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An Interview with Kirsten Olson

The following interview is shared with you by both Kirsten Olson and Isaac Graves. To learn about this interview series and reproduction, citation, and copyright information, please click here. To find out more about Kirsten Olson and her work, click here.

Kirsten Olson

Kirsten OlsonIsaac Graves:  What does community mean to you? 

Kirsten Olson: Community is a group of people with whom I share values, aspirations, and understandings. Community are the folks who invite you to play, and take risks and also keep you in line and challenge you. Community for me happens in lots and lots different places, across many different domains of my life. The commonality is there’s a sense of play, and invitation, and sharing, and also of accountability and challenge in meaningful community to me.

IG: How does community play out in your life?

KO: I have many different communities, some of them are family community, spiritual community, many different work communities. In terms of educational work, some are transformational reform communities, some are practitioner problems-of-the-work communities, some are policy communities. One of the things  I wish for is that there were more intersections between all these communities. In our sector we are so silo-ed and unaware of each other, in terms of our understandings of the work, our approaches to the work. So finding more commonalities and mutual understandings is something that I wish for and hope. At IDEA that’s the project that we are working on.  

IG: What do you find most meaningful about community?

KO: Both a sense of being at home and also being invited to learn in them. I think a sense of hospitality in community is critical, and also the excitement of learning along with other people and exploring new ideas and solutions. That's very, very meaningful to me. I try to find that in all the communities that I’m in. Sometimes it’s harder than other others.

IG: What's missing in community?

KO: It would be easier for us to create real change in the sector if there were spaces for us to have reasoned conversations with each other about what we agree and disagree on. I wish there were more places that we met to exchange our ideas and learn, rather than to fight with other, or “other” each other, or mischaracterize each other. Fighting and othering is a stance lots of people are in and that is tremendously unproductive for us. People tend to feel very, very passionately about the transformation of education in ways that sometimes make it hard to hear other people whose point of views are really radically different. So an ideal community to me would be a place where people could come together to hear each other and to know each other more. 

IG: What is an ideal community to you?

KO: Hmm, is it a virtual space? Yesterday I was talking to one of my friends who works at Education Trust, which is a policy think-tank in Washington, and then I had a conversation with someone who is at a Free School, in the same day, and a public school superintendent and emailed with my IDEA colleagues. Where are the places in our sector in which all those elements can get together and understand what parts of the project everyone is working on? Not that we all have to agree with each other, but understand what everybody else is doing and to try to hear about why they’re doing it with less passion and castigation and sense that "I know the best way" or "what you have to say has no meaning to me—you don’t operate in the same accountability world that I do." All those various ways that people “other” folks are unproductive. Of course there are real philosophical disagreements about how people learn, the conditions under which people should learn, and what the outcomes of education should be. But we don't have places that foster powerful discussions around those differences. It’s a pretty fragmented and un-cosmopolitan world. 

So, how would I imagine this ideal community? I think we just have to start doing it. That’s the project that you are working on at your conference. So, the more we are producing folks who know about what’s going on in lots of different parts of this sector and can speak to each and are translators—the better. And the more places we have to come together to talk about things the better, too. 

IG: What does a democratic education mean to you?

KO: Seven things describe democratic education to me. It means shared authority in the educational enterprise with the positional authority of adults mattering less than it does in conventional educational settings. It means real thinking, so that achievement is related to real outcomes, and assessment and evaluation is related to people’s work or thinking. The work students do is organized around student interests much more than it is in most conventional educational settings. There’s kind of negotiated content: students negotiate with whomever the educators are about what they are going to learn and how they are going to learn it and how it is going to be assessed. There’s a push in the enterprise to increasing independence in the learner and also interdependence—that learning requires both of those, and that both of those capacities really be nurtured and intensified. That rigor is increasingly defined by students: students can begin to own the process by which you make the work better and that that is deeply apart of the democratic enterprise; is it’s shifting authority for judgment of what good work is away from adults onto the learner, him or herself. And high achievement is available to all, that the purpose of school is not to sort and track kids but that there’s a mastery orientation to learning in which everyone can be successful and cognitive difference is welcome. And so my last piece is that difference is seen as sustaining and helpful. Intellectual, social, and cultural difference is seen as critical to the lifeblood of a healthy learning environment. What are the outcomes of these things? To me, much, much more powerful, engaged learning, more meaningful learning for everyone. Educational places that people actually want to be. That was comprehensive and wonky, wasn’t it? 

