...on creating real change.

The office is pretty quiet...

It's time for me to get back to the roots of this blog.  The flaming "social justice warrior" that initiated this collection, especially its forerunner Facebook notes, has aged considerably.  I'm much more diplomatic and reasonable than I was when I first started writing; however, the flame that originally ignited my passion still burns strong.

It's time that I put my thoughts about what it means to create real change into writing.

If you're one of the few that has read most of this blog, then you're probably aware of the "methods" label that I've attached to many of this blog's posts.  I've consistently believed that improving the world requires far more than the heart to do it; I believe that it requires careful consideration of methodology and of actual execution.

To truly improve the world, one needs to genuinely change it.  However, I think that real change remains far rarer than most people would have you believe.

To understand why, we must examine the notion of the normal.  The normal is defined by and depends on a set of habits of thought and of behaviour.  This status quo consists of routine and can be identified by recurring signifiers such as milestones in people's lives (graduation, marriage, children, etc.).

It's important to grasp the breadth of the former definition: it's important to consider what can fall within the purview of normalcy.  For example, resistance, in all of its various forms political or otherwise, is practically normal.  Social movement theorists going back as far as Max Weber, (and earlier, depending on who you talk to), identified the emergence of resistance in the face of hegemony as a natural occurrence.  Resistance emerges as a means to balance power; its emergence is causal and therefore predictable.  Resistance is normal.

Therefore, if change is that which separates from, or alters, the normal, then resistance is not in-of-itself a form of change.  In fact, resistance is usually an aspect of the status quo.  Moreover, resistance fosters or becomes change depending upon what's done with it.

If normal is the habitual norms that would continue macro- and micro- institutionally in spite of any one person's actions, then change would be that which alters or separates from the routine.  Change is therefore before or after the status quo and actions that cause change are performed above or below normalcy.

Notably, many self-proclaimed and self-asserting "change warriors" are simply a part of the status quo.  They neither harm or aid normalcy; some of these professional activists spend their whole lives changing little to possibly nothing.

To affect change is to act beyond the normal: to act beyond the cycle of dominance and resistance.  This rule applies regardless of one's station.  From  professional activists to professors to factory workers, we can all be an aspect of normalcy if we choose to do so.  To truly create change is to go above and beyond the easy, the usual, and the routine; in other words, to really change something is to genuinely do and be more than what you could do or be otherwise.

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Then how does one know that he/she is creating real change?

It's impossible to know with any significant certainty, as with most things of importance.  After all, the legitimacy of change depends on the legitimacy of the normal and both realities are constantly shifting.  These categories are dependent on, and ultimately relative to, one another.

Still, there's some useful questions to ask yourself if you're genuinely concerned about whether or not you're creating real change.

Here's a short list:

Are you, at this moment, comfortable?  If yes, then you're probably currently reaffirming the status quo.
Are you consistently more committed to performing well than your colleagues?  If yes, then there's a good chance you're contributing to genuine change.
Are you awake relatively early every day?  If you are awake early most days, then you're probably having a different impact than most of your peers.
Do you take your own reflective self-criticism seriously?  If you don't, then there's a significant chance that you're contributing to normalcy.

So in sum, if you're uncomfortable, relatively over-committed to good performance, waking up with the birds, and actively responding to your own practice, then there's a decent chance that you're creating real change.

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The picture at the top of this post depicts my office at my high school in China.  The piles of books on my desk contain the three assignments from three of my classes that I've been marking for the last 40ish working hours throughout the Chinese New Year holiday.  My colleagues maintain that I'm spending too much time preparing for lessons and marking.  But I maintain my commitment to real change.

What is the purpose of institutionalized education?

page 288, second paragraph

I have not published anything in this blog for almost half of a year.  In large part, this hiatus was due to beginning writing, defending, and publishing this monstrosity.  I will start teaching full-time at a Canadian International School in Jiangsu province, China, in January and so I felt that this was as good a time as ever to finish this blog post and to re-energize this blog.

I've danced around the question of the purpose of institutionalized education for over half of a decade.  As someone who changed his entire life trajectory to that of affecting reform of institutionalized education, it's rather ironic that I have never attempted to address the "final cause" of education in writing or otherwise.  I've yet to attempt to explain the conceptual logic behind what I continue to choose to do on a daily basis.

I am almost certain that there is an end that links all means of institutionalized education.  Educa-tion can connote the process of "putting someone through" something. When referenced to a curriculum, education can be both figuratively and practically defined as "putting someone through a course."

Therefore, all means of education can be described as means of putting or guiding someone through some kind of process.  This author wonders "why do we bother putting someone through anything?"

