Education Week - April 13, 2016 - 22

COMMENTARY

Buildings, Blocks,
And Experience

F
Dave Roback/The Republican of Springfield/AP

By Jonathan Lash

The R. W. Kern Center at Hampshire College, which opens this month, is already
being used as a site for collaborative work between students and professors.

ive years ago when, deeply impressed by the college's students,
I agreed to become Hampshire's
sixth president and transition
from a career in the environmental field, my wife, Ellie, was bemused. She knew very well that
even with a master's in education,
her husband would face a steep learning curve.
After 40 years as a primary school teacher,
mostly with 1st graders at the Sidwell Friends
School, in Washington, she was excited to share
the experience with me.
She has been a wise and patient adviser, as
delighted as I am by this college, founded to be
an alternative to the lecture-test-grade model.
Students here at Hampshire College work with
a committee of faculty advisers that they recruit,
mixing experiential, project-based studies with
seminars and courses to explore the questions
that drive them.
Ellie and I often discuss work, and we've realized a connection between student learning in
grade school and college. Some people may find
it difficult to imagine a connection between anything about 1st grade and higher education, but
the relationship is obvious in the most fundamental and instinctual form of learning: the power of
experience, of learning by doing. But providing experience is not the same as providing information.
I wish schools at every level did more to enable
teachers to create opportunities for students to
practice experiential learning-a model critical
for our world as the pace of change accelerates.

Its results cannot be captured on a standardized
test; in fact, it stands in opposition to standardized teaching to a test, because at its core are
innovation and invention.
In Ellie's experience, one of the most effective lessons for her 1st graders was when they
would undertake an immersive, weeklong lesson of designing and building a model of a zoo
with blocks and crafts. The students were so
immersed in experimenting and creating that
she would easily guide them to learn lessons
from her curriculum, including biology, math,
language arts, writing, reading, technology, and
social studies, not to mention the practices of inventing, collaborating, and problem-solving.
A group of Hampshire students have undertaken their own building project on campus this
year: They have been learning science, math,
and technology by performing labs tied to a
major campus center we're constructing. The
college will soon dedicate a "living building" to
meet the most advanced, sustainable greenbuilding standard in the world. Designed as a
teaching tool, the R.W. Kern Center will produce
its own energy, harvest its own water, treat its
own waste, and contain no toxic materials. More
than a half-dozen of our professors have actively
integrated the building's advanced systems into
our curriculum this year.
This past fall, a group of Hampshire professors-a microbiologist, a hydrologist, an ecologist,
and a mathematician-collaborated to develop
tutorial seminars enabling Hampshire students
to model the living building's waste-treatment
systems. Proctored by the professors, the students
led one another through labs in which they built

You Are What You Teach

By Zoe Weil
recently came across a story
in a local Michigan paper that
reported the news of a teacher
who showed 5th graders an
undercover video of pigs being
mistreated in a modern foodproduction facility. Some parents
complained about the "disturbing" nature of the video to administrators, raising concerns that the teacher had
shown the children graphic and inappropriate footage. According to the article, the
school district disciplined the teacher with
a brief suspension.
Although this case is just one instance
of a single teacher's error in judgement
and a district's recourse, it raises a question that calls for analysis: When and how
should we teach children about critical
real-world issues of injustice and cruelty,
ones in which we are often complicit as a
society and as individuals? Students, even
those in elementary school, should learn
about where their food comes from. There
are few systems more intricately and intimately connected to personal and planetary health, justice, and ethics than agriculture. So how do we incorporate difficult
and often controversial issues into schools
in appropriate ways?
As an educator with more than 25 years
of experience teaching about global ethical issues, I believe that we must teach
students about the interconnected issues
of human rights, animal protection, and

environmental preservation. But we must
take great care to share information about
cruelty and injustice in age-appropriate
ways that provide students with the tools
for meaningful problem-solving. The goal
is not to traumatize students but to engage
them in awareness. In the case of cruelty
in meat production, students need a combination of factual knowledge and intrinsic
motivation to examine their personal roles
as consumers. They also need to understand the responsibility for engagement in
community and legislative action for the
humane treatment of farm animals.
These topics can be challenging for teachers to bring up because they do not want to
incur the potential negative responses from
parents and administrators who would prefer to avoid controversial issues in school.
Even teachers who do have the requisite
knowledge and commitment may still
struggle with the least-biased and mostempowering approaches.
Instead of slapping teachers on the wrist or
suspending them when they make errors in
judgment, we must solve the problems that
this can create. Here are a few suggestions:
* Students exposed to issues in inappropriate ways, such as graphic video footage of animal abuse at too early an age,
must be given the opportunity to discuss
that exposure with informed mentors and
teachers who can help them process their
thoughts and feelings.
* Students should learn more about issues through problem-solving approaches
to understand the role they can play in de-

22 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 13, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Our education system
must present ethical
concerns through
school curricula."

vising solutions. As the folk singer and environmental activist Joan Baez said, "Action is
the antidote to despair." If students experience trauma from exposure to cruelty, they
need to be provided with positive outlets for
participating in meaningful change.
* School faculties, boards, parent-teacher
associations, and administrations should assess how and when to teach students about
challenging issues that affect their lives, as
well as evaluate curricula and pedagogy for
relevance in today's world.
* Schools should consider their own involvement in animal abuse and environmental degradation by assessing choices
such as cafeteria food and product and
energy use and discussing these choices
with their students. In this way, schools
can model what is taught in classrooms
and reinforce learning.
While it demonstrates poor judgment
to show young children graphic depictions of violence and cruelty, the reality is
that most 10-year-olds have been exposed
to extreme images of violence outside of
school through films and TV, video games,
and news reports. And many students are
already aware of atrocities in the world,
whether or not we explicitly teach about
them. Several years ago, I asked a class
of 5th and 6th graders to share what they
thought were our world's biggest problems.
Their list filled a whiteboard. What these
young people didn't have was hope that
these problems could be solved.
In fact, when I asked the students to raise
their hands if they thought we could solve

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Education Week - April 13, 2016

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