Cycle Three: Embryonic Communities

With this week’s idea of “embryonic communities” being so engrained into the work of John Dewey, I find it necessary to mention that my older brother teaches at the University Lab School (http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/schools/lower-school/index.aspx) at the University of Chicago and he teaches 4^th grade. I have been fortunate enough to observe him in his classroom and it further links this week’s reading, especially the Dewey text, to what I have seen and what he does. There seems to be a deeper connection to his methods and understanding to why he sets up his classroom the way he does. This idea of community is ever present in his classroom and has always been a major goal of mine as a teacher.

            To take John Dewey’s term “embryonic community” I add my own interpretation of that meaning. To me, this means that the school, home, community and all the people at these places communicate and experience meaningful and authentic learning opportunities with each other. However, I firmly believe that this idea of community is not being fostered by the education world we live in today. There are certain policies that are preventing this and it is troubling to me. With that being said, I do believe that as teachers we have the opportunity to create this community and allow our students to experience meaningful and authentic learning.

            There are many reasons for this failure of community in the school system of today. To start, in opposition to Norway where “teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around” (Hancock, p. 1), it seems more and more the teachers are being relieved of their control in the classroom. They are replaced with mandated district curriculums and materials that do not connect to the students’ lives and do not provide them with a meaningful entry to the learning. Also, teachers, including myself, are made to feel bad for making the extra effort to build this community. Through home-visits, morning meeting, and student-led conferences, I am made to defend these choices and at times forced to stop.

            Another policy that is preventing communities within the school from thriving is the high stakes standardize tests. This is for a couple of reasons. First, these programs such as “Race to the Top” promote competition between schools and within classrooms. While in the business world competition is a necessary, in the education world this competition prevents collaboration. Teachers need to feel like they can collaborate with other professionals through PLCs and other forms. “If one method fails, teachers must consult with colleagues to try something else” (Hancock, p.1) to keep finding ways to connect material to the students’ lives and the real world. This directly relates to community because “as teachers learn from one another, they begin to see the ways that group members can contribute to and enrich one another’s development and growth” (Lieberman and Miller, p. 14). This collaboration not only dies with standardized tests amongst teachers, but the newly enforced performance pay will only splinter that gap even farther. These tests also prevent students from learning from students to the point where if “one child is to help another in his task it has become a school crime” (Dewey, p. 29). This collaboration is important because “the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons” (Dewey, p. 27)

            As mentioned earlier, I engage my students in different ways such as home-visits, morning meetings and student-led conferences in order to build my community. This past year I struggled and felt like I was missing a part of that community and that was the parents of my students and businesses within my community. To help with this I piloted a program called Enrichment Clusters (http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/sem/semart01.html). This idea originated from Dr. Joseph Renzulli of the University of Connecticut and was also something I observed in my brother’s classroom. This idea behind this is that students are split into small learning communities based on their interests where they work with an adult to create a product or service. The adult was usually a teacher or parent, but we had some business leaders take on a cluster as well. These clusters were small in only 5-6 students and was focused around the idea that “both students and teachers are constantly engaged both in learning about core content and in how to understand and communicate with one another” (Felner, p. 3). At the end of the 7 week period, students would share their product or service with the entire school. During these clusters, adult-leaders were more facilitators and also were able to set up meaningful field trips to help the students with their products or services. These field trips allowed students to see how what they were doing in the school is being applied in the real world. The focus of each cluster was very much similar to those listed by Kyle in his intro to this cycle. They included, stop motion photography, cars of the future, food drives, school wide compost (http://www.standard.net/stories/2013/04/22/shadow-valley-students-turn-lunch-leftovers-compost), theatre, and outdoor survival to name a few (http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/clusters/). These “occupations in the school were not meant to be mere practical devices, but centers of scientific insight into natural materials and processes” (Dewey, p. 33). Students were driven by their inquiry and their own natural curiosities. They worked cross class and even cross grades. In my opinion, this built classroom community, school-wide community, and community with surrounding areas.

            While there are policies in today’s educational world that can limit community there are many things we can do to promote and champion this idea. As teachers, we should strive “to make each one of schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society, and permeate throughout with the spirit or art, history and science” (Dewey, p. 44).