Whenever I read Freire I feel inspired. And then I think about the realities of the classroom… How to implement problem posing education so that it is omni-present in the school environment? Is that even something that he proposed and imagined? Is there a place on earth where this is happening? How do they do it? Whenever I think of this I almost always conclude it is a matter of numbers. How to engage in dialogue with the student when there are twenty to thirty (a half if you are lucky) minds all eager to do so? What is a good amount of dialogue in proportion to independent work?

I “teach” at a progressive school with good resources and I can only engage a few students before I have a line of hands waving waiting for their questions to be answered. Sadly and dehumanizing, I feel it’s a “game of numbers”. I think about homeschooling and a most excellent student I met who came from that environment. Maybe they know what they’re doing: One or a few adults with hopefully no more than a handful of “students” frequently engaged in dialogue. In problem posing education where “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers” (Freire, p. 80) and “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (Ibid.) there needs to be a balancing of numbers. Perhaps a mathematical relationship could be posed: as consciousness grows in the child there is an increased need for focused dialogue with each student and therefore more teachers are needed.

Another reality I face has to do with the student’s attitude towards learning. Students of course aren’t always in the lab. They spend most of their time in a regular classroom with well intentioned teachers who instruct them, hopefully in the best of traditional ways. Sometimes I reach a student who says they need help having shown little progress or who has reached a stopping point. The student then kindly (or persuasively) requests to be given the answer. I can’t ignore the student but I also can’t ignore the increasing line of hands behind it. I try to scaffold it as best I can but it feels like I am giving away the answer and what should feel like cooperation feels like something else. The next time I encounter the student they will be heavily dependent on me. I haven’t found good strategies to deal with this, so I request to you, dear reader, to please comment below.

Another dimension of these two problems has to do with what is called “behavior management”. In almost every space in the school there is a clearly communicated hierarchy between the teacher and their troupe of students. Miss-behavior is not tolerated and children are expected to follow instructions. Even at a “free-er” space like the lab, having this encompassing systemic culture, it is very hard to be radically different. And even if you’ve done what your colleagues recommend -which is to build a system of rules with the students- incidents happen where things could very easily get out of control and be dangerous. Unity is very fragile and can be shattered through the actions of an individual. If you have tips on this matter as well, please comment below.

It’s too easy in a creative work environment, to be overly concerned about the end product.  We may have a vision in our minds of what we would like students to produce and even how they might get there; however, when we predetermine what that project will become by restricting process and regimenting our environment for an indistinguishable experience, we are not allowing room for the development of an important skill: asserting one’s individuality and creativity through the practice of solving problems.  As we set up guidelines and pose problems for projects, we cannot lose sight of the fact that this is their work, not ours, and the over-management of creative work by the teacher is analogous to Paolo Freire’s critique of models that describes students as containers into which teachers deposit knowledge.  A rote kind of making happens while bypassing all of the process, exploration and individual decision-making that is built in.  Students will make amazing things and discoveries in our spaces if we can help them build skills, cultivate the spirit of exploration, and allow room to create unique solutions to the problems posed.

Establishing age-appropriate maker skills through design, construction, and programming allows students to gain confidence and the facility to achieve independence in the makers’ space.  They can access this knowledge and build on it, personalize it, and apply it to new situations and problems.  The skill set for making is wide and crosses curriculum divisions and STEM and humanities disciplines.  While mold-making might be taking place in a middle school art studio, sewing could be happen in a lower school social studies unit, while programming languages may be used to model forms in an upper school geometry course. Coordinating school-wide design software and programming languages while encouraging communication between departments about curriculum can help support the development of makers’ skills school-wide.

Setting aside time for play and exploration when introducing new materials and processes further supports independence in making.  The power of discovery through mess making and tinkering is magical and sparks interest and imagination while cultivating a knowledge base. Equally important is reflection by helping to solidify the learning.  Sketchbooks, notebooks and journals and electronically, blogs or webpages are a great place for recording discoveries and reflections.

