LIBERATING LEARNING Thisbookisaboutthreecomplementaryideas:1)learningisapracticeoffreedom;2) liberating learning in public education requires widespread cultural change in classrooms, schools, and entire education systems; and 3) social movements have beenthemostpowerfulvehiclesforwidespreadculturalchange,andintheirlogicof operationliethekeystoliberatelearning.Drawingonexistingknowledgeandnew researchoneducationalchange,theauthoroffersnineprinciplesofactiontoliberate learning in schools and across entire educational systems. Topics discussed include learning, pedagogy, leadership, education policy, widespread cultural change, collectiveaction,andwholesystemimprovement.Writtenforeducatorsandleaders interestedintransformingteachingandlearninginclassroomsandschools,aswellas for publicintellectualsand people interestedinwidespreadpedagogicalchange,the bookarticulatesanewwaytothinkaboutandpursueeducationalchange. Santiago Rincón-Gallardo is an education consultant and chief research officer at Michael Fullan Enterprises. ROUTLEDGE LEADING CHANGE SERIES The world is crying out loud for quality education, and for the type of leadership and change to make quality education a reality. Never has there been a greater need for grasping the big pictures of leadership and change in education, which creates the world of tomorrow by developing future generations today. In this series, you will find some of the world’s leading intellectual authorities on educationalleadershipandchange.FromthepensofwriterssuchasDennisShirley,Pak Tee Ng, Andy Hargreaves, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, Alma Harris, Yong Zhao, AmandaDatnow,VickyPark,SantiagoRincón-Gallardo,ArmandDoucetandKaren Edge, come wise insights and breakthrough ideas on this subject. They ask what the new imperatives of educational change are. They explore the paradoxical nature of educational change in celebrated Asian cultures and systems like those of Singapore. Theypointtothepowerofprofessionalcollaborationandleadingfromthemiddlein schools,andnetworksofschoolsandacrosstheworld,ratherthanjustdrivingchange from the top. They invite us to think about and pursue educational change as social movementsaimedatliberatinglearning.Theyhighlightthesurrealnatureofleadership andchangeatthiscriticalmomentinworldhistory. This series of books is for the stout-hearted and open-minded reader who is keenly looking for inspiration to unlock the potential of educational leadership and change in this turbulent world. Published books in the series include: Professional Collaboration with Purpose: Teacher Learning Towards Equitable and Excellent Schools By Amanda Datnow and Vicki Park Surreal Change: The Real Life of Transforming Public Education By Michael Fullan Learning from Singapore: The Power of Paradoxes By Pak Tee Ng The New Imperatives of Educational Change: Achievement with Integrity By Dennis Shirley For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Leading-Change-Series/book-series/RLCS. LIBERATING LEARNING Educational Change as Social Movement Santiago Rincón-Gallardo Firstpublished2019 byRoutledge 52VanderbiltAvenue,NewYork,NY10017 andbyRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness ©2019Taylor&Francis TherightofSantiagoRincón-Gallardotobeidentifiedasauthorofthiswork hasbeenassertedbyhiminaccordancewithsections77and78ofthe Copyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988. Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor utilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,now knownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinany informationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissioninwritingfromthe publishers. Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksorregistered trademarks,andareusedonlyforidentificationandexplanationwithoutintent toinfringe. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Acatalogrecordforthistitlehasbeenrequested ISBN:978-1-138-49174-8(hbk) ISBN:978-1-138-49176-2(pbk) ISBN:978-1-351-03210-0(ebk) TypesetinBembo byTaylor&FrancisBooks CONTENTS Preface vi Acknowledgements xii 1 Introduction 1 2 A Glimpse into the Future of Learning 20 3 Educational Change as Social Movement 39 4 Occupy the Pedagogical Arena 61 5 Occupy the Social Arena 79 6 Occupy the Political Arena 95 7 Rolling Up Our Sleeves 109 References 112 Index 121 PREFACE Why I Wrote This Book Throughbothelementaryandhighschool,Iwasseenasahighlysuccessfulstudent. Thanks to scholarships, I was privileged to attend a prestigious private school in Mexico City. Each month I proudly brought home a certificate showing I had obtained the highest grades in my group. I represented my school in multiple academic competitions, and often won. In school-wide ceremonies, I often carried thenationalflagforthefullschooltosingthenationalanthem–inMexico,whereI grew up, carrying the national flag is considered one of the highest honours for a student.Inessence, I wasconsideredan“excellent”student,one that, accordingto myteachers,myclassmatesshouldemulate. And yet, when I left high school I didn’t really know how to read and write. I could pronouncethewords inatext witheloquence, and “finish”entirebooks.I could even recite entire passages of textbooks shortly after