Is There a Curriculum in this Community?



            I will be honest and say that I have had difficulty neatly summarizing my ideas around community as curriculum this week- and maybe that is the point.

            There has been a lot of discussion about the community piece both on Twitter and in the unhangout. However, I feel like the actual curriculum piece has sort of fallen by the wayside. Dave suggests that communities tend to be messier than networks, and I completely agree with that. And similarly I do expect that the community that has collected itself under the #rhizo14 banner over the past five weeks will definitely separate and regroup in different ways; which is the beauty of the rhizome.  This community of practice that we have created is a community of choice and that community of choice can infinitesimally and narrowly define itself. 

            I see an analogy to those how small of a fraction can you get until you reach zero problems that you find in high school math texts. As a community we can fraction ourselves until we are left alone but then the aspect of the community is lost.  Community, again as Dave pointed out in the unhangout, is about density of connection. It is in the density (and because of one or many “reasons”, as Sarah pointed out in the unhangout) that the community exists. And I think this concept of density is where I have either consciously or unconsciously centred my thoughts and my intervention into #rhizo14. I say this because density has a lot to do with literacy for me and in turn that idea of literacy leads back to the often illusive curriculum.

            There was a question at the end of the unhangout this week which a really read along the lines of “can only certain communities create a curriculum?” I would say yes, and it is a literate community that creates curriculum. But not just straight forward reading comprehension or numeracy but literacy writ large. What I always try to instill in my students is the importance of the ability to (effectively) navigate the sheer overwhelming amount of information that we swim (or drown) in every day.  That literacy needs an application piece, which is what we are doing as participants in #rhizo14 (also I don’t know how I feel about the word “participant” but I am using it for the moment). The distinction (or lack thereof) between information literacy and digital literacy can be hedged in application. 

            In the project I declared two weeks ago I spoke to looking at literacy and rhizomatic leaning in both an application and theoretical paradigm. The curriculum we have in #rhizo14 is at the heart a curriculum based on information sharing for the sake of information and not necessarily centred on one real topic/theme/idea. Again this is the beauty of rhizomatic learning, it forces participants to develop curation skills and abilities and apply them. We are constantly asking ourselves: What is important to me? Who best shares my interests? This is why in the first few weeks I really saw an affinity in both Sarah’s work as well as Simon’s work. For the past two weeks however, I find myself a bit more siloed off because my curation has led me to spend more time sense-making than sharing or necessarily overtly engaging (on Twitter say). 

            So what am I saying is the curriculum in this community, if there is one? I believe that the curriculum here is literacy and curation: digital literacy, information literacy, numerical literacy, visual literacy, I could go on.  I will also suggest that though community is of course important, for without it the curriculum would not exist, we should not forget curriculum for the sake of community. Maybe it’s because I am strange because I do love me a really well written learning outcome (Bloom’s verbs and all) but I worry that #HigherEd wants us to go too much in the direction of community at the expense of curriculum.  We need to have both in equal measures – this is where the curriculum in the community really has the opportunity to shine and we will have the ability to engage on many levels.

Postscript
On Thursday I was at a “Better Aging Summit” which was organized through the Council of Ontario Universities. The purpose of the summit was to look at the how regulated and unregulated medical professionals alongside colleges and universities can better address, train, educate, and implement gerontology and geriatrics to engage with our aging population. I went there with my admin hat on. As a generalist coordinator (with an English literature doctorate) in a health portfolio at a college I was surrounded by specialists of all varieties. The summit was truly an experience in rhizomatic learning. We all came in with different ideas and at the end we were all speaking the same sort of language.  Action pieces were crafted, links were created. I kept thinking and wondering how Dave would have seen this summit- as the rhizo came to life in order to extend quality of life.

Comments

  1. Another aspect, which you allude to, is the self-selecting aspect of #rhizo14. We joined because we wanted to and we stay because we want to. It is not forced, and maybe that is an element of open education (like P2PU) that has a certain value for self-focused learners. But is it utopian to think that everyone can flourish in such a system? No. Some people need structure. But those spaces don't naturally emerge as a community.
    Kevin

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    1. Hi Kevin, When I used the word "forces" above it didn't feel right and you do well to expand on that here. Nothing about #rhizo14 is forced which is what makes it so great. But again you are right in stating that not everyone can flourish without a rigid structure. Some thrive on the liminal, for others it gives them a sense of panic.