Celebrating ingenuity and encouraging creative solutions sends the message that all students can be artists, engineers, and inventors in the maker space.  Support of individuality while students’ gain a maker skill set and embrace exploration in their problem solving will provide the foundation for students to feel successful.  The role of the teacher changes from the individual “depositor” of information to a partner in learning.  Paulo Friere describes this partnership where teacher and students grow together: The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.  The maker space becomes a dynamic environment where everyone learns from each other, and an individual’s unique ideas are valued.

Image: student pour paint exploration in sketchbook and wood construction with pour paint

Acting as a studio and lab teacher requires providing not only materials, inspiration, and a problem to tackle, but also a bit of redirecting student desire to focus on the end product. Conversely, the path of a creative thinker can be a non-linear one, resembling alphabet soup more than a direct path from A to B.  This process requires periodic realignments, or, if the maker chooses, redirections: either edit, or continue.  There are no mistakes on this journey, just decisions.

In Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, the author emphasizes the value of debugging as an opportunity for children to reframe failure as a chance to learn.  This describes the same creative process to either realign or redirect. Whether working with robots or graphical programming languages, there are no mistakes; like a painter who misses their mark when putting brush to canvas, children should be encouraged to turn their “mistakes into art.”  It is at this point that they are faced with the choice that requires full ownership: reframe or realign.

For Papert, a prescriptive curriculum, driven by the teacher, is one that misses more students than it reaches.  A student-centered curriculum reaches everyone.  When we consider a creative practice that does not accept realignments or redirections as mistakes, we put the work fully into the hands of the students who both drive the ideas and curriculum.  When following their interests, students create tremendous opportunities for teachers to make cross-curricular connections.  It requires teachers to be creative planners who learn alongside their students and provide mentorship for a dynamic class.  This model is an antidote to students who have become adept at identifying and presenting the right answer in a classroom setting.  Test taking and assessments places a certain value on “correct.”  We can help students develop creative thinking habits in our maker spaces, art studios, STEAM Labs, and innovation centers.  These are environments rich with objects to “thinker” with, without the pressure of perfection or getting the right answer.  Learning with one’s hands allows every child to be an engineer, inventor and innovator and allows every engineer a chance to be a geo whiz, sculptor or poet.  The beauty is, the journey to learn and create, with all its iterations, edits and reconfiguring of mistakes eventually results in something fully realized. Emerging out of process and mistakes is a new, exciting idea or object, potentially more interesting than the object born out of a prescribed path.

Image:  two iterations of a student’s image- drypoint etching and cyanotype sun print

Pedagogy of the oppressed is, in my opinion, one of the deepest reflections on education ever.  It is so complete and complex that one can read it again and again and discover new contributions/inspirations every time.

The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for the  critical discovery that both oppressed and oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.

By overcoming the oppressor/oppressed contradiction, intended as the dialectical conflict between opposing social forces historically determined,  the man or woman who emerges is a new person, “a new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom”.[1]

Social reality is the product of human action, it is not transformed by chance, destiny, fate or  god. So,  if people produce social reality, then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity, a task made real and possible by the fact that world and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction.

Freire describes two different stages of the pedagogy of the oppressed. At the first step  the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and start to transform it through the praxis, i.e. through   reflection and action upon the world in order to change the actual order of social forces. In the second stage, once the transformation has already started, this pedagogy extends its territory and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation, in the purpose of being more human.

Pedagogy of the oppressed is not a method, nor a technique nor a magic recipe. The educator, the teacher, the facilitator or everyone who decides to commit to the people, must re-examine himself constantly. “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth”. It requires the understanding of the fact that liberation is not a gift donated by the revolutionary leadership to the oppressed, but the result of their own conscientiçao.

