Response to article

Dear Folks,
Before our voices die down to faint echoes, I'd like to continue some of the dialogue we started at the retreat. I was as intrigued by the responses to the Inside Higher Ed article as I was with the article itself. They raised some issues that seem worthy of our continued exploration, amongst ourselves if not in that venue (interesting how even normally cantakerous academic debate becomes even more vituperous when disembodied).
I'm not sure we ever agreed on what we mean by "progressive." Is it really, historically and in our own minds, from "the left"? Is that language still useful and persuasive? In the sense of liberatory, maybe yes, but my own experience with left politics, of the sectarian variety, is that they were anything but liberatory. How do we distinguish between progressive education for adults and progressive education for college aged students? between undergraduate and graduate education? I hope that next time we meet, we have time to really tell our stories in a way that shares our actual practices with different learner populations, learning styles and stages of development, as well as different kinds of institutions.
I was most intrigued by the Civil War history (I'm not myself a Civil War History buff) and the implication, however "ironic," that the South was too "democratic" to win the war, and its suggestion that democracy is as passe as the aggrarian society the South was defending. Aside from the equation of "democracy" with lack of discipline (and more than a hint of anarchy), I can't say that my experience of progressive education was that it suffered from too much democracy-- quite the contrary. Does "democracy" mean faculty governance? Has faculty voice in academic affairs really led to chaos, defeat and economic disaster?
The idea of creating our own accrediting agency is certainly something we need to discuss together more fully, its obvious advantages and potential disadvantages. Whether we decide it's a good idea or not, it is certainly an empowering concept, helping us to imagine moving out from the margins into agency over our own affairs. My experience with "outside agitators" has been mostly positive, in terms of Vermont College programs, but for the Union doctoral program, it has been a disaster. Perhaps the issue is how administrators relate to the evaluators and what they expect from the accrediting agency itself.
But what distressed me most within the higher ed communal blog was the suggestion that progressive education has betrayed its own values, abusing students rather than helping them transform their lives. This brings me to some of the questions that emerged in the planning of the retreat, but which weren't directly addressed there. I'd like to share them with you here in hopes of some further fruitful dialogue around them:
1. What are the models each of us have in mind when we think "progressive education"?
2. Would P.E. developed among us today look like the sort we discuss in pursuit of something like a definition? What might P.E. look like if created anew now? (not a plan, not a model, just some ideas, flashing thoughts, notions, visions, quirky but appealing possibilities)
3. What forms of P.E. do we know work really well? For whom?
4. What forms of P.E. don't work so well? For whom?
5. How has P.E. been most effectly undone by unfriendly folks, institutions, values, our own failings, prejudices, or even ideals, etc. (not asking for war stories but for an analysis of the levers used and how they worked)
6. What possible new sources of support are there for current and new P.E. programs and institutions? What can we do to cultivate them?
Hope you are all well and thriving.
Margaret

Inside Higher Ed Article and Tim Pitkin Papers

Here's to all having had safe travels home, and thanks to all for participating in what I feel certain is the seed for the next wave of progressive education--by whatever name and whatever shape it may grow into in the future.

For those who haven't seen it yet, here's a link to the story that is in today's Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/29/progressive

Also, following up on the ideas about documenting and accessing the history of progressive ed, here is a link provided by Marjorie Strong at the Vermont Historical Society, to a catalog of Tim Pitkin's papers: http://www.vermonthistory.org/arccat/findaid/pitkin.htm. They also have an extensive collection of Pitkin oral history tapes.

Those of you who mentioned archives at other progressive institutions, please either post some information about accessing those collections, or email me and I'll be happy to put together a list of all the sources we turn up.

Having indulged in some much needed rest following the retreat, I haven't summarized any more of the presentations or discussions for the blog yet, and encourage folks to please post your own reflections, summaries, etc. I brought home all the notes on newsprint that we generated, and will take digital pics of those and make them available here over the next several days.

Thanks!

