Inquiry Inventory - 05/04/22

Here at The Human School, a big part of what brought us together is a deep love of reading and learning. We commit, as part of our learning journey, to sharing our week’s reading with you and what influences our thinking and learning.

Each week, you will see a post with what we’re reading, a quote, and an insight from that reading that leads us to deeper thinking.

To learn more about what we are reading, please take a look at our Connection Catalog.

“Telling a New Story” by Bobbie Macdonald

“Without a transformation of the system itself, we are being pulled back to the default—into a system designed to see children as fitting into averages, to be sifted and sorted and put on a conveyor belt ready to be released into the workforce upon graduation.”

There is a lot that resonates in this post from Education Reimagined’s Bobbie Macdonald––from the title of the post to this particular quote, and more.

This particular quote reminds me that standardization is the magnet that keeps pulling so many of us back.

An antidote to that is story. And that’s why the second mindshift in our Storyteller Compass Point is this––Tell the new story: Navigating from not sharing our stories to we will share many stories.

Stories inspire. And they help us break from the stories of the past. What stories are you telling? How can you amplify the stories of those learners––old and young––in your learning environment?

—Randy

Stay and Fight from Madeline Ffitch

As a drastic shift from our usual texts, I wanted to take a moment to discuss Stay and Fight from Madeline Ffitch. The fictional novel focuses on a family of women raising a young boy in Appalachia, and it brings questions of knowledge, schooling, learning, and power into sharp focus. The women raising the young boy struggle to allow him freedom and space as he grows as well as learning and experiences they provide for him in the outdoors: building and harvesting, survival skills, and hunting. When the young boy begins to attend school at his own request, he and his family meet objection and systemic walls to their ways of learning and teaching in Appalachia. While I would make some very different choices for my own son than they do, what I keep thinking about in this novel is the question of societal and systemic expectations, of learning versus knowing, of choice and authenticity versus structures and systems. More than that, I come back over and over to questions of power and who makes decisions on what to value in our system and what to devalue.

What kinds of knowledge are worthy? What kinds of learning? Who decides? And who is left out?

—Rachel

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone and Benjamin Zander

“Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view. Find the right framework and extraordinary accomplishment becomes an everyday experience. Each chapter of this book presents a different facet of this approach and describes a new practice for bringing possibility to life.”

The Art of Possibility is one of those formative texts that I go back to from time to time both as a re-affirmation and for re-consideration. It is a book I recommend to everyone because it is equally hopeful and dissonance causing. The book highlights a series of practices, which are considerably aligned or mapped to our Compass Points. While this is unintentional, it does reflect just how seminal this work is when doing aspirational work. The first practice “It’s all invented” is the ultimate example of being an Objector. When you start to see the world through this lens, it’s not a difficult stretch to recognize that everything around us has been designed and can be re-designed (and should be reconsidered). “Leading from any chair” echoes being an Objector as well in that we believe that leadership is a call to act by anyone compelled to do so, regardless of title. I just love the Art of Possibility and hope that you will add it to your “must reads” too.

—Chad