Content Area Thinking...I continue to be pulled in by the writers of science and religion. Though I’m a veteran educator and fledgling philosopher around learning and literacy, I often turn to the writers of science and religion because they are the ones who are seeking the truth. They are the ones seeking answers to the “big” questions. I mean the “really big” ones. You know, questions like: How did life begin? What’s the point of human existence? Is there any relationship between one thing and another? Might it be that all things are connected? Might there be a plan that we don’t quite understand?
As I read these writers I ask the same questions about literacy and learning. In my recent re-readings of Fritjof Capra’s books (The Web of Life is a favorite of mine), I draw all kinds of parallels between his commentaries about science and my wonderings about education. I am struck most recently by the connectedness of things as espoused by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess under the heading of “deep ecology.” By this he means to move away from the anthropocentric tendencies of some scientists and toward a deeper understanding of the connectedness of all things. In short, he views the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as “a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.” This notion of a “web of life” – that all things are related – has been rendered before under headings like “systems thinking” and enriched by Gestalt psychology and even quantum physics (the point of Capra’s book). Of course, we’ve seen all of this before. Most notably, the great intellectual debates between the mechanistic world view of Rene Descartes and the broader, more romantic worldview of philosophers like Aristotle and poets like Blake and Goethe. Count me among the latter.
So what’s all this to do with literacy and learning? It has everything to do with how we approach the fixes around students who struggle and schools that struggle. I submit that any fix begins with the questions we ask and ends with the solutions we seek. More to the point, I say we begin with questions related to the whole (not the parts) and then we seek answers that address the whole first, not last. Let me provide two examples. First, the entire notion of having students read better has been reduced to assessments that disaggregate every last dexterity (from prosody to consonant / syllable patterns). That is clearly a parts-focused approach. Writing too is often reduced to its least common denominators – indenting five spaces to begin each paragraph or (I shudder to think) the celebration of canned transitional phrases like “my first reason is” or “in conclusion.” What’s more, it may be that we need to consider the same things when we look at improving teaching lest we reduce the art and majesty of sublime pedagogy to the number of word walls we see and the preciseness of the teacher’s agenda. Once again, I see evidence of a “parts” fix to a “whole” problem.
Let me be clear. I have no issues with prosody or with indenting paragraphs or with word walls. Still, I wonder if all that would be as necessary if we just asked our students to read and write more and to read and write more about what they want. I can’t help but use my son again as an example…the wisdom of an 8-year-old. He is in third grade and he reads quite well. He gets home at night and he reads for fun. He loves to read everything from the Book of World Records to the Hardy Boys. Still, he hates his reading class. He came home today and told us that he would much rather read the story instead of having his teacher spend all his time breaking down every part of the plot and theme. My son put it best: “I just want to read the story! When I’m reading the Hardy Boys I don’t think about how I’m connecting with Joe and Frank Hardy! I’m just trying to figure out the mystery!”
Maybe we should go back to Arne Naess and draw on his notion of deep ecology when we think of transforming students into deep thinkers and schools into forums for deep learning. Naess puts it this way: “The essence of deep ecology is to ask the deeper questions.” Or as Capra states: “We need to be prepared to question every single aspect of the old paradigm…from an ecological perspective: from the perspective of our relationships to one another, to future generations, and to the web of life of which we are a part.” I say: Let’s just be sure that we are asking the big questions and solving the big problems. If we don’t, we might find that we are feeding the parts whilst we are starving the whole.