In the pedagogy of the oppressed education is not an instrument by which the teachers can domesticate the students, or treat them as deposit for knowledge. Education, in this setting is co-intentional education. “Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge”. So the task of the teacher is to create knowledge working as a “fellow-researcher” together with the students. Education must not be a narration of a static, predictable, compartmentalized reality, but “must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students”.It is a problem-posing education, where the vertical, narrative flow of banking education is replaced by conscious acts of cognition performed by cognitive actors(teachers and students) intermediated by the world.

All that can sound like unrealistic, impractical, too political and theoretical, but there are several studies that demonstrates that an implementation of freirean learning environments is possible and it works very well in combination with creative technology as agent of emancipation. It is the case of a P. Blikstein study, Travels in Troy with Freire, who combine a freirean framework with a creative use of technology for the design of educational interventions in low-income communities.

I think that the maker-space, is a perfect environment for implementing a freirean framework, because  is  a good place for being teachers/learners.  In this setting the learner became an active agent of change and the teacher “a facilitator of emergent emancipation”[2]. Also It offers the possibility of building a shared critical knowledge about technology, its design and its use. It can allow us to use and implement the community´s technological culture and became conscious of the oppression of being just passive users/customers of technological devices. The maker-space environment also allows us to reflect on the real course of technological development and see how a deterministic, acritical approach is what make bigger and bigger the technological divide.

As Freire says “More and more, the oppressors are using science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression.” The maker movement offers the possibility of change this pattern and produce a collective consciousness about technology development and its influence on people’s living. Technology, as history and reality doesn’t follow a predetermined development, but it depends on people’s knowledge and people’s choices. People can determine technological development. The maker-space as educational setting and learning environment can be the place where learners become conscious about the power they have to create more human and more sustainable technology and society. The the teaching/learning practice made possible in a maker-space, enhanced by reflection generated  by the community  and the sharing of knowledge   becomes  praxis of liberation.

 References

1 Freire, P. Pedagogy of the oppressed

2 Blikstein, P. Travels in Troy with Freire

A. Gramsci, Lettere, Torino, Einaudi, 1965,

Papert, S. Mindstorms.

Freire and  Papert video http://vimeo.com/20497106

It’s not an easy reading book for me but this book kept me going on and on, I can’t stop reading this.

“To achieve this praxis, however, it is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason. Whoever lacks this trust will fail to initiate (or will abandon) dialogue, reflection and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiques, nomologues, and instrucionis. superficial conversions to the cause of liberation carry this danger.”

to let my student make, learn and explore in whatever that interest them .. really need a huge energy to both trust in them for all the steps, ups and downs throughout the processes and also bigger one to trust in ourselves
that we will be able to give them support to our best, for whatever happen in the process.

Trust will give the students the space to explore and to try things and build up ‘confidence’ in themselves and until one day, they will take off to be independent learner. Learning is so organic and it takes different people different timing.

This doesn’t seem to be doable in rigid regular structure of classroom or school at all, at least in Thailand, but this actually made us rethink of ..what the school in the 21st century should be like instead of just being content feeder and certificates publishing.

Seymour Papert was definitely ahead of his time when he wrote mindstorms in the 80s.  Unfortunately he still seems to be ahead of his time some 30 years later.  Instead of hands-on and minds-on education, the current trends in education have pushed us towards accountability, standards and a common framework for education.   I think a large reason for this shift towards mandated norms of educational knowledge come from the simple fact that it is efficient.  Paperts’ ways of education can be, well, messy.

