Thesis_Article_V2
In Northern California, where the Sierra Nevadas meet the Cascade Range, lies a small community called Greenville. The town is small and, along with its neighbours throughout Indian Valley, paints an idyllic picture of rural simplicity. They say there that you can never pop out to run an errand, because you will meet someone you know, and be drawn into a conversation that may last 5 minutes or all afternoon.
But the town itself is not quite as bucolic as it sounds. When we look at the statistics, we see a town falling behind the California average in many different categories. For example, median income is about half the California median. Median house value is less than a third of the California median. And unemployment is nearly 20%[1]. When historical census data for median income is converted into today’s dollar rate, a steady decline can be seen, from $26,062 in 1969 to $23,309 in 2011. This blue collar, traditionally Republican enclave has always been a poor county, but over time, it has stayed that way.
The county is not just impoverished economically. By the institutionally recognised measure of educational improvement, standardised testing, the town is also scholastically impoverished. The average for every high-school grade falls below the California average in every subject. Society places value in the acquisition of educational certificates, and by this rationale, Greenville is also highly impoverished. Only 8% have a college degree, half the California average.
These statistics should be placed in the context of several recent events that have shaped the area’s recent history. In 1984, the implementation of the Timber Tax restructured the regional tax watersheds for the logging industry. Revenues gathered from regional logging ventures were pooled and then redistributed to the whole State, meaning incoming tax revenue was severely depleted. Local infrastructure and services were no longer directly funded by the then profitable logging industry.
A second influence to suffocate the economic growth of the area was the conservation law surrounding the Northern Spotted Owl. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan prohibited the felling of trees within 10 miles of a Northern Spotted Owl nest. Logging, having been the county’s leading industry since the Gold Rush, was more or less put to bed by the plight of this endangered bird. These conservation efforts have led to the closure of all but two sawmills in the county. Attrition of the economic driver for the region as contributed to an 8% population decrease since 1990, which has, in turn, led to increased cuts in the educational sector.
One school in particular has suffered as a result of these shifts. Greenville Junior/Senior High School has seen its student population decrease consistently over the last 10 years along with its teacher pool. Community dissatisfaction with this scenario has led to the opening of a second school, Indian Valley Academy. While the two schools are fundamentally different in their pedagogic models, it must be remembered that they both fall short of the median State achievement requirements. Today, GJ/SHS has 100 K-12 students and a student teacher ratio of 1:15. It uses traditional, or back-to-basics teaching techniques. IVA, is smaller with fifty-three children, enrolled in grades 6-9 with a 1:10 teacher student ratio. It uses project-based learning as its primary pedagogical method.
It becomes problematic to architecturalise the performance issues of the two schools, but it may be potentially useful to analyse the systems of power that operate within the two pedagogically different schools. In his book, Discipline and Punish (1975), Michel Foucault charts the history of discipline in institutions from the military through to schools. Through the subjugation of the body these institutions create what he terms the docile body. The docile body is subjected, used, transformed and improved. Three major strategies are implemented to impose discipline; control of space, control of time and the capitalisation of time.[2]
When viewed through a Foucauldian lense, the western education system in general has become a machine for creating docile bodies. Indeed what Foucault pejoratively calls exercises (tasks of increasing complexity that, upon completion, mark the acquisition of new skill or knowledge) have become the keystone of modern education.
Both schools implement different elements of these strategies in different amounts. In terms of controlling space, both schools enclose the bounds of the institution as a protective place. They both also partition the space into cells, thus invoking another mechanism of the disciplinary machine. They both inherit, from strategies of control originally found in monastic life, a rigid timetable as a means of partitioning time to facilitate the creation of the docile body.
GJ/SHS employs rigid internal spatial arrangements that serve to enforce the rank or place of the teacher and student within a classification system. The school also, by assigning specific classrooms for single subjects, invokes a rule of functional spaces where ambiguity of use is eliminated and the production process of the student can be maximised. One part of the syllabus that is paid great credence at GJ/SHS is competitive sports. By controlling the body through exhaustive drills, the school is enforcing the Foucauldian assertion that in the disciplinary machine, the correct use of the body means that nothing remains unproductive.