Thanks, Deb, for setting up this blog and the opportunity to continue the conversation. And thanks for doing so much for making the weekend possible and run so smoothly. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be with you all, and I look forward to very good things as we continue this important process.



On a personal note re: the blog membership -- for some reason I show up as LadyBirch. That is part of my Website name, but I have no idea how it got on here. I entered "Genie" as my signature but it looks like, in its apparently infinite technological wisdom, Google remembers me as my alter ego and I don't know how to change it. Apologies!



Thanks again, Deb and everyone! Hope everyone arrive(s)(d) home safely.



Blessings,



Genie Rayner

More tomorrow

Given the busy schedule of the day and the volume of information generated, I'm going to call it a night and start catching up on posts tomorrow. Rather than try to transcribe all the notes we developed today, I'll be taking digital pics of the big pages of newsprint and upload those to the blog.

I'll close with brief mention of our "wish session" tonight where a lot of great ideas were put forward, many of them related to putting on a PE conference next year. We expect to invite a lot of people from non-academic institutions and organizations to start forging the relationships that will enable progressive ed to move out in new ways beyond academia so as to reach the people and places where it is most needed and can do the most good to affect positive change in civil life.

Good things are coming! More tomorrow.

Helena Meyer-Knapp’s Presentation

The second presentation of the day was Helena Meyer-Knapp’s. Helena posited that the PE we talk about as “western” is actually U.S. PE, which is very different from PE in Britain or France, albeit that cutting edge educators there would agree that relationality is central. She talked about our 85% society, which is that as long as 85% of the population is doing well, society disregards the 15% who are forsaken. She suggests we are headed for, and must not become, a 70% society, willing to forsake 30% of the people in our midst.

She spoke of a radical libertarianism that is helping to feed a disengaged approach in which people do their own thing but do not join with others to act for common good. She spoke also about the necessity of teaching judgment and cited an exercise in which her learners talked about and arrived at some clear judgments about the place of religion in their school (Evergreen). Helena also spoke to the importance of cultivating the practice of thinking about complex ideas over and over again. She mentioned the book Field Work in Familiar Places, the author of which I do not remember just now, but will add later.

Notes following Stephen Rowe's presentation

Notes following small group discussions after Stephen Rowe’s presentation:

How to extend PE beyond its current confines through research and other means
RISK
Interdisciplinarity is solid but whole person education is not.
Futures and visions for Learners, Faculty, schools and other venues
Local and community actions in articulating/realizing principles of PE
Artifacts of PE in traditional contexts/institutions—i.e. bits and pieces that have been adopted by non-PE institutions
PE: Accept no substitutes.
Intergenerational learning community
Make national and international impact.

Goddard is a Seminary
Life as a pilgrimage home
How to talk about spirit in ed.
Contemplation and activism
Catechism (should?) of prog ed?
Spiritual, moral, or both?
Porosity of spirituality
Dream work
“The secret sits in the middle and knows.” – encountering mystery
Third thing
Otherness

One theme that has emerged

First a sort of blog housekeeping note: I just noticed that some of the formatting I had used in the previous post was lost in the post itself. Some of the terms you see in the lists didn't originally go together--e.g. "community" and "teams." As you read through those, play with the various combinations and stand-alones.

I will later post the notes we've developed from the late morning small group discussions, which don't come close to capturing the richness of the conversations going on but will, I trust, at least communicate something of their flavor; and also post summaries of our presentations. For now I will just share with everyone that one of the primary themes to emerge has been spirituality, the pervasive interest in it among learners, and our lack of language to talk about it in a progressive education context, or the many progressive education contexts. There have been references to the PE canon, whether or not we do have or should have a PE catechism, and the need for institutions to serve as seminaries for PE. We are talking about it with the language available and being attentive to the need for better language to say what we mean.

Other on-campus participants are now aware of their ability to post to the blog, so I hope you'll be seeing more from them later this afternoon and this evening. We look forward to hearing more from those of you who are away, too. Jane, thanks for your care regarding contagion, and we all hope you feel very much better soon!