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    2. @Kevin an idea that I have seen several times on #rhizo1 Is the concept of "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" and I think that can apply to structure. Structure has a value in educational settings as you and Ann have suggested(although traditionally the tendency is to over-structure), and Jenny Mackness has shown the risks to the learner of too little structure. I can't help but think that on #rhizo14, whilst we nomads wear mottos of freedom, openness, diversity on our shields as we speed across the plains on horseback, we are actually a bit stumped when we come to the#rhizo camp by the competing campfires of P2PU, G+, FB group, Twitter, etc. Some settle down at one fire to tell their stories, converse - others make their own little fire at their blog (thanks Ann for the heat and light) then run around calling out an invitation to come to their fire. What I am driving at is that structure is ever-present in our digitally networked world - it just operates differently even if we pretend it's not there. It has seemed to from early on that many #rhizo14ers are interested in how they can use digital networked technologies and services with learners to escape from some of the damaging effects of the educational structures that constrain them. I have seen some inspiring examples on #rhizo14 from you, Kevin, Terry Elliott and others. My interest is on orthogonal time perspectives for learners (teachers and students). How can we apply learning from informal to formal domains, and vice versa? So how can I apply what I have learned from rhizo14 to my practice as a knitter on ravelry.com? And how can I apply my learning from ravelry.com to my continuing practice as a knitter in a future where ravelry.com may be different, superseded or missing? As Ann and Clarissa suggest new literacies and curation are important. Bringing the time perspective in leads me to think about literacies that help us, now and in an unknown future, be critical about digital networked services and how we use them in curation and, dare I say it, personal archiving. It seems to me that a lifelong learner needs to acquire flexible literacies that will go beyond using tools and services in learning to helping them answer questions like the ones I posed above.

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    3. I think you really spur a much larger issue here that gets at the heart of how we function in these learning 'machines' we call schools. We all accept the charge and the contract when we become teachers to help others learn "X". Given the physical and intellectual and conceptual support structures available to us, how do we make that happen? And what if we don't really buy into that superstructure of curriculum, syllabus, textbook, and certification as the true, still center of that process we call learning? And that's only above the waterline, what about all the substructural assumptions we ostensibly agree to when we take on this job in the "real world" of schooling. In the end the discussion is political, a term that Harold Lasswell defined so indelibly as "who gets what, when, and how." Part of the confusion I feel as I exercise rhizoidal teaching is the suspicion that this is a double bind: I feel what is right, but I push into contrary assumptions every day from students first and from the whole physical, social, emotional and intellectual zeitgeist that is the university that I simultaneously embody and am embodied by. It is the slavery of DuBois' double consciousness. He argued: "“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." I think the term can apply to this political dilemma we feel. In our hearts we know that it is true that most learning occurs in informal contexts that are not amenable to curriculum. In our hearts we know that learning is as much happy accident as it is a result of curriculum. In our hearts we know that we have run the table on the lone American teacher who can innovate and engineer her way all by herself out of any lealrning problem no matter complex. We need the community, too, but it has not gotten anything but the most tenuous finger hold in that cliff face. In the end all learning is political and we know it in our hearts as we struggle to subvert and trip the switch on the rail line to send the whole train down another track. So...I don't think these are competing campfires so much as a recreation of Plato's parable of the cave. We see the same shadows from the same campfire, but have not yet cast off our chains. Hmmm, Plato and Rousseau, an unlikely partnership, but apt for the dissonance that I feel.

      Thanks for the chance to rant and the inspiring ember fanned to flame.

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    4. @Frances: I am glad that I have created a fire that you were drawn to. That is an amazing metaphor and I really want to use that more in my pedagogical practice. Flexible literacies is an amazing term and I think it really hits on many of the themes we have seen discussed during #rhizo14.
      @Terry: That DuBois quotation certainly gets to the heart of the matter. And yes there is certainly the political aspect here that is always the mortar of the educational structure we navigate daily. Structure is such an important part of what we do and yet it, like curriculum and community at times, becomes muted. I have done a lot of thought, writing, etc, about how physical structures in our classrooms, colleges, and universities, either support or deconstruct learning. How do we make places of learning comfortable, ethical? What happens when those places aren't comfortable- say for our LGBT students, or those who are ELL students without the level of diction or support required in certain situations?
      We have all become part of this rather messy and dense rhizome and there is something very good in that. Sometimes ideas (constructs) need to be messy and challenging in order to expose the mortar that binds us all in some way. Thank you both for the opportunity to ponder these wonderful ideas further.

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  2. Hello there, Ann. I have found that the whole experience of #rhizo14 has concomitantly pushed me towards acquiring new literacies, as well as exercising some literacies in a way that I hadn`t yet explored. I feel that one of the most critical literacies is definitely one's curation abilities, and #rhizo14 has provided so much ground for me to exercise that. I agree with you when you say that the curriculum here is literacy and curation. I suspect that it was part of the design purpose of the course that we experiment with the kinds of curation and connection experiences that would enable anyone to feel 'rhizomaticity' at play first-hand.
    Clarissa

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    1. Hi Clarissa, I am glad that we seem to be on the same page here in regards to literacy and curation. In the survey Dave sent out I called him Victor Frankenstein, and yes I was trying to be funny but truthfully he has helped build something completely new here, and it will always be completely new every time because of the people who are part of the make up of the course and how curation leads to knowledge/information transmission. I have really enjoyed these past 5 weeks!

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