From my experience, the final purpose of any and all education is to foster responsibility: i.e., a particular onus or commitment to respecting and to enacting a disposition of responsiveness.

There's a wealth of nomenclature utilized throughout the scholarship of pedagogies that describe aspects of this unifying purpose of education, from mindfulness, to forms of critical thinking, to resiliency.  However, these terms are all aspects of or precursors to an end of fostering greater responsibility.

After all, one's greater responsibility is directly linked to one's greater degree of knowledge.  One cannot be responsible for that which one does not know.  Moreover, the desire to foster knowledge mirrors the desire to foster a kind of responsibility where there was none before.  More generally, there are as many forms of responsibility as there are forms of knowing.

Furthermore, we can only be responsible for that which we have some degree of certainty.  Regardless of context, without a basic degree of certainty of cause and effect, one cannot be responsible for an outcome.  Therefore, to foster certainty is to foster the precursor to responsibility.

Throughout the past, certain forms of knowing have come to be discredited or disavowed of the same legitimacy as that of other forms of knowing.  Today, scientific understanding, or certainty derived from observing patterns and habits, holds sway in many parts of the world.  In spite of the rise of scientific methodology, knowledge from authority continues to hold prominence.

Just as certain forms of knowing have been gradually discredited over time, so have certain forms of responsibility.  Our degree of responsibility is directly constrained by our knowledge that we hold with the greatest certainty.

But regardless of one's epistemology, or means of knowing, one educates for responsibility.  Whether it be a responsibility to use proper grammar, to uphold the sacraments, to the proper use of electron microscopes, or to utilizing the fine motor skills required to create a work of visual beauty, educators seem to educate to this common end.

Moreover, educators working within the disciplines concerned with humanity teach toward a particular set of aspects of responsiveness, empathy.  What is empathy, but a kind of humanistic responsibility? What are the capacities of empathy, but cognitive processes involved in accurately responding to human needs?

Importantly, responsibility is nothing more than a set of suggestions for action; responsibilities as human dispositions do not control action.  Cognitive empathy, (empathic capacity dependent on thought processes), provides a person with a set of suggestions for how to best act with or toward another person.  But a person can refuse to listen to the data he/she acquires through his/her empathic capacity, just as any person with any responsibility can shirk it.  However, the fact remains, without any degree of responsibility, without any degree of certainty, one cannot behave ethically even by one's own standard(s) --- nihilism being the noted exception.

The commonality among the various products of education has some important implications for how to effectively conduct the processes of education.  I've already spoken of the importance of fostering appreciation.  Appreciation, like technique, is merely a means to responsibility or to acting responsibly.

The goal of this post is to serve as a far-cry to educators contemplating the learning objectives, specific and overall expectations, prescribed learning outcomes, and <insert ministry edujargon here>, of their educational programming.  If the goal of education is to foster responsiveness, then this goal should be reflected in how we structure our interactions with students.

I try to be reasonably skeptical of my own ideas.  However, this commonality across ends of educative processes has held in every instance I've witnessed to date.  You are welcome, as always, to challenge my opinion.  These posts are intended to serve as contributions to the continuing discourse, not as solutions.
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When I participated in service-learning in Berlin and Poland as a part of my Teacher Education program, I visited Birkenhau.  Today, behind what was "the little white house", there's an open field.  One of vilest acts against humanity in recorded history occurred in and around that field.  It's one thing to torture and murder human beings on a vast scale.  It's altogether another to have their kin dig up the victims' remains and burn them in order to hide the evidence of your deeds.  The conductors of this abominable tragedy demonstrated by facilitating it that they knowingly shirked their responsibilities to their victims' and their own humanity.  I now have the responsibility to carry-out their memory and, given the seeming logic of education, now you do too.

Contradictory virtues: The problem of honesty and humility

It has been months since I've written any words in this blog.  This post alone has been several months in the making.  Ironically, I'm finishing this post at a point when I have the least time available to write extra-curricularly.  I, and my thesis committee, have committed to beginning to completing the writing of my thesis in just over 6 weeks, definitely my greatest challenge yet.

The subject of this post has been grinding my gears for some time now and I felt I should take some time to finally enunciate it in writing.

As many readers of this blog may know, I've committed myself absolutely to attempting to live a good life.  I've explored the implications of this before and will not reiterate them here.  My concern with this post is the problem of living virtuously in the Aristotelian sense of virtue.

Specifically, I'm concerned with the virtues of honesty and humility.  For a significant chunk of my life, I've committed myself to these principles.  As of late, however, I've realized that these two virtues in particular stand in contradiction to each other when one attempts to exercise them practically.

