I grew up during a time of great change and social upheaval. A month after my birth, C.S. Lewis, Aldus Huxley, and President John F. Kennedy died on the same day. On my birthday in 1963, the very first Merchant Ivory film was released: The Householder, a screenplay adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on her novel. Also in 1963, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was published by The New Yorker. It is still considered by some to be the most influential book on race relations.
Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are was one of the most popular books in 1963. The book was at first banned by authorities, but when it was noticed that children were flocking to the book, checking it out from those libraries willing to shelve it, attitudes toward the book relaxed. Recently the New York Public Library recognized Where The Wild Things Are as number four in its list of “Top Checkouts of All Time.”
In August of 1963, Martin Luther King gave his “I have a Dream” speech before 250,000 civil rights supporters on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. After nearly 30 years of operation, Alcatraz prison was closed down in 1963. Under the Kennedy administration, we saw the end of financial relations with Cuba. However, that same year, Kennedy signed the nuclear test ban treaty, and signed equal pay for men and women into law.
In 1963, the world’s population was 3.2 billion. In my lifetime it has reached 7.8 billion and continues to increase.
I’ve been told that I was a curious child, and I find that curiosity remains firmly grounded in my thinking to this day. I was not much of an aspiring academic in high school . I was quite bored and found myself easily distracted by my photography and my music. My 11th grade English teacher, Ed Maly, saw my boredom and reworked my assignments. Instead of reading Shakespeare, he assigned me to write an additional act as an epilogue to Romeo and Juliet. He assigned me to write poetry and fiction in the style of other authors as well, knowing that to emulate these other authors, I would need to read their original works. He was a very good teacher and I fell in love with the written word.
When I finished high school I told my father I never wanted to step foot in another school as long as I lived. Instead, he suggested I take a gap year to consider my options. My gap year turned into a gap decade. I worked at various jobs, learning from the experiences, learning what I enjoyed and what I didn’t. What I learned was how to learn for myself. My curiosity propelled my learning and I found jobs that provided the opportunity to discover new knowledge and gain a new understanding of my self and the world in which I lived.
One of those opportunities was with Sense Interactive. Started by a friend in 1992 after hearing about the book Beyond the Limits, our goal was to use interactive multimedia to affect how learning was conducted in schools, to introduce technology in education, which included animation, sound, video, and storytelling to help students learn about sustainability, systems, and the consequences of unplanned growth. Not only was I exposed to the ideas of systems theory and sustainability, I also learned about transdisciplinarity, wicked problems, complexity, and the impact of perspective.
I knew then what I was called to do and I returned to school, first with a BA, then an MFA in creative writing. I taught English for several years at an impoverished school on Houston’s east side. I learned that regardless of economic differences, these students were as capable as any of making a difference in the world and should be afforded every opportunity to do so.
As of this writing, I have taught high school for more than ten years, at poor, inner-city schools and at high-achieving schools, I’ve taught at expensive private boarding schools and suburban public schools. I taught college for five years to students who did not know how to learn, and I’ve tutored and coached students who were thirsty to learn and wanted to drink from the fire hose of knowledge.
I went back to school and completed my PhD in transformative learning; my research focuses on self-directed learning.
Our current educational model doesn’t really deliver on the promise we’ve made to our younger generations—not that the system is broken—it needs to be improved upon, rethought, reconfigured. Education, the top-down process of organized teaching, is an example of a wicked problem: too many stakeholders with too many competing vested interests to effect any lasting change in the fundamental system.
There is a change coming though. Our millennials, our digital natives, and our iGen generations seek more authenticity, autonomy, relevancy, purpose, and meaning in their learning than did previous generations. The regurgitative model to teaching is coming to an end.
Consider this a place where ideas, strategies, theories, and practices for authentic learning are shared and discussed.