Right now, I’m in a coffee shop working.  I often work here.  It’s just the right environment for some activities, some work, that I need to accomplish.  I go here because it fits my learning and work style.  There is a 4-year-old across the room right now who is playing with all of the items of a nearby table.  His parents are a couple tables down.  First He plays with the crayons that they gave to him, then the table menu, and now, the salt shaker.  He’s shaken it on seats, the table, and his brother.  I’m waiting to see if he will be unscrewing the lid soon and what will come of that exploration.  Now, why do I mention this?  I mention it because he is learning through his play.  Unfortunately it is a messy way to learn, dare I even say an “unsafe” way to play.  Salt in the eye?  That could be painful.  So, what would I do if this was my son?  What would you do?  I think most of us would take the salt away.  We’d replace it with a nice kids menu and have the child do something less messy and safer.  It’s just easier for us as parents and requires less clean up.  It’s easier to evaluate too, when he gets to the end of the maze that’s on the back of the kids menu we can say he accomplished a great task.  Start to finish with 1 curvy long line!

This is exactly what education has become, a start to finish maze of tasks. Give the kid the crayons, and let him do the maze right?  Yet I think Papert would have not just tolerated, but actually encouraged the messy salt play.  Yes, it requires more clean up, and it has a less definable standards of achievement and in the end he may not have learned anything that he could verbalize.  Yet, the child has learned something, maybe just scaffolding for future learning, maybe the start of some other genius thought.  I’ll never know.

In Mindstorms, Papert said, ”But ‘teaching without curriculum’ does not mean spontaneous, freeform classrooms or simply ‘leaving the child alone.’ It means supporting the children as they build their own intellectual structures with materials drawn from the surrounding culture. In this model, educational intervention means changing the culture, planting new constructive elements in it and eliminating noxious ones.  This is a more ambitious undertaking than introduction a curriculum change, but one which is feasible under contusions now emerging.”

I’m glad I have the flexibility to work in a coffee shop.  I’m glad I’ve had the chance to chew on Papert’s thoughts of how to help students learn by doing; even how to help students make computers do something through programming.  I’m glad that this little child entered my world, influenced this post, and learned about the properties of salt all at the same time.  So, lets look around our environment and see what new constructive elements we can find and what noxious ones we can remove.

Reading Mindstorms should be inspirational. I love reading anything that Seymour Papert has written. His words and his vision have always rung true for me and have always motivated and inspired me to infuse the practice he calls “Constructionism” into my classroom.  Then what it is about this time through the book that I have been left with such a grey and pessimistic feeling about everything that is the state of public education 35 years after Papert wrote Mindstorms?

Could it be that I can’t seem to get past Papert’s prediction that school would reject the ideas he has for using computers? Not understand his vision of Mathland or the way that learners can use the computer as material, as a tool, for shaping their understanding of the world they live in and must navigate through?

“Conservatism in the world of education has become a self-perpetuating social phenomena”.   pg 37 Mindstorms

To get past this negative feeling I reached into my own student’s experiences with the Turtle. I have taught Microworlds in a formal setting (meaning as a 2 to 3 month unit in all my 6th and 7th grade Digital Media classes) for the past 14 years. I absolutely love it. I love the joy the students experience the first time they get the turtle to move. I love the smiles on their faces and their shrieks of delight and the way that some will jump out of their seats with their fist in the air, “I did it!” which comes out much louder then they expected, and even catches themselves off guard.

The Turtle is able to capture the imaginations of every one of my students. We begin with simple turtle geometry as described by Papert in Chapter 3. For most students this is their first time “programming” an object on the computer screen using a text based interface rather than the familiar GUI or point and click and drag interface. Because of this the students are awestruck on the abilities and seemingly magical characteristics of the turtle. I will always remember when one student turned to me, in his most serious 6th grader voice, and said “It really is amazing, what this turtle is able to do”.

My students go on to tackle some very complex concepts and thinking strategies when they work through their Microworlds programs. When I observe my students working through their ideas and sharing their observations and their “code” with their classmates, I can see the learning that is happening. If learning is a verb and is an active state then why is it that we are surrounded by tests and grading practices that are grounded in data collection and traditional frameworks of receiving information through direct instruction and then measuring what student’s have retained using a methodology that is disconnected and often out of context from where the information originated from in the first place.

