What Are The Wounds of Schooling?

What Are theWounds of Schooling?

Kirsten Olson. Ed.D.

Teachers College, New York, NY

May 27, 2009

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Origins of Project

• Artisan and virtuoso learners

• Unconventional learners

• Literature on “flow” and creativity

• “My real learning never was in school.”

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Students

• Weren’t thriving• Were “lost” in school• Were rebellious,

angry• Were checked out• Were “on the

margins”

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Looking at school froma student’s perspective…

• “Teachers don’t like me.”• “I always feel like it’s me

that’s not making it.”• “The work is so, so

boring.”• “No one cares if I’m here

or not.”

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Even among “highly successful” learners

• Sense of disconnection from learning

• Cynicism• Perfectionism• High SES students

experiencing unprecedented pressure to be successful

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My research

• 109 semi-structured autobiographical interviews over 4 years

• “Portraiture” method (Lawrence Lightfoot, 1997)

• Initial interviews from 1-3 hours • Cross section of class, gender,

race• Subjects ages ranged from 11-

67• Themes generated from

transcripts of interviews

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7 “types” of wounds

• Creativity• Compliance• Rebelliousness• Average• Numbness• Underestimation• Perfectionism

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“Basically, I became motivated to not do well--like what I could do well was not do well. The literature talks about islands of competence. In school I didn’t feel like I had them.”

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“I failed math throughout elementary school. Fractions ruined me. I failed Spanish twice

in high school. During sophomore year biology we learned about the circulatory

system. When test day arrived I failed because I got my left mixed up with the top and my ventricles confused with my aortas,

but I knew it! I lamented. These events mark an angry theme throughout my life. I

proceeded to cheat all the way through high school. I started buying my science projects a year in advance after the previous grade’s

science fair.”

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“There was always something mechanical about school, a mold I never fit into, never quite understood. Although I

knew inside that my writing was powerful and artistic, I was unwilling to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s

critique. The years of frustration and failures had taken a toll on my confidence and I found myself unable to trust my

own ability in the classroom.”

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“I must have held the world’s record for detentions

and suspensions in elementary school. I was told I was mentally defective, emotionally damaged.”

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“I quit and had a baby. There was no relevance for

me.”

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“I am afraid of school. Teachers don’t like me. At school I’m mistreated.”

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“I went to kindergarten as a happy child. Throughout my years in the

educational system, I lost a lot of my happiness, imagination and

enthusiasm. It all faded away, confined to the labels of the outside

world, based on the concept of intelligence. The school system was

focused on organizing and labeling students based on so called innate

abilities. If you get good grades, test well, you are intelligent. This pierced my self-esteem armor over and over

to the point of self-hatred.”

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School wounds:Interactions with school

personnel that tell students:

• They aren’t “smart”• They don’t have what it takes to succeed (in

school--by implication, life)• Their ideas lack value or validity• All efforts are below standard• They are flawed people

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“Narcissistic Wounding”

•Child is insufficiently positively mirrored by environment, harshly critiqued, not “seen”

•Develops insecurely attached, distorted sense of self (Seigle, 1996; Jacoby, 1991)

•Compelled to act out woundedness over and over until empathically healed (Golumb, 1992)

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Statements are global

“You’ll be lucky to finish high school.”

“You’ll be flipping burgers for a living.”

“Some people never learn math.”

“You’re a smart one.”

“Everyone in the Smith family does well in school.”

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Effects on students

• Reduced effort• Lower persistence in face of difficulty• Less self discipline• Lowered ambition• Attributions of success based on ability, not effort• Learned helplessness

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Disconnection from pleasure in learning

“I stopped caring about why I had

to learn something. Just

tell me how to get the answer.”

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Less courage in learning

• “I just started to doubt myself.” • “I never thought I could do it.”• “I don’t respond well to

situations that aren’t well defined.”

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Incredible impact of school experiences on individuals

“That is like a moral shame at the kernel of my being. I don’t

like to talk about it with anyone.”

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For many, school is the “crucible” in which

self-concept is formed“For twenty-four of my thirty-six years, I was a student, and I was good at it… My success in school defined me—I was ‘smart’ and ‘a good student,’ and I reveled in that identity.”

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“Kids who struggle are so sensitive to moments--especially bad ones. These moments shape their whole lives, their sense of themselves. Teachers’ little comments had huge effect on me. ”

Underestimation of the effects of educational experiences on

self concept

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Lack of cultural discourse to describe school wounds

“School is supposed to kick you around.”

“School sucks for everyone--deal with it.”