I’m finding all these videos to try and demonstrate what I want to talk about. So I found this fabulous 1953 video about democratic classroom practices. It’s one of those "everything old is new again" pieces . . . we seem to be in the same conversation every four or five decades whether we wish to be or not. I realized that back in the day, in 1953, there was much more interest and receptivity to some of the fundamental principles of democratic education than there are now. The current No Child Left Behind and the kind of reform era that we’ve been since the early 80s have actually flattened the meaning of education. Attainment of skills and knowledge that will make us competitive in the global marketplace seems to be all that school is about in the conventional settings now. The idea that school was really about producing people who were engaged with the world and cared about the world as citizens was a much more acceptable set of ideas and attitudes in 1953 than it is now—which is astonishing considering the relatively repressive climate of the 1950s. It’s just really interesting. 

IG: How does education play out in your life? 

KO: Well, education is at the center of my life. And there’s two pieces to it: passionate learning myself. One of the things I love most about my life is that I can be in really, really fun learning projects with other people through my work. Whenever I am doing something with somebody, and we are trying to learn together about how to do the work better—I love that and find it incredibly exciting and enjoyable. Second, a lot of my work is about figuring out how to help kids who are stuck in stultifying, uninteresting institutions get to do some of the same kinds of fun learning projects that we as adults often get to do in our work. The schools I’m in, in most of my work days, have almost nothing to do with that kind of really passionate, joyful learning that is at the center of my work life. And so the starkness of that contrast is there for me all the time. Why would we do this to kids? What is our purpose in that? Ultimately, what will be the consequences of the particular regime that we are in now? So, that’s part of it—this alive, playing, incredibly fun part of learning has always been so much in contrast, for me all of my life, to this institution that we call school which seems to me to have almost nothing to do with that. There are places and things called school where that can happen, but the almost active disregard for the pleasure of learning—you know schools are really not institutions that are organized around pleasure. Pleasure is almost embargoed. The contrast of that really drives a lot of what I do.

IG: What do you find most meaningful about your work in education?

KO: I have been passionately consumed by the problem that I just named, which is the power and pleasure of learning in contrast to the institution in our culture that houses it, for a long time. I’ve been in that problem since I was maybe in the first grade and I am still learning lots of new things about it and finding new ways to understand that problem. I always say to my undergraduates when I ask them to write a paper about the purpose of education: "what you’re really writing about is: what constitutes a meaningful life? What do you think is really important to live for?" That is at the center of education. That's why the questions it involves are so profound and complex and important to wrestle with, even though we don’t do a very good job with wrestling with them. But they really are about: what do we want to live for? What do you think is meaningful? What is the nature of human life? How much control and authority do people need to learn things? What are the consequences of that control and authority? I find all of that really, really interesting. Then, how to take those big thoughts and make them practical—like what do you say in the faculty meeting tomorrow about the problems of this particular school that we’re working in. 

IG: What's missing in education?

KO: There is tremendous under-appreciation of the complexity of learning, of the complexity of emotion, and cognition, and spiritual inclinations that learning involves. There’s way too little respect for learners themselves. Learners, for the most part, are treated like cattle on a feed-lot and at a factory farm—and schooling is a crushing spiritual enterprise. In many ways, deliberately so. The individuals who work in schools are often crushed individuals themselves. The failure to appreciate the complexity of the enterprise of learning is just profound and underlies so many things that are wrong with how we do school. I’m very much with John Taylor Gatto. I don’t think that’s a mistake. I don’t think these things are accidents. We have the system that we have for particular reasons. The issue is that that system has become dysfunctional and the new story has not been born yet.

IG: What is an ideal education to you?