In 1980 Papert thought children deserved better than just the recycled and refitted mathematics from traditional approaches. Why do we still keep working with the old framework today and keep struggling to force-fit the old into today’s world. Papert’s approaches to learning are readily and easily accepted by children, as confirmed with my students as they “make sense” of the turtle. It is time his ideas and of allowing the students to be physically immersed in their learning makes sense to adults too.

The book talks about education and computer used as instrument to help cognitive development. Papert writes a critic declaration about the using of LOGO language in the mathematics education for children and the positive impact caused by this process. Despite it was written in 80s, we can affirm that the subject is present, and although we use computers at school nowadays, the book shows a little-explored way: The child as protagonist and author.

Reading the text carefully, I could realize that the education is not limited only by the mathematics learning, by the language LOGO, computers, nor the employed methodology. These elements actually afford an experience linked to the way things are done in labs, leading the student to look for solutions, making knowledge and self-learning, not only on mathematics but in the whole field of human knowledge. The text is enthusiasticand the personal tone that he uses to relate about his experiences has caused me a deep reflection and personal history rescue. I believe there’s a strict relation with the researches in Fab Learn. In my childhood I had the opportunity to use the tools my father used for as a woodworker, and I always tried to create some project. Although I have dispensed a lot of effort, rarely I was successful. Besides that, the learning obtained could help me on new tries on other projects. In counterpart at school I was a medium student, maybe caused for the excess of formalism of information, that today I know they’re important but in that moment I couldn’t make relations between the subjects. The problem on this wasn’t just the kind of information and how it was taught, but the educational system was made thinking that all students may learn things at the same time, by an automatic and mechanized way, and even using computer today, this problem is amplified, by just transmitting a big amount of information. However people are unique and this approach leads each one to learn according his pace. So the Papert’s idea has a different approach. The lab environment allows a learning that seems like what was on Guilds (association of artisans who practice some craft), a learning aimed according the needing and competences of each student, not only based on the age group. In the lab it is encouraged to use of a lot of senses and expressions forms besides just listening and saying. The book talks that the human has a lot of ways to learn and teach.

We can consider the book as a support and inspiration for development of new educational approaches where the educators will share their labs, encouraging students to make prototypes from their own ideas, where learning is not limited only by concepts of “right” and “wrong” but is used also to produce knowledge according to the desired solution for some problem. This can embolden the engineer, designer or artist inside the child.

Commentary on Mindstorms by Seymour Papert: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas

“Certain uses of very powerful computational technology and computational ideas can provide children with new possibilities for learning, thinking, and growing emotionally as well as cognitively.”

Reading Papert’s Mindstorm shed light on several parallels between the learning environment in 1980 when the book was published, to changes currently taking place in the educational system in Kenya as well as the fruition of Papert’s vision disruptive learning.

Uhuru Kenyatta, the current president of the republic of Kenya, in 2013 announced that his government would provide one laptop for each children entering standard one in primary school (the equivalent of first grade). This ties in closely with the concepts that the uptake of integrating computers in education will often be politically influenced, and through bureaucratic channels. What this means is that they will be a shift in the learning environment for children in the public education system who, as Papert described, would provide the unique environment for children to program the computer as opposed to the computer programming the children. The ripple effect of providing these tools being that shifts to ‘thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologists’ which leads to thinking of children as active builders for their own intellectual structures.

When the FabLab Robotics Outreach Program (FROP) team first embarked on its project in Dagoretti slum in 2009, we set up to disrupt learning by providing an open learning environment. Using both computer software (Picoblocks inspired by LOGO) and computer hardware (LEGO complemented with sensors and motors), what we indirectly were doing was creating a mathland where it was both interesting and natural to learn about math and science. The experiences of the children were best captured as Papert put it:

“The child programs the computer and in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over the piece of the most moderns and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics and from the art of intellectual model building.” Minstorms p.5

By creating Mathlands where it is possible to understand math from the environment in which the child works, emphasizes by his own personal example being this interaction with gears and the influence this had on this interest in math and its understanding. These unique platforms are not only user friendly, they are also powerful learning environments.

