Brains are pretty cool. The material brain that is. How can a lump of organic matter sloshing in our skulls come to define some intrinsic part of itself as ‘other’. I’m talking about tumors here. Is there some organic dichotomous gate method where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are recognised through a genetic moral gene? Or maybe the brain does not ‘know’ that a tumor is growing – and that as a culture we have decided what constitutes ‘brain’ and ‘extra-brain’. I’m glad for that distinction considering how many lives have been saved as a result.
So what constitutes school – or learning or success or agency? How does this constitution change over space and time? Listening to one of my most informative and thought provoking podcasts (Modern Learners) this morning it was obvious that a very clear distinction in education has been crystallising in my head and has already gained broad traction.
This is the American notion of the Accountability Movement and the Progressive Movement when it comes to education. A quick search demonstrates that the Accountability Movement was in formation well before NCLB came into play. There is narrative around this movement that has nothing to do with learners or learning. Rather, co-opting the business approach of the era, it to do with generating data and an external (to the education community) schema for discourse on the efficiency of schools and teachers.
This aligns with my own version of the the ages of education:
- Schools produce workers.
- Schools produce data.
- Schools afford agency.
This of course is but one overgeneralised expression. Jacobs and Alcock in their book Bold Moves for Schools characterise it this way:
- Antiquated
- Classical
- Contemporary
Then there are others with a different aspiration for the project of Education.
The podcast referred to The Accountability Movement verses Progressive Schools. (One useful perspective on qualities of a Progressive school can be seen here)
So we have a contested notion of what schools are for – and a contest around the structures that afford legitimacy to those claims.
In terms of Learner Agency and where it fits on a continuum with Accountability to the far right and Progressive to the left (far?) then I suspect a school that affords learner agency would have to be in the progressive quadrants of the continuum.