Iris Priest goes to A School : Lesson 2

The emphasis of the project is not test scores, league tables and the dichotomising scale of success and failure but on collaborative, creative approaches to learning and teaching. Students and practitioners alike are encouraged to admit to not knowing, to ask big questions and to work with failure not as a negative consequence but as a potent means for learning.

Lesson Two: 9/11 and The Economic Crisis was based on connecting two separate suggestions for lessons (on 9/11 conspiracy theories and Bankruptcy) along the lines that, if it's true we're all connected by 6 degrees of separation, our cumulative knowledge may travel much further than that of any one individual or even the group itself.

After a “pomodoro” break (an interlude which happens after 25 minutes of lesson, the equivalent time scale for cooking the perfect Tomato Pasta Sauce apparently, hence the name) I'm sat on the floor next to another of today's new students. The student, Paul, turns to Christo (one of the creative practitioners on the project) and, describing how he had seen him with the group yesterday testing their home made Go Karts next to the bowling green, asks whether he's a teacher. Christo laughs warmly and explains that he is learning just as much as the students are.

Pasted on one of the classroom walls in large, friendly letters is the school logo “With brains like ours, it's easy to improvise”. Beneath this we work in pairs (selected at random) to brainstorm everything we know about the two lesson topics and any correlations we see between them. I'm paired with one of the year 9 students whose knowledge of fire fighters and conspiracy theories can only be described as encyclopedic and very quickly we have filled our quota of postit notes. The pooling of knowledge as a means for learning and forming a common consensus on a topic raises a lot of questions about the nature of learning and on the teacher-student relationship. On the one hand it's a very egalitarian and democratic approach to the enrichment of shared knowledge and experience. On the other hand, there is a nagging question of practicality; how can you (or can you?) quantify the learning which takes place through this process?

Once everyone's multifarious, fragmentary knowledge of 9/11 and The economic crisis has been accumulated in a smattering of postits across the classroom walls, we sit in silence for a while pondering the possible connections or correlations between these two events. Christo invites suggestions from the class and one of the students volunteers 'Freedom' as an issue to discuss here. And then, quite quickly, I find the lesson developing into an unexpectedly sophisticated, metaphysical conversation pondering these decade-defining issues from a position I previously had never considered...

As we break up for lunch I find myself feeling both excited by the possibilities of an education not limited to the usual hierarchical strictures but also slightly anxious that the tendencies of the classroom dynamics – e.g. of boisterous students to be fidgety and then ostracised, for teachers to be leaders and then superiors etc - not to be allowed to eventually creep into this organic project of learning.

Iris Aspinall Priest©