Simply put, to act absolutely honestly is to almost inevitably come across arrogant and excessively prideful and to be absolutely humble often necessitates disingenuous and ultimately dishonest behaviour.

As I stated in my first Facebook note which became my first blog post ever, I've often had to deny my own qualities in order to not violate the sensitivities of others.  It's only now upon much reflection that I've realized how dishonest this adherence has made my behaviour.  The more I give and do, the less honest I've found myself about the degree to which I engage in both.  To maintain humility and avoid risking violating the sensitivities of those who give and do less by their own standards, I've become more and more disengenous.  And I hate it because it's so dishonest but yet I find it necessary to maintain a sufficient degree of humility.  I'm sure even writing a blog post such as this can appear, to some, as a form of arrogance or at least of excessive presumptuousness.

What I've found is that the flip side is even worse.  Rather than be honest about myself and risk coming off arrogant, the alternative is to try to be absolutely humble.  But attempting to exercise absolute humility often amounts to my avoiding saying or even implying anything about who I am or about what I do.  In fact, to some, I potentially violate the virtue of humility by simply suggesting that I'm having this problem in the first place~

It's a lose; lose situation.

Here's a practical example.  I've found trying to enact both the virtues of honesty and humility especially problematic when consoling those with severe depression.  For the longest time I thought that approaching those with such depression in a purposefully positive manner would support those individuals in feeling better.  But it doesn't work like that in real life.  More often, that approach has made those individuals feel more depressed and insecure about their current situation.  They wonder why they can't be as positive or feel as good as I'm portraying and it sends them spiraling further.  So I've had to take to what I would honestly consider lying to support them in feeling better.  Absolutely bjorked, but depression is bjorked.  I really feel for those who struggle with it on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, there's not much any of us can do other than give these people support and time when they feel and communicate that they're ready for it.

From what I can tell, there is no "solution" to the practical contradiction of enacting both honesty and humility.  But they're still awesome virtues individually.  However, I think we need to be mindful of their pursuit's practical consequences for other people and how these consequences potentially threaten these virtues' nature as virtues.

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So essentially your options are arrogant prick or lying sack of ****.  You're going to end up being one if you try to absolutely avoid the essence of the other.  Maybe this is why Aristotle called for moderation in all things.

I'll close with some of the ever inspiring words of Paulo Freire on the importance of humility to dialogue.

"On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others---mere "its" in whom I cannot recognize other "I"s? How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of "pure" men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are "these people" or "the great unwashed"? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration, thus to be avoided? How can I dialogue if I am closed to---and even offended by---the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue. Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages: there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know." 

- Pedagogy of the Oppressed

On appreciation

Christmas Truce of 1914

As the first round of holy-days draw to a close, I'm reminded of all those who could not for diverse trials and tribulations celebrate them with the same warmth and comfort as myself. 

I treasure holidays as an opportunity for reflection: an opportunity to reflect, yet again, on all that I, and my community, take for granted.  Just as consciousness is always becoming, growing, and fostering, so is our understanding of our privileges.  So many of us take for granted the reality that we'll never realize just how much we take for granted.  The wisdom that we know next to nothing will ironically never cease to serve as an impetus and agent in the fostering of new knowledge.

My reflection intensified as some members of my friends and family exchanged racist and homophobic remarks and jokes during one of our gatherings, as I'm sure some of my colleagues and peers may have witnessed with their own friends and families.  My siblings and I were fortunate enough to be gifted with a liberal education that inculcated a relatively greater respect for all human beings regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, gender, and sexual affinity.  An education that itself is often underestimated; one that often contributes to the formation of impossible expectations for those without such an education such as of those making the racist and homophobic comments.  I found myself in a situation where I had ample opportunity to unleash an indignant inclusivist self-righteous fury.  But I didn't.

Because an "indignant inclusivist self-righteous fury" is an oxymoron.  Militancy with regards to inclusivity can be both thoughtless and careless.  As I stated in the forerunner to this blog post

"just as it's easy for the conservative to turn inwards, it's easy for the liberal to turn their back on the conservative.  All you accomplish by turning your back on conservatives is to alienate, victimize, and thus, feed their conservatism even more.  It's easy to mock Tea Partiers, but much more difficult to empathize with them - to invite them to come together for the benefit of all."

All I would have fostered by going on an inclusive offensive was greater defensiveness, more justifications for feelings of victimization, more walls, and ultimately more exclusion.

I find myself cautioning my former classmates and all those involved in the movement for sustainable self-actualization.  We won't win converts to our cause by oppressing them, even if they are in fact ultimately in the wrong.  We'll win converts by fostering their appreciation. 

