Classrooms Without Borders
Imagine a 30 by 30 room, with students sitting silently in rows, ostensibly listening to lectures, text messages covertly being sent inside hoodie pockets, and whispers here and there. Eventually, completion of multiple choice exams at the end of an instructional unit measures learning. Sadly, this probably sounds familiar. While there is a time and place for extended direct instruction and lecturing, the majority of kids do not benefit from this type of instruction, as it does nothing but increase the chance for more disengagement, failed tests, and I don’t care about anything at school uttered from freshman to seniors.
Paul Barnwell 
teachers aren’t paid enough, but thankfully some still hang in there and teach because it’s their gift to the world. thank you for being there for some lucky students! z
Great. I love the words “possibility” and “passion.” And, I like the partnership approach that really gets done where kids are. We have wonderful partnerships where a company or group supports a program we implement, but the partnership you are talking about brings passionate people together with the teacher and directly with kids. They can SEE the passion, learn and FEEL the possibilities for themselves – in whatever makes them excited. In Finland, one school we visited carved out and hour and a half in the middle of the day for “hobby lessons.” Teachers and others shared their passions with the children. One second grade teacher was a former Finnish rock star and he organized a great student rock band that performed for us!
It was great to have all of you at our Board meeting. Inspiring! THANKS.
Sadly, the Alec agenda will be promoting more disenfranchised learning environments. There is an assault on intellectualism, critical thinking, and the humanities in general. My university faces the pressure of a governor that would like to penalize students seeking art and literature majors by raising their tuition, and rewarding those in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) majors, by lowering their tuition. Not to mention the corporate based charter schools cropping up everywhere and dotting the landscape, like the giant big box stores that have hunkered down all across America. My beloved university professors, passing on their passionate love of literature, and giving us in depth exams built from the heart of the narratives we read, may soon have to resort to multiple choice and “scantron” type testing because they may have to absorb more classes, or pack existing classes with even more students.
Getting kids outside is so important. Whether it is on a class trip that takes them to a new exotic place, or simply out on the football field to classify the physical geography that surrounds them. I know when I take my kids outside the box, deeper learning happens.
I want to know more about Bread Loaf and the kinds of ways you are networking classrooms around the world. Besides the Navajo project, are your students doing projects regularly with other schools? Do you connect digitally some way?
Students will often remember lessons because of emotions attached to learning experiences, in addition to hands-on work. Thanks for sharing!
Lillian,
Thanks for highlighting what has been a powerful catalyst in my professional life. The more BLTN teachers can share and teach others about the dynamic projects going on across the world to connect students and educators, the better!
I remember one Biology teacher in high school who was teaching us about DNA nucleotides. The fact that I still know that words says enough. Have gave us a large collection of little blocks that connected together and we had to find the right pieces that would make a strand of “DNA” that wouldn’t break. The teacher would take it when we were done, do a little dance, and shake the DNA around. If it fell apart, try again.
To anyone else, it may seem we were playing with toys. But I still know what nucleotides are and what they do, so clearly, I learned something.
I think writing about this collaboration during Bread Loaf Teacher Network’s 20th year is timely. It is a celebration of not only what has been done, but it is a call for what we must now do. Dixie Goswami, the long-time director of Bread Loaf Teacher Network, and other BLTN delegates were visiting the Navajo Nation and Yup’ik villages before mass access to digital platforms were used with such frequency as they are now. In fact, BLTN became the digital platform carrying stories and other artifacts between teachers and students on the Navajo Nation and in Yup’ik villages to other BLTN teachers and other students in the southwest, the southeast, New England and beyond. Indeed, Goswami’s life’s work has been an effort to break down barriers between schools and communities’ literacy practices, to celebrate rural, urban, and international teachers’ and students’ contributions to school narratives and school success, and to elevate these contributions in collaborative lasting ways. The initiatives illustrated in this post, and other dynamic generative work pursued by teachers associated with Bread Loaf and the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, speaks to the distance BLTN and its teacher participants have traveled in the last 20 years, the enthusiasm they still bring to their work in classrooms and online, and that, despite the ways the Internet has made the world much smaller, there is a great deal still to be celebrated, shared, and learned in the moments when students from Kentucky and the Navajo Nation gather, when their teachers gather, and when they work collaboratively toward common goals which are of interest to us all. Thanks for sharing, Paul.