Hopefully you’re well rested after spring break and are ready for the next leg of our journey together.
3 … 2 … 1 … blast off!!!
Welcome to the future, where we will spend the next 6 weeks thinking and storytelling about the possible futures of education. Specifically, we will be reflecting on the last year for education in a pandemic and imagining how things might change for education in the “post-pandemic” world.
To structure our imagining->storytelling, we will use a design process from Mitchel Resnick and his team, nabbed from his book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. It goes like this: 
We’ll start with the first “Imagine” and loop around, week by week, until we return to imagining again. Note that in the image above, the thought bubbles are emanating from a central … emptiness. YOU are the emptiness — or rather, the opposite of it! Each of us is full of expertise in education — as teachers, learners , advocates, and more. Our future education stories will draw on this expertise, our imaginations, and some collaborative online research.
IMAGINE
We will begin with imagining, and we will fuel our imaginations on exploring what’s being said elsewhere about the future of education. What might it be? What’s possible? Note that next week’s “Create” will ask you to design digital storytelling projects for your schools/students that will help to secure the future for education that you would like to see. The goal of this week is to get you really thinking not only about what’s possible, but about the future YOU think we need.
Please read the articles below and join us in Slack to share your thoughts. What would you like to see for the future of education? What has your experience been as an educator over the last year? What will you keep and what will you abandon from your covid learning practices?
Imagining what education can be post‑COVID‑19 by Robert F Arnove
Future Studies: Reimagining our Educational Futures in the Post-Covid-19 world by Marek Tesar
Education in a post covid world: Nine ideas for public action (UNESCO) — this one is skimmable. Pay attention to their calls to action, and which attract you.
Schools after COVID-19: From a teaching culture to a learning culture by Geoff Spencer
Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play (chapter 1 excerpt) by Mitchel Resnick — this is the text from which we are drawing our process
Conferences
This week, I’d like to meet with each of you on Zoom to chat about your last blog post and anything else related to class. Please sign up for an appointment here. If none of the available times work for you, DM me on Slack and we’ll find a time that does!
Weekly Declarations
Please fill out this this form to declare your progress in our explorations together this week.