Safety Boxes (A work in digress)
Thinking outside the box, what a wonderful catch phrase! Lots of people do it, too. LouAnne Johnson even wrote a book on it for educators (Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains, 2005: Jossey-Bass). That’s the easy part, thinking that is. Anyone can think outside the box, or so they like to believe. What’s tricky is actually stepping outside the box, a threatening thought for most educators; not terrifying per se, but beyond a mere challenge. Why? First of all, of course, I’ve got to explain such an idea and justify it. Then I can move on to fathom the reaches of safety in the box while thinking outside it. Finally, I hope to provide some big picture ideas of how to think and step outside the safety box (and at some point in time I’ll provide more substance to what I mean by “big picture thinking”).Thinking outside the box is merely to possess ideas –a starting place to be sure– that are different from the norm or status quo thinking that is exhibited in moment-by-moment practice. I can think of (dream, imagine) education along the lines of Jefferson County Open School (http://sc.jeffco.k12.co.us/education/school/school.php?sectionid=296) in a British Columbia setting, or Walkabout applied in undergraduate and graduate programs, or field trips-a-go-go to help out in disparaged regions of the planet (global citizens helping other citizens around the globe). These are safe thoughts. I might even venture a foot outside the box by inviting dialogue with others (e.g. faculty or staff meetings) about such possibilities as just mentioned. And I still remain safe. Nothing has gone outside my safety box at this point that risks enough exposure to get hurt or ridiculed. Ah, but now I have stepped outside the box for now I’ve entered the public forum in this online site. Now I risk. Now I’ve stepped outside the box.Stepping outside the box might look like dialogues in an honoring environment where ideas are allowed, indeed, encouraged to flourish, to be aired, to be contested unthreateningly with a common vision of improvement, whether personal or community. I work in a place of safety boxes and of banged up boxes, boxes where people have ventured outside expressly to float ideas, to dream big and small, to contest only to receive the obligatory stoning that comes from fearful people threatened by ideas, by big pictures, by dreams, by contest, by different thinking and by people who risk stepping outside the box. It’s not just an education plight, although it appears to be the most evident there.There are many reasons as diverse as teaching strategies, learner needs and genomic computations. I would suggest that fear is the primo debilitating factor in educators’ resistance to step outside the box, in their resistance to macro-change (micro-change takes place regularly, n’est-ce pas, such as in portfolios in lieu of test scores –what do those scores really tell us again?, group work, laptop initiatives, collaborative (team) teaching, whatever); fear of ostracization, of retaliation by administrators, of ruckus-raising parents, of …failure. “What if this new initiative doesn’t fly? I’ll look like an idiot or my students won’t succeed and I’ll get beat up by the admin!” Not being bothered to try is a default failure; failure to believe that with risk comes not only the opportunity for great successes but also potential failure. It’s the stuff of business, of inventing, of progress, but hardly the thinking in education. After all, education is a public trust. (more to come)