“If I were smarter I wouldn’t be treated like this.”

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Pervasive Positive Framing of Education

“Our educational system is great. If you don’t make it, you didn’t try hard enough.”

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Cultural Myths of Schooling•Education is a “level playing field”

•Process of being educated is almost always constituted as positive

•Those who do not succeed are individually at fault

•Makes recognition and healing of wounds much more difficult

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Conferring privilege on the already privileged

“I’m truly ashamed I broke it down in that way.”

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“Just be grateful

you were able to go to school.”

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“I don’t know what kids complain about. School was

much tougher in my day.”

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“See, what we seem to forget is that it’s all there for the taking. If you want an education in this country you can have it. Kids should get their butts in gear.”

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Both liberatory and democratizing, and reproducing social and economic inequality.

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“I can remember my first experience with tracking. It was in second grade math class. The class was all working class and minority kids. Like me. My self concept remains there to some extent today.”

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“School is like the meat packing

business, designed to teach

children what grade of

meat they are, and to send

them off to the right market--

but make sure they

believe it.”

-John Holt,

What Do I Do Monday, 1970

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“I believed I was broken.”

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Pause to Reflect: •Think of someone in school (teacher, mentor, peer) who had a very positive influence on you.•What qualities did he or she have?•What made them such a powerful influence on you?

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Path of healing

• Grief

• Anger

• Mourning

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5 Stages of Healing

• Self blame and private shame

• Moments of insight, a change in self-concept

• Grieving, anger

•Critical consciousness around institution of schooling

• Reconciliation and re-engagement

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When You Visit Schools,Who Is Thriving?

Who Is Being Wounded?

• How do you identify them?

• Who are you thinking of?

• How do they relate to you?

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What practices harm?

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“Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed…the solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world…the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping and marking, the authoritarian style of the teacher--are precisely those that made mass public education so effective as an adaptation for its time and place.”

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

A defunct educational model…

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1. Defining learning as “product”

•Overemphasis on low-level cognitive tasks

•Simplistic definitions of “rigor”

•Inflexibility of classroom/teaching methods to adapt to individual learners

•“Monolithic teaching” (Christensen,2008)

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2. Truncated Ideas About Ability

•Hobbled by oversimplified ideas of ability

•Human ability is enormously plastic, develops over the lifespan

•Develops in response to environment

•Persistence, self-discipline, ambition matter most

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“When we talk about intelligencewe do not mean the ability to geta good score on a certain kind of test, or even the ability to do well in school; these are at bestonly indicators of something larger, deeper, and far more important.by intelligence we mean a styleof life, a way of behaving in various situations, and particularly in new, strange, and perplexingsituations.

An intelligent person, young or old,meeting a new situation or problem,opens himself up to it…”-John Holt, How Children Fail,1964

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Teachers Are In An Ambivalent Game

•Rewarded for controlling students and producing attainment

•Unsupported for new kinds of practice

•System lacks knowledge about the core of its business: how people learn

•Lack of candor about what it not known

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Students get blamed for failure

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What School PracticesSupport?

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•Reducing isolation among adults in schools

•Creating incentives for collegial, cooperative learning among adults

•Redefining teaching as a profession

•Being more candid about what is not known

Teachers

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•Creating language for discussing wounding practices

•Encouraging students to be much more active in managing their own learning

•“Knowing the contours of your own mind”

•Encouraging students to be activists around wounding school practices

Students

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•Redefining what powerful learning looks like

•Ending the punishing, shaming dialog around teachers/the work of educators

•Embracing new technologies to help us rethink learning environments (is the classroom really necessary?)

•Supporting our efforts to redefine our broken work, rather than blaming and castigating

Policy Discourse

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Why does this matter?

• Lost capacity• Sense among

teachers that they are not living up to the highest standards of their profession

• Increased “web of connection” between adults and students

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Highest calling of our profession

“We are inspired optimists who went into the job because we believe in children and young people.”-Superintendent, school system in the Northwest, 2008

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Meaning of our work

“The most important condition of my work is--first do no harm. I need to be sure I’m not harming my students when I teach, or I can’t feel good about my life as a teacher.”

-Interviewee, teacher, 2007

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“Naming our reality is the

only way to be free.”

Finding your “inner warrior”

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“Through all my bruises and battles, I found my inner warrior. Whether we know it or not, the warrior developed over years of fighting for our identities in school--surrounded by families

who fought side by side with us--and in our struggles in the workplace and society. In the end, this is who we are.”

-Jonathan Mooney, bestselling author and learning differences advocate