This one was a banger. The special issue draws on the popular essay by Arundhati Roy’s popular essay about the pandemic. The idea is that the pandemic represents a unique opportunity for change. In this issue the articles have as their focus the idea that the public education system missed a great opportunity to learn from what happened in and around schools during the pandemic. Narratives of “learning loss,” framed in neoliberal, global economic terms, dominated headlines. The worldwide slide in achievement on tests was translated by various organizations into future economic losses.

The articles in this issue highlight “the real learning loss,” which was the opportunity to reimagine education. Anyone who paid attention to schools knew of all the problems before the pandemic came along. I’ve watched my doctoral students research the ways in which those problems have been exacerbated during and after the pandemic. Over-burdening teachers with new curricula, new gimmicks, new and age-old neoliberal attacks on public schools. Racism, classism, ableism.

I read 5 of the articles. In this post, I share a big idea, a quote, and further reading I might someday complete from each article I read.

Article 1: Carnival and the Fake School: Transgressing the Vertical Imaginary of Education with and for Young Children. Erin Dyke.

So this article was based on a pandemic pod that went two years with some six and seven year old kids. The kids came up with “fake school.” And I guess from the perspective of mainstream education, that was an appropriate label. The kids in this pod engaged in a lot of self-directed learning through play, outdoor learning, and the arts. If that’s fake school, sign me up. At 7 years old, my son was doing a bunch of stupid worksheets and getting bored with school. The article gives a few vignettes from the time kids were together: making a play that included a “giant booger of frustration,” finding “ecosystem gifts” at a nearby park with a wetland area, and working through computer-based curriculum (that sucked) provided by the state.

With the play about the booger and a shadow puppet show, “they storied themselves identifying and solving problems, in stark contrast to the nonsensical easy readers around which Edgenuity’s language arts curriculum [the computer one] centered and which they were tasked with passively consuming and regurgitating as “comprehension.” (“I see a big sheep. Come here big sheep. Here is the big sheep.” Q: What did he see? A: A big sheep.) Nevertheless, I still had to have them complete [the computer crap] and struggled to convince the kids (and myself) why it was important.” Dyke explains that, to the computer-based curriculum’s assessment system, the learning the kids did through play was just that: play, and therefore useless. Yet they learned so much more through collaboration.

There were a few big ideas in the article that detailed what I wrote in the intro: school policy has always been a place of struggle, racism has always made school for non-white students and their teachers harder, and the big “learning loss” discourse is sort of a red herring. One of the most interesting ideas for me in this article, which was unique to it, was that one of the fundamental ideas that all of us swim in from conception on is the idea of an individualized ascendance. This is like, we start small and insignificant, and then we develop and grow and one day become self-actualized grown-ups who figure things out and are wise.

This is the basis of a kind of hierarchy, and got baked into European culture in the middle ages. She goes back to the plague as a time when alternatives were created and then destroyed by the beginnings of capitalism and this mindset: a “growth mindset” for exploitation of those deemed low.

Dyke explains how this hierarchy relates to the kinds of learning and playing the kids were doing. It’s a bad moment when the computer-based curriculum makes some of the students feel bad about themselves due to a poor performance on some stupid test. But they have these moments of educational (and bodily) freedom that are beautiful.

Dyke concludes with this: “Fake School offered the children a refuge to think, dream and act expansively, to make meaning of and flex…their ecological gifts. Imagining a new world, one without eviction notices or life-sucking mayors requires…the guidance of our ancestors, and the understanding that imagination, like birth, requires labor. …For myself, Fake School has provided me a glimpse of a world I feel ever more accountable to fighting for.

I really enjoyed this article. I love examples of educational freedom in a world of barriers. I love the idea of learning as freedom, and for future reading, I might check out Cook-Sather, A. (2020). Student voice across contexts: Fostering student agency in today’s schools. Theory into Practice 59(2), 182-191. doi:10.1080/00405841.2019.1705091