Summary of First Saturday Conversations

Good late morning to all of our distant retreat participants! My apologies for taking so long to get a post up for you this morning. We’ve been busy with lots of wonderful discussions, and the wifi connection from the room where our large group meetings take place isn’t strong enough to accommodate live blogging.

Herewith, a very incomplete summary of some of what we have been talking about this morning. As time allows, I hope that other participants here on campus will also post their thoughts and summaries for you as well. NB: any mistakes I make in representing what others have said are mine alone and I will be happy to correct them.

We started with a list of key words and phrases from conversations that people had last night over dinner. Here’s what we put down on newsprint about what progressive education is, does, means, etc.:

Public Good Parallel History
Community Teams
Innovation Family Stories
Progressive Ed & Age
Activism/Agency
Experiential Learning
Reflective Future Generations
Angst, Loss, Change
Visions Whose canon?
Spirituality of Progressive education

Next we had a presentation by Stephen Rowe offering some historical perspective and so much more re progressive education. Stephen talked about the traditional model wherein education is a matter of delivering a body of knowledge to students, and then testing to see that the students received it properly. Then there is alternative education that tosses out discipline and all things associated with the delivery model in which anything goes. He placed progressive education between those two and invited us to think about what comes next, beyond the language and PE structures/ways of thinking and doing as talked about by John Dewey and William James. Stephen presented a five point model for thinking about what PE is and can be:

Affirms difference
Pragmatic
Problem/issue orientation
Emergent design
Relational and pluralistic

That’s it for now. I will return shortly with another post about the small discussions that followed, as well as Helena Meyer-Knapp’s presentation and the discussions following her presentation as well.

Dear Friends,
I'm so sorry I can't be with you this weekend, but you really wouldn't want to get this raging cold I seem to have brought back from vacation. You have already opened me to a new experience by getting me on a blog, so I look forward to great things from this retreat. All best wishes, Jane

Retreat Participants Can Now Post to the Blog

Good evening, folks. We've had a delightful (to my mind) start to the retreat and I am very much looking forward to what tomorrow brings.

I have just sent email invitations to all participants, including those of you who couldn't be here in person, to post to the blog as authors of new posts. You are not, in other words, restricted to posting only comments. I'm sure I'm missing a few email addresses which I will try to get tomorrow to make sure everyone has an open door to post to the blog. In the meantime, if any of you want to post but don't find an invitation in your email inbox, first check any secondary email address I may have for you. If you still haven't gotten it send me an email and I will make sure you receive one.

One idea floated by me today is to eventually send notice to everyone who was originally invited to the retreat, opening up the discussions even further, after the retreat. We might also open it up to friends of friends, as it were--people who weren't invited but whom some of you would have liked to invite.

I wish I could have been in many places at the same time during dinner this evening--so many wonderful conversations going on. Those of you who missed dinner missed a great one--the chef and crew went all out. Thanks much to one and all!

Welcome to the Retreat

Ah, the wonders of technology, which we so love when it works! Here we are at the beginning of the Progressive Ed Retreat, and very excited about the conversations to come. Disappointed to see how many people who had wanted to come needed to cancel, I've decided to employ a bit of technology that does have some reputation for reliability: ergo this blog.

The plan is to post regularly throughout the weekend about conversations that are going on during the retreat, and to provide an avenue for those who had to cancel attending in person to participate in the conversations from a distance.

I'm not yet on the Goddard campus, but as soon as I get there I will see if I have wifi connectivity from the building in which most of our meetings will be taking place. If so, you can expect some live blogging during our large group discussions. If not, then we will post to the blog in between sessions, and invite your comments and questions at any time throughout the retreat.

If you need help to post a comment, let me know at debgaryalicen@alumni.unc.edu. If you want to start a new topic, send me an email and I'll get it started.

The only people who are being given the URL for this blog are those who had been planning to come, and those who are attending the retreat. Please do not provide the URL to anyone else at this time. We will decide later whether to leave it up and make it public, or leave it up with restricted access, or take it down.

That's all for now. Welcome to Vermont!