preparing for an exam. But I would have struggled if someone asked me what was the core argument of astoryIjustread.Iwouldbecluelessifaskedtoidentifythestrategiesusedbyan author to make a point, let alone articulate my own personal opinion about their ideas.Iknewhowtoputwordsandsentencestogetherwithperfectorthography, impeccable grammar, and beautiful handwriting. Yet I was unable to access my own voice and express it in writing. I took Japanese classes every day for 12 consecutive years. Yet, to this day, I’m unable to maintain a decent conversation with a Japanese speaker for more than 20 seconds. Perhaps more tragically, I left high school practically unable to learn on my own. Why did I “succeed” at school? I had very good short-term memory. I could memorize entire passages of textbooks the day before an exam and write almost verbatim versions in tests. I became good at understanding and fulfilling the Preface vii expectations of my teachers. I got especially good at identifying what was required to obtain the best possible grade and doing it. I often ask myself how I could stand to do this for my entire childhood and teenage years. In part my drive may have come from the fact that the early passing of my father – when I was 4 years old and my young sister only 2 – pushed me to feel responsible for helping my mother, who always emphasized the importance of doing well in school. In my world as a child, doing well in school was my most important job. It would make my mother happy and put one less worry on her shoulders. Another reason may be the sense of satisfaction that came from adult approval and the admiration of a good number of my peers. After all, there’s something comforting about being liked. As I entered adolescence, something in my “success” at school started to feel meaningless. I continued to get the highest grades in my class, but I started to rebel. I started to mock some of my teachers when they conveyed incorrect information or when they made requests that felt unreasonable. When I knew it wouldn’t affect my grades, I offered evidently absurd responses to questions from my teachers. I got into drawing and doodling to zone out during long and monotonous lectures. I started to cheat in exams. I learned how to make test notes on a translucent sheet, which made it invisible when placed on my dark- wood desk, but allowed me to read it when put on top of a white page. In essence, I figured out how to get the best grades with the least effort and spent the rest of my energy trying to discover all those things that school rules did not forbid and do them. I got a reputation as a troublemaker, but my high grades kept me safe from suspension. I remember vividly two sour experiences that completed my disillusionment withschooling.In mysenior year inmiddle school, the high school principal saw me at the front desk of the school office. Talking aloud to other teachers in the room while pointing a finger at me, she said: “I’d rather have a student with mediocre grades but good discipline than a guy like this!” This message conveyed to me that the core mission of my school was to discipline us, and that the high grades I had invested so much energy in getting were only secondary to this main purpose. Later on, in high school, my ethics teacher humiliated a struggling student in frontof the whole group and broughther totears.Istoodupand confronted the teacher, calling her out as a bad example of the ethics she was supposed to teach us. I was expelled from the class for the rest of the year. The next day, the high school principal – the same one who had singled me out back in my senior middle school year – came into my classroom and asked me to leave the room. After I left, she warned my peers to stay away from me, that I was a bad influ- ence (a couple of friends told me this afterwards). I was able to maintain some connection with a handful of friends brave enough to defy the principal’s instructions. But the overall effect of these events was that I became ostracized by most of my peers. viii Preface My experience with schooling offered me two main lessons. One was simula- tion. Doing well in school was about pretending I was learning while simply getting done the work required to get good grades. But the currency of school grades, which was easy for me to access, was devoid of any intrinsic or lasting value. The secondlesson was injustice. It had become clear to me that, in school, obedience and submission took precedence over everything else. My high school graduation was a low point – rather than excitement about the future, my dominant feeling was relief that the pain of school was over. IwentontotheNationalUniversityofMexicotostartmybachelor’sdegreein Mathematics.UsingbasicallythesametricksIlearnedinschool,Ipassedmycourses withverydecentgrades.Mid-waythroughmycollegeyears,theuniversitywenton strike. Students, professors, and staff were protesting a proposed legislation that wouldchargetuitiontouniversitystudents–theNationalUniversityofMexicohas historically been tuition-free. I had been involved in activism coming out of high school – joining literacy and human rights campaigns in indigenous communities, organizing to support the indigenous