Papert does not rule out the need for teachers or imply that the world would be better without schools. What the modern education system needs to incorporate are modern learning technologies and theories, cross curricular applications, and application of various skills in a creative way. There needs to be shift from instructionism which implies passive learning to Piaget’s constructionism that allows children to use the materials they find about them to develop salient learning models. This leads to intellectual development in children  outside traditional learning conditions through open ended discovery which developing the culture of ‘thinking about thinking’ in children.

Mindstorms is so rich of powerful ideas that it is really hard to choose and pick one or two…. Reading the book is like taking a walk among almost every interesting concept I learned in my life, or, said in other words, meeting old friends again like Galileo, Aristoteles,Tarski, Poincare, Piaget and Bruner, all bringing new source of inspiration thanks to the powerful interpretation of their theory given by Papert. I’m particularly fascinated by Papert’s contributions about epistemology and its relationship with learning. It’s something related to my personal experience as primary school teacher with a background in theory of knowledge.

I’ve studied philosophy. During 5 years I used to spend my time enjoying the study of epistemology and logic of natural  language. It was wonderful passing the day in the library, reading, connecting abstract concept, playing with theories, comparing paradigms, analyzing my own process of learning and using language.

At the same time I was starting to feel a strong interest for education as political practice.  I discovered critical pedagogy and I got involved in several groups promoting child’s rights and new forms of  teaching/learning. I decided to convert this political passion into a job mixing my theoretical background with new practical pedagogical knowledge, and taking the challenge of promoting educational change in low income public school.

At that time I didn’t know that my epistemological background and my desire for educational change were strongly related and they were  part of my teacher’s “tool box”. At that time I was considering epistemology as something platonic, I mean idealistic, far from the ground,  not  a tool to use in education,  but just a tool to understand the history and development of knowledge.

I was convinced that the change needed in education was more about participation, human relationships, respect, freedom, and cooperation than about the structure of knowledge. I didn’t understand yet that how we think about knowledge affects how we think about us.

The teaching practice made me discover a new reality, more complex, less ideological and more epistemological. I started to enjoy using models in order to help kids become conscious of their own mental process, or physical activity in order to work on logical topics. The separation between my theoretical background and the practice was gone forever..epistemology, mental experiments, scientific paradigms, modularity, cognitive science,  history of science were everyday by my side, helping me making kids happy and comfortable about the knowledge they were building.

Below some Mindstorms ideas that I found very helpful for every teacher, not just math’s, to become conscious of the empowering effect of epistemology in learning and also to  limit the production of “cultural toxins” and  related damages on people.

• We need to promote a new sense of the child as a thinker, even as an epistemologist with the notion of the power of powerful ideas.
• It is necessary to encourage the child to become expert in recognizing and choosing among varying styles of thoughts, to acquire  multiple epistemology in order to build his own knowledge.
• Procedural thinking is a powerful mental tool needed for multiple epistemology.
• A domain of knowledge is a community of powerful ideas.
• To know a domain of knowledge is much like coming in a new community of people. The teacher plays the role of a mutual friend who provides introduction.
• How we think about knowledge affects how we think about us.
• The discrepancy between our experience of ourselves and our idealization of  knowledge has an effect: it intimidates us, it lessens the sense of our own competence and it leads us into counterproductive strategies for learning and thinking.
• The learner’s thinking is more like the mathematician’s than either is like the logical ideal.
• Powerful ideas help us grasping the world and have the capacity of helping us organizing our way to think about a particular class of problems. We don’t have to reorganize ourselves in order to use them. We put our skills and heuristic strategy into a kind of tool box- and while the interaction can, in the course of time, give rise to global changes, the act of learning is itself a local event.
• The importance of Tinkering: learning consist of building up a set of materials and tools that one can handle and manipulate.