I'm pleased to share the first video in this Spotlight Series, my conversation with Aaron Eden, Director of Entrepreneurial Enterprise Learning at The Green School, Bali. Aaron talks about the importance of using students' interests to make learning more "real", redefining success, and the role of smaller disruptive models in shaping education.
(We didn't have a mic so there is some background noise, but a mix of drums, Adele and loud kids makes it all more real right?!)
See more of Aaron's thoughts on his blog, and my reflections on the Green School model post-visit here. . Big thanks to Aaron for allowing me to record our conversation without any advance notice (!), and for being so gracious with his time.
Feel free to leave your comments and questions below. If you have suggestions for alternative or progressive educators to interview, please use the contact form to get in touch!
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I have decided to focus my blog for the remainder of 2016 on a monthly "Spotlight Series", profiling the ideas of inspiring people ranging from educators and researchers, to entrepreneurs and designers around the world. I have been fortunate to connect with so many people working on fundamental change in education, and I am excited to share their work and ideas with you. Each interviewee will be asked three questions: What paradigm shifts need to happen in education?; What challenges do you face in advancing alternative or progressive education?; and What hopes do you have for education over the next decade? The idea for a video series came to me while I was preparing to meet Aaron Eden (see his blog here) at the Green School in Bali this past fall. I scrambled through the streets of Ubud to find a stand for my iPhone, and a kind driver helped me find one just in time. My main aim with this series is to raise awareness of the work that is already happening, while acknowledging the challenges in creating programs outside of the conventional mould. Having an idea of our collective hopes for education also gives us lots to look forward to, and to work towards. (Note: For the latest posts and embedded videos, click on the Spotlight Series category.)
Recently I was able to visit the Green School in Bali, a school that’s been on my list and on my mind since I first watched founder John Hardy’s Ted Talk five years ago. The idea of a school based on green design principles, aiming to be off the grid, made of open air bamboo structures?! I was basically sold before you could say "John Hardy's sarong!" (the man always wears one!)
Hardy was born and raised in Canada, but was not quite satisfied with our schooling or our society. In his TED talk, he explains how he didn’t quite fit in conventional schools; his needs were not addressed by the rigid schooling he experienced. He moved to Bali in the 70s as a young man, and has been there ever since. After spending a good part of his life building a successful jewellery brand, he sold the company in 2007. Motivated partly by Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, Hardy set out to design and run a school that was based on green principles. The result is a beautiful school sprawling over 20 acres of land, about a half an hour from Ubud, Bali. In the following post, I’ve tried to capture my overall impressions from one of my visits to the school: what I loved, what intrigued me, and what was disappointing. Today I came across a video ot Chef Jamie Oliver’s visit to a grade one classroom in the States (which you can see here). Students were surprisingly unable to identify basic vegetables and fruit, with one child guessing that tomatoes were potatoes.
If children have interest, then education happens. At a recent conference in New York, I spent a week exploring alternative education from an American perspective (a lot of talk about homeschooling, unschooling, “deschooling”, which I will come back to in a later post). A refreshing departure was a keynote speech by Sugata Mitra; he was the first at the conference to focus on ACCESS for students who don’t have the choice of any school at all!
Mitra is the man behind the “hole in the wall” experiments, and has gained popularity through TED Talks (such as this one, and this one). Essentially, Mitra placed a computer in the wall of a slum in New Delhi in 1999, where kids had never used a computer before. With an internet connection, Mitra left the computer for kids to play with. What he found was that groups of kids, within days, were able to learn impressive things on their own - from browsing to recording music, to googling their homework! The following reflection was contributed by Jerry Liu, one of the Laurier Enactus students who took part in our service learning trip to Haiti. As their Faculty Advisor, I am happy and humbled to share their thoughts with you. We are also grateful to Steve Sider (check out his blog here), for inviting us to be part of this experience. After working remotely with a Haitian NGO on their micro-finance program since October, I had the opportunity to travel to Cap-Haitien to work with the team on the ground. It was a great opportunity for us to apply the skills we learned in university, while having a deep learning experience in the Haitian context.
Our team managed to strike a balance between digging deep into the culture and economy in Cap-Haitien, and synthesizing these into specific insights for the NGO. Most notably, while coming up with business ideas for the micro-finance program, we toured the nearby market, and realized that most vendors were selling either products purchased in bulk at the Dominican border, or donated clothes from the United States. The following reflection was contributed by Laura Douglas, one of the Laurier Enactus students who took part in our service learning trip to Haiti. As their Faculty Advisor, I am happy and humbled in sharing their thoughts with you. We are also grateful to Steve Sider (check out his blog here), for inviting us to be part of this experience. Stay tuned for Jerry Liu's reflection, coming tomorrow! After finishing the first week of my final semester at Laurier, my prepared personality had me completing a checklist before I jumped on a plane to Haiti. However, no matter how prepared I was, or thought I could be, I very quickly learned there as very little I could have done to ensure I could make the most my service learning trip. Reflecting back on such a powerful experience I was able to see the very apparent motives, meaning and memories that arose from learning outside of the classroom.
As part of this year’s service learning trip to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, the Laurier ENACTUS team (an organization based on applying business skills to address social needs) has been spending time at a partnering nutrition centre. The nutrition centre is a hub for many services and programs, with an aim to develop the capacity and skills of young mothers in the long term, while addressing nutritional deficiencies in their babies in the short term.
Over the past year, our small team (three Laurier Business students and one faculty member) has spent time researching improvements to an existing microfinance program at the centre. In just a few days of being here in Cap, we are really appreciating the critical importance of presence on the ground to really LISTEN to the concerns and needs of people we are working with, and to understand broader context. Skype calls don’t always do this justice!! So we decided to take a step back, and put our research on microfinance aside.. just for now! On a recent visit to the reputed Rishi Valley school in rural Andhra Pradesh, India (past posts on the philosophy of Rishi Valley here, and here) two friends and I had the chance to visit a rural school operated by Rishi Valley, under the banner “RIVER” (Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources).
This one room schoolhouse typically housed kids aged 4 to 10, one main teacher, and one assistant. Students sat on the floor, with large square work tables a foot or so off the ground. I am (re-)launching this blog to explore alternative models of schooling, and frankly to force myself to keep up with my own dreams! I have now observed and taught in classrooms where schooling is still more focused on the intellect than on a holistic approach to learning that integrates subjects, along with other important dimensions (the emotional, social, physical, spiritual), that I know have contributed towards my own happiness. On a practical level, our mainstream models of schooling just aren't as effective as they could be. Everything from rote memorization to a lack of responsibility for learning on the part of students; talking heads at the front of classrooms, and poor measures of success (standardized testing) are still rampant. On the flip side (pun intended :)), approaches such as the flipped classroom, and tools such as the Khan Academy have garnered a lot of support, and older models of Gurukuls and visions of schools in nature keep me dreaming! I don't think everything with our education system is "wrong"; it is also important to acknowledge the strengths and improvements in current models, which I will continue to explore. So, the re-launch of my blog is as much about planting seeds for my own learning in this space as it is about sharing and connecting with some of you. Some of these ideas have been around for centuries. Some are more innovative. Either way, for me, the time for these ideas is NOW. To start, an excellent overview of various models and philosophies of education is given by Ron Miller, and gives useful context for the 'alternative' education space. The holistic approach really resonates with me but the others have elements I like too. Feel free to share your thoughts - and thanks for joining me! |
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AuthorA passionate educator.. on a quest for a schooling model to love! Archives
August 2017
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