Zapatista movement, enrolling volunteers to overseethefirstelectionsofgovernorinMexicoCity.Idecidedtojointhestrike.A seriesofeventsledthemostaggressiveandintolerantsectorofthemovementtotake control. Ultimately, I and other colleagues who had been organizing forums to discussthefutureofpublicuniversityinMexico,wereexpelledfromthestrike. It was at that time that my life took an unexpected and fortunate turn. Gabriel Cámara – one of the most important living education thinkers and doers in Latin America–waslookingforsomeonetojoinhisteamtodesignandrunaneducation programme for small, rural communities across the country. He contacted me by recommendationofauniversityprofessorwhotaughtaseminaronmatheducation thatIhadtaken.Withmyschoolonstrikeandeagertostartaformaljob,Iaccepted Gabriel’sinvitation.Theprogramme,called“Post-primaryProject”,washousedby the NationalCouncilfor thePromotion of Education (CONAFE, for its initialsin Spanish),thebranchoftheMexicanMinistryofEducationthatprovideseducational servicestosmall,scatteredruralcommunitiesacrossthecountry. ThePost-primaryProjectaimedatencouragingyoungpeopleandadultslivingin the mostremote communitiestolearn independentlyfrom written sources.Groun- dedonthefundamentalaxiomthatmeaningfullearningoccurswhentheinterestofa learner meets the capacity of an educator to support them, in Post-primary centres eachstudentcouldchooseatopicofstudyandreceivetutorialsupportfromatutor. Independentlearningtookcentrestageand,fromtheoutset,thePost-primaryProject ignored standard teaching; there were no fixed programmes, syllabi, or certifying systems.Subjectmatterwasbutanexcusetodevelopmoredurableintellectualhabits. Gabriel’s educational philosophy and practice had been influenced by the ideas of his close friends Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, two of the most prominent education thinkers of the 1970s. He saw in literacy an enormous potential for individual and collective liberation. The Post-primary Project offered an opportunity to test ideas that until then had only been tried out on a small scale. Preface ix One of Gabriel’s most important decisions with the Post-primary Project was to keep design and execution tightly linked. In practice, this meant that the leaders of the project at the national level had to demonstrate that their ideas could work in practice. Our team spent a lot of time in Post-primary centres, nottoevaluate teachersand theirpractice,buttoassessourownmodel, testour assumptions, and adapt to ensure the pedagogical practice we envisioned became a reality. Our constant review and adaptation of the Post-primary training model revealed a fundamental contradiction between the training we were delivering and the practice that we expected to see in classrooms. The national team inclu- ded specialists in different academic subjects, with each specialist responsible for training Post-primary educators in that area of expertise. The mathematician led the math training, the literacy expert led the literacy training, and so on. Our expectation, however, had been that young instructors working day to day in Post-primary centres would support the independent learning of their students across all subject matters. But this was not occurring. The revelation of this core contradiction led us to redefine our training model. If we wanted instructors to be able to support the independent learning of topics across subjects, we had to demonstrate first that we were able to do it ourselves. We decided to become a learning community. The mathematician started to dive into poetry and short stories with the support of the literature specialist, the English specialist started to tackle math problems with the support of the mathematician, and so on. Each of us was expected to demonstrate our learning in public. The national team of the Post-primary Project became a learning community, a living example of the pedagogy that we expected to see in schools. This became a core feature of our work, which later on took on different names – first the Learning Community Project, more recently Tutorial Networks. This experience changed my life. With the support of expert colleagues, I learned to make meaning and experience the beauty of initially obscure poems; I dived deep into novels that I had “read” many times in the past but, for the first time,Iwasabletoengageinsustainedconversationwiththeauthorsanddiscover the strategies they used to surprise me, to make me feel moved, and so on. I experienced thinking like a scientist when exploring puzzling questions such as “how was John Dalton able to demonstrate that atoms exist when there were no microscopes powerful enough to see them?” or “how do airplanes fly?”; I experienced thinking like a historian when I read original works about the Conquest of Mexico and the Mexican Revolution, and explored how the authorswere abletoarticulatetheirtheoriesofwhyandhowthingshappened,in spite of having no direct access to people who lived at the time. For the first time, I experienced the joy of making sense of questions that puzzled me, using written text as the medium. I felt the joy of finding meaning in initially obscure texts after persisting through the struggle of learning deeply. I