In two weeks on campus at a school in Johannesburg, I had well over a hundred conversations with staff, administrators, teachers and students. I taught a handful of classes and am leaving with email addresses of kids from, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, and Malawi. As I write this, I am wearing the shirt from one of those countries, the gift of a student who saw that I am a citizen of her world, not a servant of the academic machine.
The school’s quandary is one faced by many now: play the college game or not?
How do we show “the rigor” universities demand when our demographics (as is the case at ALA) or our values (putting health and learning ahead of status) or our notion of learning (for its own sake, say, rather than for advancement) would lead us to do something other than what Harvard deems worthy.
In worrying about this words like “accountability” and “assessment” and “objectives” come up a lot. School becomes business. Anxiety and expectations need to be managed. Misery creeps in.
My answer is that rather than designing for rigor, design for joy and production and connection. Get students and teachers making and giving and smiling and the rigor will take care of itself. Spin a day of play to output and problem solving and you will generate lots of stuff of self-evident value and thus lots of kids who generate that value. You will end up with the actual of what rigor pretends to demonstrate: engagement, mastery, commitment.
And life. I mean, maybe Harvard won’t care that you spent your high school years making stuff rather than obeying them. But you won’t have nothing and the time will be marked by life and others rather than death and you.
Time? Space? A healthy group of young people? Some adults who love working with them? Enough food? That is a recipe for a giddy situation. I am not sure how we make it anything else.