Standardization and Alienated Individualism, or Learning as Belonging?
I was fortunate enough to come across The School as a Community of Engaged Learners, by Penelope Eckert, Shelley Goldman, and Etienne Wenger of Stanford’s Institute for Research and Learning. Unfortunately, the IRL closed in 2000, but this document remains as timely as ever. It does so because it understands learning as a practice that takes place within a social context, and imagines learning as so much more than the simple acquisition of knowledge that can be simply tested. These authors understand that the damaging premise of testing as the leverage for change has co-opted the school reform movement and left students and teachers alienated and laboring under a false identity determined by “achievement.”
School is necessarily a place of coming to understand who we are because our identity is developed through connection to others. It’s crucial to understand that the quality of these connections is the basis for all learning because our identity is the foundation for what we learn. Identity comes as a result of who and what we belong to. We learn from those in a community that we see ourselves a part of. (Frank Smith calls these connections of belonging “learners clubs.”) We have the opportunity to work with this necessary function of