IVA maintains flexible classrooms, both in layout and function, thus coding space to a lesser degree and relaxing one mechanism of the disciplining machine. Equally, IVA does not run an organised sports programme, and therefore, does not place a correspondence between the body and gesture, entirely surrendering the mechanism of control concerned with the correct use of the body. However, the project-based learning methods that they employ often result in a single document that is continually added to by all the different subjects. This artifact becomes objectified and fetishised within the school and as such acts as an articulation of a body-object discipline mechanism. In the language of Foucauld, discipline characterises every relationship between the body and the object it controls.
GJ/SHS is revealed through these calisthenics as a slightly more restrictive institution, employing more strategies for discipline and potentially generating more docile bodies as a result. These docile bodies, within a school environment become, to quote Ivan Illich, “ “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence and fluency with the ability to say something new.”[3]
Why, then are these schools both failing their students? How can we gain understanding into the success of a learning environment through a lense of power dynamics? Perhaps one strategy would be to expand the field from ‘learning environments’ to ‘places of cultural exchange’. Seven case studies have been chosen which exhibit varying degrees of conventionality to traditional learning environments (see fig. 1). The larger themes of control of space (The Art of Distribution)(see fig. 2) and control of time (Control of Activity)(see fig. 3) have provided a framework for a more detailed meta-analysis of each case study. Each case study has been placed along a different spectrum that corresponds to Foucault’s criteria for the creation of docile bodies. In doing so, a greater understanding is generated about how these methods of cultural exchange either embrace or dispel the control mechanisms of the Foucauldian model.
One particular case study is notable for its informal framework. Although it is difficult to instrumentalise the mechanisms involved in elder/novice exchanges, the primacy of this method of learning cannot be underestimated, particularly for this small town. In this community, the role of the mentor and peer-to-peer exchanges are especially important, as is evidenced by the number of community based organisations in Indian Valley. When compared to the population of the area, (1,129) there is a disproportionate amount of religious institutions (9 churches), arts and culture organisations (6) and community based non-profits (20).
The benefits of strong community are well established, but recent research by Sugata Mitra, an educational technologist based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, have exposed the power and efficacy of community based learning. His Hole In The Wall experiments, which began in 1999, placed unmanned computers embedded into a wall three feet off the ground in a slums in New Delhi. Curious children then began interacting with the computers, working out for themselves how to operate it. Within days crowds of kids were helping each other to understand how to browse the web, record music, use the webcam and many other things.
Another experiment conducted in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne put a group of twelve year old students into teams and gave them four GCSE[4] questions to answer using one computer for each team. They were allowed to look over the share information and collaborate with other teams in the sourcing of this information. The fastest team completed it in twenty minutes, the slowest in forty-five. The average score was 76%. When questioned whether this was deep learning, Dr Mitra returned two months later and asked the same questions, but this time there were no teams and no computers. This time, the average score was again 76%. The strong retention of information was linked to the social interaction that each student went through in finding out the answers. Collaborating and playing out community roles is therefore not only a strong way to provoke learning environments, but also a strong way to retain the information.
A strong sense of community clearly prevails in the Greenville. This expands the pool of ‘places of cultural exchange’ to places outside the bounds of the school building. It also potentially expands the pool of students and the pool of teachers. If we apply this framework to the writings of Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich we can draw a couple of useful points that we can generate potential for new learning paradigms.
“A good education system should have three purposes: It should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”[5]
In this framework, everybody has something that they can teach somebody else. Regardless of age, rank, institutionally sanctioned certificate, or any other marker that today signifies ‘schooling’ status, the provision of the exchange of culture in peer-to-peer environments eliminates the disciplinary machine that creates docile bodies. In this model, the construction worker teaches the grandfather chess, the child teaches the pastor facebook, the designer teaches the painter photoshop. The traditional programme of the school is re-evaluated and cast anew as the main community focus, a place of fluid cultural exchange and a true generator of individuals and innovation. The school is combined with the community centre which is combined with the salon-era coffee shop.
This radical proposal for a new kind of school is for a society that does not currently exist. The totalitarian nature of western government has no motivation to reassess the current learning paradigm as it provides them with a willing conveyor belt of docile bodies. These docile bodies are so accepting of the hierarchically insitutionalised world that has been created for them, that they can no longer see an alternative. In that respect this becomes the first revolutionary step in the plight of the individual. And it may be that frustration with the currently failing schools paradigm is the thing that begins to tip the scales of change for a new social arrangement.
