Whitebread
2012
A full report and collection of research supporting why play is insurmountably important for young people.
Today’s episode is Dr. Sarah Fine’s keynote, the Quest for Authenticity: Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes, from our Conference to Restore Humanity back in July of this year.
As Dr. Fine argues, the limits of our grammar of schooling and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but there is nothing inevitable or inherent about them. This is the throughline in her observation of co-constructed and collaborative humanized learning spaces, where inevitability gives way to possibility predominates.
Not only is it possible to change the grammar of schooling, but that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured school, Sarah argues, in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars, in the periphery. These spaces, she points out, offer “the hallmarks of a learner-centered system: trust, safety, & authentic care, where learners and educators codesign coursework.” As Sarah and her co-author Jal Mehta urge in their 2019 book, In Search of Deeper Learning, “We need to change student learning, so we need to change schools, so we need to change systems.”
Transcripts are available via the Zencastr link above (top left corner).
"Sarah Fine joins the Department of Education Studies and the UCSD-CSUSM Joint Doctoral Program in Education Leadership with a deep commitment to transforming PK-12 schools into humanizing places to teach and learn. Her research interests lie at the intersection of educational change, the learning sciences, and social justice pedagogies. Her empirical work, conducted in more than forty secondary schools around the United States and Canada, is ethnographic, ecological, and action-oriented." (*)
