Unfold Learning

exploring the best innovations in learning and teaching


Learning Supremacy

Adapted from an image of beheaded statues at the confederate memorial in Portsmouth, VA. Original photo by Kristen Zeis, The Virginian-Pilot.

If you want to build a diverse, just, and equitable society, you cannot do it with the current educational system. 

That may sound harsh, but there’s no use pretending otherwise.

Consider for a moment not what happens on the surface of most schooling — not the math, history, chemistry, or civics…. Consider instead what’s happening beneath these, about the structural armature over which all the diverse disciplinary practices and activities have been stretched. Think about what happens in most classrooms, regardless of the learners’ age, the subject their teachers are addressing, or the country or city in which they’re located… 

Working to do the best for learners, teachers demonstrate a principle, concept, or skill. Then they ask learners to complete an exercise designed to implement and solidify this lesson. Most teachers would love to try a different, more creative or student-centered approach, but they just don’t have time. They’re overwhelmed with too many students and too much bureaucratic paperwork. So they ask all students to complete the same assignment. It’s sheer, handy pragmatics. This way, teachers can compare one learner’s performance with another’s to ‘see who’s getting it and who isn’t.’ It’s objective, scientific, clear

It’s the way most teachers were trained to teach.

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image of fungus on a log


Learning Online

image of fungus on a log

Yesterday I took a picture of a carpenter bee with some gooey stuff stuck to its face. The bee did not look well. It was moving slowly and trying very hard to dislodge the stuff which seemed to be keeping it from feeding properly. I looked online for what might have been wrong with the bee, and then I reached out to the one person I knew about who worked at the intersection of insects and fungi.

It is important to say I don’t really know Dr. Matt Kasson. I know of his work, but we’ve never met. I ran across one of his tweets a while back and started following him out of curiosity regarding his research of a fungus that kills cicadas. I found his description of the dead cicadas as “spore salt shakers” darkly humorous. And while I reserve Twitter as a space to learn about education, technology, and social justice, I figured throwing in a few insect-related accounts would only improve the experience.

So today, I tagged Dr. Kasson in a tweet and hoped he’d get back to me sometime in the next week. Within the hour I was having a conversation with three different highly qualified experts who responded and helped me out. We discussed the ailing carpenter bee, and as a thank you, I shared a picture of one of my latest fungal discoveries made during an exploration of the woods behind my house, a fungus called Trichoderma strictipile (image above). This led us in a new direction as they discussed what my picture showed.

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