In one of my more abstract series of posts on this blog, I argued that unity is the way.  In the context of the current post, it's unity between the racists, the homophobes, and those they prejudge and fear, that is the good life for all.  Even the most oppressive human beings on the planet were, and still are, human beings.  Paulo Freire once argued that the oppressed must liberate their oppressors.  I can't imagine a situation in which unleashing a self-righteous fury could be liberating, unless it was truly directed towards unity. 

Education more often than not is simply a call to appreciation.  Whether it's an appreciation of processes, identities, events, ideas, or wisdom, one of our roles as learners and educators is to create appreciation where there was none before.  Just as we'll never realize just how much we take for granted, we'll never appreciate just how much we will never appreciate.  I embrace holidays as an opportunity to grow in appreciation and to slowly foster appreciation in others.

To quote the wisdom of Confucius a second time in this blog, “It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.”

T2P Application for the Poland Trip: A Manifesto?

I just applied for a trip to Poland for my transition to practice (T2P).  From what I've read and been told, the trip is designed to evoke remembrance of the Holocaust and empathy for its victims through meetings with survivors, tours of museums, and a trek to Auschwitz.  Here's a description of the trip by the organization facilitating it.  We had to provide learning objectives for the application process.  Normally in these situations I'd simply employ ingratiating sophistry.  Instead, as usual, I took to being bluntly and uncompromisingly honest.  And then this happened.  Enjoy.

My first objective is to grow as a global citizen.  I've almost never left the province of Ontario (the only exceptions including a week in Cuba for my brother's destination wedding and crossing the border into Hull to see the Canadian Museum of Civilization).  I’ve declined every opportunity to “see the world” thus far and as a Social Justice and Peace Studies student from King’s who worked for [anonymous], that’s a lot of opportunities.  I always felt I knew most of what I could learn from the trips already.  Through the experiences of this trip, I want to prove myself wrong.  I always jump on vulnerable learning opportunities and this trip is an opportunity to make myself vulnerable to learn.  I want to become ever more cosmopolitan and, therefore, my first objective is to grow as a global citizen.

My second objective is to grow as a philosopher.   I’ve always thought myself a philosopher in the Ancient Greek interpretation of the term: a lover and pursuer of wisdom.  Much has been made by both philosophers and historians alike about the “lessons of the past.”  I’m of an appreciation of the paradox of our inability to value the knowledge from an experience before we’ve had it.  I see this trip as an opportunity to gain some insight, and maybe even some wisdom, about the human condition and our roles as the keepers and sustainers of memory.  I hope to draw ethics from my experiences on this trip, new perspectives and ways by which to live a good life.

My third objective is to grow as a historian.  History’s crux is primary sources and the interpretations of, and discourses around, those sources.  To go to Poland is to go to the primary sources, to the people and places touched by the people and places of the past.  Also, to go to Poland is to witness and potentially join another set of discourses of history.  As a future history teacher, through my experiences on this trip, I’ll have a wealth of primary sources and discussions to draw on when teaching about various concepts and topics in history such as Nazism, remembrance, and dehumanization.

My fourth objective is to grow as a learner.  We’re all learners before teachers.  I’m of the opinion that we should always listen more than we speak; we should always read more than we write.  As such, on this trip I plan on doing a lot of listening and reading.  I will use this trip as an opportunity to further foster my love of learning and intellectual curiosity.  Therefore, my fourth objective is to grow as a learner.

My fifth and final objective is to grow as a teacher.  I believe that knowledge and wisdom come with a responsibility to foster, to nurture, and to protect.  My personal motto is “take everything from the world but keep nothing for myself.”  I believe that as teachers, we take everything we can from the world, our experiences, understandings, and values, and share them with others to the best of our abilities.  Therefore, I will embrace this trip as an opportunity to experience, philosophize, and understand, as an opportunity to grow as a teacher to the benefit of my future students.

On standardized testing

I started writing a reflection for one of my classes and it turned into an off-topic gripe-fest about standardized testing only worthy of publishing to blogs dedicated to improving the world such as this.  Enjoy!

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In my graduate studies, my Introduction to Curriculum class once came to the conclusion that standardization in schools is not inherently evil.  The key question to ask when confronted with standardization is “standardization of what?”  Are you standardizing the process of education?  I.e. pedagogies and practices. (the means) Or are you standardizing the outcomes?  I.e. evaluation and the desired understandings and skills of students. (the ends)

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Standardizing evaluations and outcomes can create many problems, as demonstrated by researchers of standardized testing.  Standardized tests like the EQAO and AYP have the potential to create systems of schooling that---instead of improving students' overall understanding, skills, and allowing them to realize their full potential---actually just increase students’ ability to score well on standardized tests.