KO: There is no ideal education. That is a mistaken idea because in terms of education, what is considered valuable and important is intimately connected and related to your community, and your social class, your ethnicity, your geography, your parent’s aspirations—what you think is meaningful really comes out of a particular context and education is about expressing that in some way. What I’m committed to is I think there needs to be more real and coherent choices for the millions of kids who are in school right now who have no choices. What I see is a monolithic educational system that is largely about control and lack of choice—and again I would say deliberately so. Our job is to create many, many more viable alternatives for communities and for students in lots of different kinds of ways. Right now, in spite of growing interest in different kinds of schools, they still largely don’t exist—choices don’t exist. Especially for people who are not high social capital, who live in isolating neighborhoods, urban and rural, there really aren’t choices. Greater consciousness about the effects of school—the ways in which conventional school flattens us, and devalues us, and cheapens us something that people are largely not conscious of. I think that a more ideal education would cherish this complexity and hold that as much more sacred.

IG: What do you think people should know about the relationship between community and education?

KO: We have moved from a world where your community was about where you lived, where you grew up, whom your ancestors were and are. Community now is be morphing into something that is much more global, much more boundary crossing, and in some ways much more self-created. That’s just one of the promises of the world that we live in now. So, that’s also a challenge to community. You know there’s a real tension there. But there are enormous possibilities for people to collaborative all around the world to produce educational environments for folks that we could never have created in the past. That is going to happen. I think that’s tremendously promising. I could now really conceivably work with my son in New Delhi and my colleague in Melbourne to try to create some kind of new educational model. And we could go pretty far in describing what that is, beginning to put the pieces of that together, making that meaningful and having other people know about it in ways that we really couldn’t before. I see that is very promising—hopeful. But the old institution of schooling cannot survive under these conditions. And I'm okay with that.

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JOB: Headteacher of Co-educational, Independent School for Ages 11-16 (England)

The Small School – Hartland

The applicant should show motivation to work with young people and be sensitive to nurturing their individual talents, building their self- esteem and assisting in the development and acquisition of new skills. A flexible and creative approach is essential

Although the financial rewards may not compare with those of other teaching posts, the job satisfaction and sense of achievement will well and truly compensate for this.

The Small School was established in 1982 by a cooperative of parents and carers in former chapel premises in the village of Hartland in north Devon.
The aim of the school is to ‘promote a rounded, individualised education in a small community, where learning takes place in a nurturing and creative atmosphere, with a focus on the environment and the community. At present there are 24 students enrolled, 40 would be the maximum.

The whole school comes together at the beginning and end of each day in order to share and shoulder each others’ needs and aspirations. This is one of the ways in which students are encouraged to become highly effective thinkers and skilled at understanding and assimilating other people’s points of view.

"Provision for students’ spiritual, moral, social, cultural and personal development is outstanding. Students really enjoy coming to school and their attendance is good. Behaviour is outstanding "– Ofsted Jan 2012

Families are expected to become fully involved in the running of the school, and volunteer time to help keep the school going as cooks, cleaners or even teachers.
Around thirteen GCSE subjects are offered including Latin and Classics. This provision varies each year according to the interests of students and the availability of teachers. The small numbers in each class ensure that one to one support is always available.

Salary: £12,675.00 per annum

Hours: full time the school would consider a job share with or without a partner

Candidates must have a DfES recognised teaching qualification

For an informal discussion about the Headship or to arrange a visit before an application, please contact Mary Billson on 01237441192 or mob 07896118968.

 

You can find out more about the school and download a job description and application form from www.thesmallschool.org.uk

 

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In Defense of Wildness

Chris Mercogliano, Originally posted on ChrisMercogliano.com

This was the name of the book I wrote in 2007 until Beacon Press and I compromised on In Defense of Childhood instead. By “wildness” I meant the inner kind, that luminescent spark which animates us and is the source of our uniqueness and creativity. It’s wild because it dwells deep beneath the surface, out of reach of the conscious mind, and it strives mightily to resist the control of others. Without enough inner wildness, we lack the drive and the resourcefulness to overcome the obstacles in the way of  becoming who we are meant to become.

