The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education

Helen E. Lees, Nel Noddings, Helen E. Lees, Nel Noddings

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137412911
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook fully explores the field of alternative education on an international scale. Alternatives to mainstream schooling and education are becoming increasingly recognised as pertinent and urgent for better understanding what really works in successfully educating children and adults today, especially in light of the increased performance driven and managerially organised economic modelling of education that dominates. For too long we have wondered what "exactly" education done otherwise might look like and here we meet individual examples as well as seeing what alternative education is when a collection becomes greater than the sum of parts.The Handbook profiles numerous empirical examples from around the world of education being done in innovative and excitingly democratic and autonomous ways from Forest Schools and Home Education through to new technologies, neuroscience and theimportanceof solitude. The book also setsout important theoretical perspectives to inform us why seeing education through an alternative lens is useful as well as urgently needed.

Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Education Policy, Sociology and Philosophy as well as educational practitioners.

© The Author(s) 2016

Helen E. Lees and Nel Noddings (eds.)The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education10.1057/978-1-137-41291-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction & This Handbook

Nel Noddings² and Helen E. Lees¹

(1)

Newman University, Birmingham, UK

(2)

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Nel Noddings

Email: [email protected]

Helen E. Lees (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction by Nel Noddings

People have expressed ambivalence about education and schools for a long time. On the one hand, it is believed that a good education should produce better people, better in every aspect of human life: intellectual, moral, physical, social, vocational, aesthetic, spiritual and civic. On the other hand, we know that schools have often induced fear, boredom, subjugation and feelings of inadequacy among those being educated. Fifty years ago, Ivan Illich (1971) suggested that, if we want to enjoy the true promise of education, we must find alternative ways to educate; we should “deschool” our society.

Illich and others wanted to “open the market” so that people could learn the necessary knowledge and skills wherever it could be made responsibly available. But this is easier said than done. There would still be “schools,” even if their administration and financing were taken away from the established government. Notice, for example, that parents who choose to educate their children at home are referred to as “home schoolers.” The alternatives we seek may be found both outside and inside the places officially designated as schools. Illich himself recognised the central importance of teaching. He wrote:

What characterizes the true master-disciple relationship is its priceless character. Aristotle speaks of it as a “moral type of friendship, which is not on fixed terms: it makes a gift, or does whatever it does, as to a friend.” Thomas Aquinas says of this kind of teaching that inevitably it is an act of love and mercy. This kind of teaching is always a luxury for the teacher and a form of leisure … for him and his pupil: an activity meaningful for both, having no ulterior purpose (Illich, 1971, p. 101).

In our search for promising alternative forms of education, then, we should put great emphasis on the teacher–student relationship, within or outside formal schools, and how it can be developed and maintained. Several chapters in this Handbook address the issues involved in developing relations of care and trust. Such relations require a supportive environment. One hundred years ago, John Dewey urged us to think about this: “We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment” (1916, p. 19). Think about this! Much of what we force teachers to do today—to instruct unceasingly on specific learning objectives—may not qualify as education at all.

Several of the Handbook chapters suggest ways to remedy this—to reshape instruction as a genuine part of education. Among the possibilities, readers will find great emphasis on choice as fundamental in education. What choices should students be allowed to make on what they will study, how deeply they will dig into a subject, and how they will demonstrate what they have learned? How should we guide their choices? Many of our authors remind us that teachers, too, must be encouraged to make professional choices. There is no one best choice of curriculum, no one best pedagogical method, no one morally sensitive way to approach every child. Indeed, in a later work (The Quest for Certainty, 1929), Dewey advised us to abandon the search for one pedagogical method that will work for all subjects, students, and teachers. Still later, the prominent educational psychologist, Lee Cronbach, emphasised the same point: “I have no faith in any generalization upholding one teaching technique against another, whether that preferred method be audiovisual aids, programmed instruction, learning by doing, inductive teaching, or whatever” (1966, p. 77). Some powerful pedagogical approaches are described in the Handbook, but they are offered for your consideration as possibilities.

Unfortunately, much of what is pressed on us today as alternative practice (perhaps especially in the US) is in direct opposition to what was recommended by Illich, Dewey and Cronbach. Greater and greater emphasis is on standardisation of content, “best practices,” “scaling-up,” and standardised testing. Even charter schools, meant to provide a positive alternative to regular public schools, often fall back on authoritarian methods and strict regimentation designed to produce higher test scores. These schools are rarely forms of what we call here “alternative education.”

Readers of the Handbook should find useful suggestions for alternative education not only on choice and relationships but also on collegiality, continuity, responsible experimentation, ecology and interdisciplinary work. On all of these matters as essential to alternative education today, listen to E.O. Wilson:

There is, in my opinion, an inevitability to the unity of knowledge. It reflects real life. The trajectory of world events suggests that educated people should be far better able than before to address the great issues courageously and analytically by undertaking a traverse of the disciplines. We are into the age of synthesis, with a real empirical bite to it. Therefore, Sapere aude. Dare to think on your own. (2006, p. 137)

We hope the Handbook will trigger such thinking.

This Handbook by Helen E. Lees

Altogether, this Handbook offers a way to navigate the variety of perspectives and possibilities inherent in the idea of educational alternatives.

As is clear from a full reading of the entire Handbook, authors identify with the notion that we do not know “exactly” what an educational alternative is or can be. This is celebrated here. We also do not know exactly to what our alternatives are alternative. For these two reasons—and there may be more—the navigational compass this Handbook presents for educationists of all kinds is an unusual one for education: it is free and free ranging in nature, although a guide. We are not saying how to do, yet we show, discuss, consider, prove, validate, underpin and understand. Despite a lack of desire to didactically “teach” here and instead a wish to pedagogically “know”—with the consequent freedoms of response surrounding such a reluctance and its concomitant intention for new knowledge—what is presented is nevertheless grounded in its own North: principles of autonomy and self/social empowerment. The collection of voices—each chapter—acts then as an intelligent invitation to alternative education.

