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.