Standardized evaluations can create systemic problems such as polarizing the efficacy of schools.  For example, magnet schools that do well at reaching standardized outcomes tend to attract the best teachers meanwhile schools that are barely surviving under scrutiny based on standardized test results tend to ward off good teachers.  This relationship creates a positive feedback loop in which the better a school does on the tests the more it attracts good teachers and funding (which allows the school to do even better on the tests); the worse a failing school does on the tests the more it wards off good teachers and suffers reduced budgets (which cripples the school at the expense of the students who end up doing even worse on the tests).  This exponentially increasing gap between the best and worst schools is very real in certain parts of the United States.

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However, standardizing outcomes, but especially standardization the evaluation of outcomes, can help organize and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of educative systems (pending those educative systems actually use the data collected by standardized evaluation).  Ideally, if you have a sufficient effective measure of outcomes, it's possible to compare school environments, demographics, students' socioeconomic statuses, etc. with schools' capacity to achieve learning outcomes.

Standardizing evaluations of outcomes provides benchmarks.  They can act as a ruler to measure the relative efficacy of schools and their educative potential.  Further, standardization of evaluations of outcomes encourages teachers to organize their lessons around learning outcomes.  It forces teachers into backward designing their lessons: identifying outcomes and developing teaching practices and activities which create the educational experiences necessary to achieve those outcomes.

Whereas standardizing outcomes can be justified, standardizing pedagogy and practices almost always creates more problems than it solves.  Every student learns at different times in different ways.  Given the diversity of learners, there’s a strong justification for differentiated instruction. 

There's something enormously dehumanizing about homogenizing teaching practices and pedagogies.  It denies the individuality, diversity, exceptionality, and the potential vitality and vibrancy of the human condition.  This goes for students AND teachers.  Teachers are just as diverse as students, and to constrict teaching practice and philosophy is to try to take the human beings out of teaching and learning.  You kill style, attitude, and enthusiasm.  Teacher-directed teaching can be just as important as student-directed learning.

All that to say, it's in everyone's interest that we constantly renegotiate the qualities, understandings, and skills that belong to an ideal global citizen.  Therefore, it's also in everyone's interest that we constantly renegotiate the methods and philosophies that should be employed when educating such citizens.

Just another blog update

Hello everyone,

The lifestream.

I sincerely apologize for neglecting this blog.  In truth, this blog was pulled from the web for almost 2 months.  I recently started teacher's college. Given the constant haranguing my colleagues and I encounter in our professional programs in regards to maintaining a professional identity both in person and on the web, I ended up killing this blog.  It was heart-wrenching and, given the nature of some of the arguments put forth in this blog, even hypocritical. 

As such, in order to relaunch this blog, I needed to gut it in order to make it more reader friendly and politically correct.  Over the past 2 weeks in my scarce spare moments, I've reread and edited almost every post. 

For those of you who followed this blog in the past, you'll notice the domain name, the name of the blog, and the background have changed.  The blog's domain name, and actual name, used to be "just another blog on saving the world."  But like the blog, I myself have changed.  Specifically, my understanding of the cause (the self-actualization of all life and life not yet lived) has transformed greatly in the past couple months.

I've started asking myself, as someone dedicated to changing the world, "what would we be saving?"  Really.  Just what would anyone be saving right now?  If you look out your window, most of the time you'll just see bread and circuses.  We live in a world of shamelessly glorified hedonism.  When one attempts to save a world, they attempt to return a crisis situation to a former status quo.  I desire so much more than the status quo.

Hence the change in name.  "Just another blog for improving our world" is more accurate to my own vision and my vision for this blog.  The use of the word "for" rather than "on" in the title is intentional.  This platform is meant to be collaborative.  My teaching and pedagogy both informally and formally are dominated by dialogical collaboration.  These posts are simply conversation pieces: an opportunity to engage with one another.  Improvement isn't something one imposes on society.  It's something developed and fostered by a society from within itself collectively.

Further, I've changed the background from the classic matrix code to a new graphic more reflective of the blog's new mandate of improvement.  Rather than ending the war for people's minds, which the previous graphic symbolized, this new graphic is an artist's rendition of the lifestream, a brilliant metaphor from Final Fantasy VII.  I've alluded to the lifestream before.  The lifestream represents the collective souls of the planet.  I don't believe in souls or supernatural energy, but I do believe that all life is connected; that every thought and action we take creates ripples in our existences and all future existences born from our own.

So there you have it, the way forward.  I hope this blog will contribute to the improvement of our world.  Thanks for reading.  As always, comments welcome.