The Handbook is an intervention into educational studies. The history of understanding alternative education is mired in strange, strangled dissonance: trajectories of enthusiasm followed by pending, almost inevitable local social rejection (Cremin, 1961; Darling, 1994; Howlett 2013; Röhrs & Lenhart, 1995; Skidelsky, 1969; Stewart, 1972). Given what is included here presents in a positive, stimulating and useful manner to envisage and know other ways for education to occur, I suggest things have moved on: the “fight” for survival is over or if not exactly over, different, because “local reason” is now on the side of the idea that alternatives matter. The chapters all, each in their way, suggest that local reason reckons we need an other education.

Do we need to be concerned these days about the relevance, the reception and the survival of other ways to do education than traditional school memes supply as “method”? Probably not. In very recent times the internet has changed so very much about how we live, want to live and need to live. Our engagement with the idea of a fixed curriculum, a physical destination location in which education dwells as if in a box in which people enclose themselves to learn, and the notion of the authority of the teacher versus the subservience of the student are all in the ring and they are losing. We must and are rethinking education.

It is happening slowly. I suggest one reason for the languid pace is the need for the concepts presented, sometimes introduced, often developed, that this Handbook contains are rarely so collected, seen as so enjoyed, so supported and, it feels to me at least, understood as so obviously pertinent to educational development. We need more work like this volume—more collectivity and human celebration around alternative educational possibilities for the future—if the pace is to quicken. At present the silt of the past vision of what education should and could be is clogging up our social and even personal imagination of the educational in the world.

Now, today, we need educational concepts that indeed can deal with challenge, know challenge as helpful and are dissonant—their past mode of demise is part of today’s core offer—because, as Kenyon and Hayes for example point out, it is in the spaces and moments of seeking and refusal we will find appreciation and clarities for action:

As educators, and me as a psychologist and psychotherapist, it had become obvious to us (and many constructivists around the globe I am sure) that people only change in response to a very clear need. This usually involves distress such as confusion, dissonance, and fear or a more positive motive such as intense desire. The satiated and the comfortable are less likely to make a behavioural change no matter what others may desire. (Hase & Kenyon, 2007, p. 112)

A behavioural change is what we need if we are to meet the present and continuing “technological age” face on with dignity and with a valuable response maximising its potential—and the education to go with it—for the benefit of humanity. So whilst the fight in one sense to prove the worth of alternative education as appropriate is over, the fight is in another, and present sense, on. In educational alternatives with all their seeming “otherness,” we find tools for living in responsive, flexible ways. It is not about learning to live according to instructions now, but coming into being through engagement with education. Those two “situations” are very different. I do not think anyone would venture to suggest life and living is unproblematic so education then, in nature dissenting, dissonant, troublesome and free—as this Handbook describes—seems like a good pedagogic recipe for this world. Education is no longer about right, sweet, pretty answers and following.

With a postmodern legacy underpinning the idea in mind that we can carve our own pathways with “incredulity” towards meta-narratives (Lyotard, 1984) of education, what matters then is the getting-on-with-it, a practical doing of difference; the translation of ideas beyond and outside already given practices into reality and experience. The chapters in this Handbook offer both visions and examples of difference being done. I think this is a brave book. The authors are walking their talk, and their paths taken change our perceptions of education. I hope you agree with me that what they are doing, where they are going, the route they are taking, is interesting.

The Chapters: An Overview

The Handbook is split into three parts: Thinking Differently, Doing Differently and Acting Differently.

Thinking Differently comes first because we as co-editors believe that, in order for practice to matter, thought about that practice matters before practice can begin well: How is it conceived, how to be understood? Just as Melzer describes thinking as learned action and as a work done within oneself in advance of actual external practice-taking (Melser, 2004) this section represents the priming for the notion of being able to do and act differently.

The Doing Differently section is in many ways coterminous with the next Acting Differently section: What is the difference after all between doing and acting? Both require in this alternative domain a sensibility for the other of education: for freedoms, the democratic, equality, curiosity facilitated, justice, the unknown felt and embraced, the controversial met face to face. Whatever it is in the alternative realm, doing and acting need care. Our answer is that chapters selected for the Doing section are indeed walking the talk. In every way these chapters show us that alternative practices are politically, socially, personally and interpersonally viable. In the Acting section there is a sense in which attitude matters for alternative “right” action: thinking and doing are involved in the acting in relation to others that is not just a variety of what we have and reject from mainstream education but an actual alternative of substance, with form, with results, with consequences.

Part One: Thinking Differently

The Thinking Differently section begins with an important start in the form of Chapter 2 by neuroscientist and an expert on the cognitive nature of belief formation and retention, Kris De Meyer. Knowledge from neuroscience and psychology are brought to bear on the difficult matter of conservative thinking in education studies. Chapter 2 explains why explains why educational thinking can remain entrenched in its positionality despite new or conflicting evidence to the contrary: by reference to, simply put, “brain facts.” What the Handbook assimilates into a fuller picture through a wide variety of perspectives and expertise this chapter helps us see as world changes up against dissonance, the mind that fails to shift because it is upset by the idea of change. De Meyer gives a brief overview of how hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction & This Handbook
• 1. Thinking Differently
• 2. Doing Differently
• 3. Acting Differently
• Backmatter