Classroom as Gilligan’s Island
Last week I had the pleasure of hearing George Siemens discussing the challenges involved in organizational change. Some very thought-provoking ideas from our neighbor to the north. What I keep coming back to is a comment that one audience member made, something along the lines of, “how can we teach kids in our classrooms when they are constantly being bombarded with information from the many devices and media to which they are connected 24/7?” There was some nodding in the room as he said it. And it’s a complaint I hear frequently when I talk to teachers about kids’ infatuation with technology and their need to stay constantly connected. How can we compete?
Yet as with so many of these criticisms that are frequently leveled at the younger generation, I’m finding it helpful to turn it around and ask the opposite about “us” - the old folk. Why are we so obsessed with being the center of attention? Why does it all have to be about us? Perhaps the real question to be asking as this rising floodwater of information makes its way up the walls of our classrooms is, “how can we allow our learning environments to be so impoverished, so stale, so univocal?”
I couldn’t help thinking as I drove back to work after Siemens’ talk that for so long our classrooms have been so many little Gilligan’s Islands - places where everyone has a role and those roles are played out week after week with only the slightest variations in theme and content and scant few new ideas or ways of doing things. No one grows, no one changes, no one really learns. At the end of each week the Gilligans are still Gilligans, the Professors are still Professors, the nerds are still nerds and the “dumb” kids are still “dumb.” Or as Ani DiFranco says, to the goldfish in his bowl, “the little plastic castle is a surprise every time.” Scary as it may be, I think it’s time to open our classrooms to some of the surprises from the world outside and get off that island.
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