Beacon Press asked me to change the title because they were concerned that referring to this wild inner energy on the cover of a book about children might scare readers away and dampen sales. Thus the book begins with the simple statement, “Childhood is in trouble,” when what I really wanted to say was  inner wildness is endangered because childhood no longer supports the kinds of experience that nourish and sustain it. My central thesis: childhood has become so thoroughly domesticated that virtually every dimension of a child’s daily reality is now fenced in by some outside agent.

Thankfully there has been a certain cause for optimism since I wrote In Defense of Childhood. A number of more recent books have come out, such as Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids, that are aimed at reversing the hyper-management of children’s lives. Skenazy also hosts the popular reality show “World’s Worst Mom,” which is the moniker she earned after making headlines by allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the subway home by himself in New York City. (She will be one of the keynoters at the Alternative Education Resource Organization conference this summer.)

There has also been a groundswell of efforts to save the free forms of play that are among inner wildness’s greatest allies from extinction, which brings us to the subject of today’s post—an article in last month’s edition of The Atlantic magazine entitled “The Overprotected Kid.” The article begins with a group of people in England calling themselves “playworkers” who are trying to resuscitate play by maintaining outdoor play spaces that haven’t been scrubbed clean of risk like most modern-day playgrounds with their rounded-corner equipment with rubberized mats underneath.

In fact, in one such “adventure playground” occupying nearly an acre at the far end of a housing development in North Wales, there is no play equipment at all. Instead there is a rope swing over the creek that borders one edge and a big pile of used tires and dozens of wooden pallets at the center that can be used to build forts and clubhouses. A stack of old  mattresses serves as a perfectly serviceable trampoline. There is even a metal fire pit for kids to start fires in, and a bunch of trash-picked chairs and couches to sit in while they hang out together and stare at the flames.

C. T. Sorensen and Lady Marjory Allen

The Atlantic article is worth a glance just for the photos. Adventure playgrounds look more like  junkyards than anything else, which was precisely the intent of the Danish landscape architect, C. T. Sorensen, who designed the first “junk playgrounds,” as he preferred to call them, in German-occupied Copenhagen in 1943. Sorensen had been designing conventional playgrounds for over a decade and it hadn’t escaped his notice that most kids preferred playing in rough and tumble places like construction sites where they could alternately build things and then tear them apart.

Right after WWII, the English landscape architect Lady Marjory Allen was inspired by Sorensen to establish a series of junk playgrounds in rubble-strewn London neighborhoods destroyed during the Blitz. It was Allen who renamed them adventure playgrounds. Familiar with the work of A.S. Neill, she believed that engaging in undomesticated forms of play could help children recover from the psychological trauma of the war. She also saw her version of playground as a demonstration of a “democratic community of children working beyond the divisions promoted in fascism of class, nation, and race.”

Allen also once said, “Better a broken leg than a broken spirit—a leg can always mend and a spirit may not,” and so it is to people like her and Sorensen that we owe the survival of the idea that the kind of play that feeds inner wildness is unmanaged and involves a certain element of risk.

Overprotected Indeed

It should be noted that adults are rarely seen on adventure playgrounds, other than the paid playworkers who are there mainly to keep track of the tools and maintain the space. Other than keeping half an eye on the kids to make sure they don’t do anything too dangerous, the playworkers generally leave them to their own devices.

Today there are over 1000 adventure playgrounds around the world; but, not surprisingly, only two in the U.S., where as the Atlantic writer rightly points out, “Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent.” The article then takes an interesting turn as it explores the depth of the American obsession with child safety. In the early 1970s, the British-born graduate student Roger Hart spent two years mapping children’s movements in a rural New England town for a dissertation project he called “a geography of children.” Hart found that the kids spent huge chunks of time orchestrating their own adventures, with their range including the entire town as well as the surrounding countryside once they were old enough to ride a bike.

Then in 2004, Hart returned to the same town to reconnect with the now-grown-up kids he had followed who still lived nearby, in order to find out how they were raising their children. The first difference he encountered was that the parents wouldn’t let him talk to their kids alone, which had been his original modus operandi. It wasn’t that the parents were suspicious of him, Hart concluded, just that they’d gotten so used to always being close to their children. One mom who had been particularly adventurous as a young girl told him that she and her husband didn’t like their kids going off by themselves because the area is “so diverse now, with people coming in and out and lots of transients.”
But when Hart checked with the local police, he was told that that there actually aren’t all that many transients, and that over the years crime has remained steadily low. “There’s a fear among the parents,” Hart told the journalist from The Atlantic, “an exaggeration of the dangers and a loss of trust that isn’t totally explainable.”

