The Golden Apple Seminar was visited by
Stephanie Pace Marshall, the founding President of Illinois Math and Science Academy and author of
The Power to Transform. Dr. Marshall discussed her book (which I had read with great enjoyment,) her experience at IMSA, and her belief in the need for transformation in the living systems of education. We had an incredible session. A few highlights of my thoughts from the meeting.
Stephanie's work, and her conversation with us, is based in one question:
“What would it take to create a
generative and life-affirming system of learning and schooling that liberates
the goodness and genius of all children and invites and nurtures the power and
creativity of the human spirit for the world?”
Her book explains how she has succeeded, and is proposing to the community, to radically change the story we tell about education. Stephanie finds great power in story and narrative. There is a anecdote in the book that made the idea of the power and potential of narrative in transforming a community clear to me. A few years ago, IMSA had mistakenly sent letters of admittance to about 30 students who were supposed to still be on the waiting list. There was no space in the school or the dormitory for the added students (IMSA is a boarding school.) Some of the faculty said they should send letters of apology and inform the students that it had all been a mistake. Stephanie overrode them and directed that IMSA should honor its offers and admit the students. Everyone would need to hustle to get new desks, beds, and mattresses ready. Argument flew around the school concerning the wisdom of this. Stephanie collected all of the things that were being said and tried to group the arguments together. She found that there were really just two narratives that had emerged: one she called
The Firestorm, which predicted dire consequences from the added students, and the other she called
The Gift, which saw the extra enrollment as a special opportunity for the school. She presented both narratives to the faculty, without judgment, comment, or argument. She simply relayed them as the two stories that were being told. Faculty who believed that admitting the added students would be fine found that they now had, in
The Gift, a language and a narrative to rally around and to express their hopefulness. Instead of just exchanging complaints and arguments, the community now spoke in terms of the two stories. The narrative of
The Gift eventually became the dominant narrative.
I have been in similar situations and seen one narrative, usually the most negative and destructive, become the default story for the organization. I took from the IMSA experience the importance of shaping the narrative, especially in my own classroom.
I was thinking of this past school year, the three quarters I taught before my sabbatical. Most of the things that happened in my classes were not new; they had happened before, but this year, a narrative grew among the students that went something like this: "We not only have the chance to speak our own minds in this class but it is generous of us to participate because it might help someone else get the courage to speak." I did not create this story, although I think I did work to shape it. By the last days of the third quarter, before I left for Northwestern, the students told me in discussions that this is what had happened that had made the class successful. The story was always told as what they had decided to do with class, with some gratitude that I had not stood in their way. I don't think we actually did that much different from other years but the story of personal ownership and generous sharing had become their story. Stephanie would call it "mind-shaping" and would remind us that "mind-shaping is world-shaping."
Much of Stephanie's theory and practice comes from an experience she had in Australia in 1997. She learned that the aboriginal people used something they called
songlines to guide them when they went on a journey. They would sing their way out, with their song telling the caves and rivers along the way, and then sing their way back
. They tell how their ancestors had "emerged from sleep beneath the earth and began to meander and sing their way across the continent." The earth was forming and so "they wandered and (sang) the land into existence." This is world-shaping in song and story. I am quoting now from her beautiful and poetic explanation of how to approach transformation:
"When you change the story, you change the map. When you change the map, you change the landscape. When you change the landscape, you change your experiences and your choices. When you change your experiences and choices, you can change your mind. And when you change your mind, you can change the world."
All of this came at exactly the right time. I have been thinking throughout the sabbatical that I have lost interest in educational reform. I don't care anymore about rearranging schedules and suggesting new tactics and adding extra bits of technology. I am not going to live long enough to see a wholesale (and with luck creative) destruction of the factory-style, industrial revolution classroom. I am weary of the many teachers who spend as much energy making certain that innovation never occurs as they do at teaching itself. I no longer think I will persuade or redirect them. Despite all this, I am more optimistic than ever, because I have seen that my job is not to reform schooling, it is to transform it. And that transformation will not happen by legislation or management techniques or I-Pads or professional development. Transformation will happen if I transform myself. I need to be sure that my story is a story of liberation and goodness and genius and inclusion. If I tell that story, the map of my class will be life-affirming and generative. If my classroom is mapped in favor of life and creation, the conditions and experiences will be favorable for young persons to be learners. When they are learning, their minds will be open, kind, and just. When a hundred and fifty students a year move on with new and learned minds, we will change the world.
I would like to strongly recommend that anyone who cares about learning (students, teachers, parents) order a copy of
Power to Transform today. It is an important and inspiring story of what we can be. My deepest thanks to Stephanie Pace Marshall for joining us in conversation.