia, their spilled blood staining the floor, was a sign that read “Take off your shoes. You are on sacred ground.” In a place of horrific pain and suffering they are honouring their dead through peaceful remembrance. Where the ghosts of the past could and should haunt them, the indígenas are allowing their wounds to be opened, cleansed and therefore healed through peace.

Why then should we not have the same approach when teaching children about Remembrance Day? Why is the focus not peace? Why are we not allowing ourselves to find empowerment in the past? It is possible to recognize veterans without glorifying war. To discuss and expose the truths and reality of war (post traumatic stress, depleted uranium poisoning, disfigurement, refugees, loss of life…) is to demystify war and to ensure that it isn’t glorified. It is also possible to celebrate Remembrance Day through peace.  How can we expect children to learn that fighting is wrong if we continue to glorify war rather than promoting and teaching about peace? War is the pathological approach to conflict. We must fight our “enemy” to solve the problem. Peace is the salutogenic approach. Why not give our children the tools (and not just lip service?) to prevent conflict so that we may all live peacefully? We can teach our children to wear a white poppy next to a red poppy so that hopefully, one day, we will find that we no longer need either.