Hart’s saddest discovery of all: the new generation didn’t seem to want to venture all that far from home.

There’s Good News Too

Thankfully, Hart’s findings aren’t universal. There is Lenore Skenazy’s boy still riding the subway by himself, and here in inner-city Albany, NY, Albany Free School kids who live near the school spend their outside-of-school hours roaming the neighborhood like a pack of wolf cubs. They turn the block into their own adventure playground. One day they’re marauders wielding swords and bows and arrows—the girls as well as the boys—and another they’re building another clubhouse in a double vacant lot they call “Wilbur Woods.” No one really watches them, or maybe all of us adults who are around do, each just the slightest bit. Either way the kids are extremely busy inventing and reinventing a world that is entirely of their own creation.

Then there are my next door neighbors—Mara worked at the school for several years—who filled their backyard with an extra-large trampoline they got off Craigslist for a hundred bucks. It’s an extremely popular meeting place and sometimes I see eight or ten kids bouncing around on it at the same time. There’s no safety curtain surrounding it as is so common these days, but when I asked Mara if any child had been injured in the five or six years they’ve had the tramp, she said only one. One afternoon a boy whose mom was quite fearful of it managed to fall off and sprain his wrist.

Why the difference? In Skenazy’s case she is determined for her kids growing up in Queens to have the same degree of autonomy she experienced as a child in the suburbs of Chicago, and here there are a group of parents who have chosen to send their kids to a school where they direct their own learning as well as their own play. All of these moms and dads understand the vital importance of children figuring things out for themselves—the younger the better.

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Baltimore, MD Job Opportunity

First Grade Teacher

City Neighbors Hamilton is seeking an experienced first-grade teacher to join our teaching team in our arts- integrated, project-based and Reggio inspired educational program, beginning in Fall 2014.

The ideal candidate should possess a strong vision of the whole child, and an enduring belief that all children deserve to be in communities with peers and adults who live with integrity, reflection and sense of agency.  Candidates should enjoy working collaboratively with colleagues and families. S/he must also possess a pioneering spirit, be a self-starter and have a good sense of humor.

Responsibilities:
The ideal City Neighbors Hamilton teacher is expected to fulfill the following responsibilities

  • Create a student-centered classroom space that is accessible, provocative, responsive and beautiful;
  • Communicate an image of the child as curious, competent and building of building enduring knowledge;
  • Collaborate and communicate effectively with colleagues and families;
  • Demonstrate a commitment to lifelong learning and professional growth;
  • Use documentation to make learning visible to students, families and the larger community;
  • Lead by example in service of the mission and vision of City Neighbors Schools.

Our Program
Opening in Fall 2014, City Neighbors Hamilton is an arts-based, project-based, Reggio inspired public charter school serving student in kindergarten through grade eight located in Baltimore, MD.  As a progressive school in an urban setting, we serve one of the most diverse school populations in the city.  Our program balances teacher-initiated projects with the emergent interests of our students as they are observed through play, photography and documentation of the learning process.   We place a strong emphasis on creating an environment that supports collaboration and reflective thinking for both students and the who adults work with them.  Learn more about who we are at www.cityneighborshamilton.org.

Qualifications
Candidates must have the following in order to be eligible for employment consideration:

  • Certification to teach in the State of Maryland (through Maryland State Department of Education); Early Childhood Certification (N-3, preferred)
  • At least three years’ teaching experience in the early learning/primary grades in a progressive, constructivist and/or Reggio-inspired setting

Applying
Inquiries should include both a cover letter and résumé in the form of an email attachment (.docx or .pdf)  to hiring@cityneighborshamilton.org  to the attention of Ms Obi Okobi, Principal, City Neighbors Hamilton.  Please include for desired position in the subject line of your message.  NO PHONE INQUIRIES.