innovation...what is to be the source?

(Classroom 2.0, forgive me--I am still a rookie. Is an article like this most appropriately posted as a forum or a blog? What if it's about our network itself?)

Innovation...what is to be the source?


It's morel season in Michigan. Trees are in flower, some are leafing out. Glorious springtime! Walking through the woods this morning, I saw trillium and mayapples, a wild turkey, and lots of frogs. Two buteo hawks circled the marsh. Sandhill cranes called their eerie dinosaur-voiced song, which always cries to me of eternity. They sing their ancestors's song.

Since my neurology is changing, from being part of this network, and from doing so much techno-work in class, all the time I was out in the woods I was thinking in links. I'm trying to figure out a puzzle. Would the answer appear?

My question is, where will innovation come from in the next quarter-century? Ok, that's too long to think about. How about the next decade? Where will innovation sprout up?

There's a study of (as I recall) Japanese Macaques in which scientists presented a group (society?) of them a problem, one that they had never encountered in their lives before. Scientists found that the macaques liked rice, then gave them rice mixed with sand. (A dirty trick!) Wanting the food, but unable to eat the mix, some gave up, some ruined their teeth, some carried it around while tossing it up and down, only to lose everything.

An adolescent female was tossing the mix, maybe playing, who knows, and carried a batch into the sea. Tossing, tossing, dropping, wading, tossing--aha! Guess what? Yes, the rice floated. She gathered up the rice, ate it, and in a flash was back to get more of the rice-sand mix. She waded directly into the sea, threw in the mix, and stood there eating her reward.

I remember this study from anthropology class at University of Michigan. It's what happened next that got the scientific community interested--yes, it's amazing that primates are so quick to learn, so ready to experiment and then, with a flash of insight, realize an application for something that may have just been a random action--but what happened next?

This behavior spread across the community. But it only went through a particular avenue: juvenile to juvenile. Even seeing what the others were doing, the older macaques didn't pick up the behavior. The new food supply only benefitted a part of the group.

The study was brought up next in my psych classes, then education. Among other animal research papers, the point was made that innovation is both originated and transmitted by youth. Ok! I got it. This was what I was going into teaching for, to participate in an innovative society, to nurture this tendency towards innovation, and to participate in it. To figure out ways for students to explore and find knowledge. I agree with Gardner, in his recent book Five MInds for the Future, that "...in the years of middle childhood, parents should make sure that their children pursue hobbies or activities that do not feature a single right answer. Teachers ought to illustrate the several ways in which a particular math problem can properly be solved or a literary passage can be interpreted; they ought to facilitate classroom visits by inventors and artists who have gone their own way and achieved success; they ought to encourage youngsters to play games drawn from other cultures or to invent new games on the playground or on the computer." (page 86) I agree with Gardner and have seen this as my mission, from the onset of my teaching career and throughout my work.

Coming from this training, this orientation, this mindset, I am working on a puzzle.

Getting near retirement (oh, ten or twenty years from now), I look to see who's going to carry on this mission of nurturing creativity. The new teachers, coming out of education school now and over the last five years, seem a bit beaten up--kind of burdened and stilted.

That's a gross generalization; I know several lively and life-giving new educators, ones who make a day in the classroom full of laughter and experimentation, classes where students find passion and discipline in learning because they get to try so many things, are listened to, and have a voice in the design of their learning. So you new teachers who are full of life and who are creating classroom climates that encourage experimentation, collaboration, and creativity in general, please don't take offense. You are the ones we desperately need.

In fact, probably all ages, all people, on Class 2.0 lean in this direction, because of the process of self-selection. In this network, learners can find learners who can help nurture growth. Thank you, Steve, thank you, for setting this up!

But out there, away from this network, in everyday education life, there's a trend I see: a lot of young teachers have had the creativity beaten out of them. Or maybe they just haven't had it nurtured along. It's probably due to this dark time of accountability and standards. It might be due to pressure that colleges feel to make these new educators get right to the job of making youngsters know what they need to know, as rapidly as possible. (Get good test scores/meet the requirements/demonstrate attainment of standards.)

Do you see a problem in this? Does it bug you, too?

In everyday life at school, where are the innovators?

At an advisory board meeting at Eastern Michigan, a professor said that we now have a topsy-turvy educational environment, at least compared to previous patterns. The older teachers now are more innovative than the young. (Why the old ones would be more innovative wasn't explained. Was it our seventies and eighties liberalism? Was it just the way many educators were, before the vice grip of the NCLB-related trends?)

What does it mean for the future, if older educators are more likely to be innovators, to be creative, flexible, exploratory?

Get some perspective, I tell myself: this is just a temporary state, a swing of the pendulum, and things will get sensible again. The students who are younger will bring along the innovation, will breathe life back into education.

But...maybe not. A recent article put out by the American Academy of Pediatrics, "The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Healthy Parent-Child Bonds" (http://aap.org/pressroom/playFINAL.pdf) actually takes the stand that play must be preserved as a childhood activity. "Time for free play has been markedly reduced for some children." "This report offers guidelines on how pediatricians can advocate for children by helping families, school systems, and communities consider how best to ensure that play is protected as they seek the balance in children's lives to created the optimal developmental milieu."

So now we hear a warning--from doctors, of all people. Doctors are calling for the preservation of an endangered childhood resource: play.

What in the world are we doing?

Look at the New York Times article today: "Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard." (Sunday, April 29, 2007) These exquisitely accomplished young people, these "Organization Kids," have arrived en masse, at colleges' doors. The writer, Michael Winerip, is an interviewer for college applicants. He is amazed at what he sees: "Knowing me and seeing them is like witnessing some major evolutionary change take place in just 35 years, from the Neanderthal Harvard applicant of 1970 to today’s fully evolved Homo sapiens applicant".

If the new kids coming into college are masterful at required mastery, (a harsher way of saying it: they may be drones) and the kids younger than them have had more and more play cut out of their lives, what's next?

It's worrisome. We may have a substantial part of the younger generation doing a lock-step march of consuming and reflecting predefined knowledge, with little time to play, explore, invent... Knowledge that is doubling every three years yet is narrowly defined by content standards that will never even come close to establishing what a person really needs to know...

My greatest hope is that with a network like this, we solve this puzzle of where innovation will come from. It will come from everyone. It will come from a new way of processing knowledge, in collaborational, creativity-producing, inspiring, and nurturing social networks. It's got to be the way of the future. We get that opportunity here. What shall we do?