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Our schools are riddles packed inside an enigma, a bundle of contradictions that get played out day after day in dramas great and small around the world. We say that we want our students to be independent learners and then create for them voluminous lists of standards (now emerging as competencies) that threaten to turn even the most intrinsically rewarding intellectual adventures into the most tedious of chores.
We tell teachers that we want them to be real professionals, and then we tangle them up in such a thicket of conflicting demands that they lack the necessary time and space for any sustained critical and creative thinking (the average teacher in Alberta puts in the equivalent of a 56-hour workweek). We tell our principals that we want them to be risk-takers and bold instructional leaders. But then we rank their schools so insistently and pervasively that even the most idealistic and student-centred among them find themselves drawn into a labyrinthine world of competitive data-mongering and policy-induced one-upmanship increasingly driven by the ephemeral goal of creating 21st-century schools.
These problems of education are not unique to educators in Alberta, whether in Calgary, Edmonton or Lethbridge. They reflect a tsunami of educational change today that is being carried forward in many educational systems as management techniques from the for-profit sector surge more deeply than ever into the lives of educators and students in our public schools.
We see evidence of this tsunami when we read about high-tech companies that fly district leaders off to glamorous resorts before sealing lucrative deals to bring their products into schools. We see it in competitive bids to businesses to help schools manage student data that end up pushing their offerings through the Internet into the homes of bewildered parents.
We also see it when some of our professional colleagues decide that since you evidently can’t beat the rush toward markets, why not join them? It’s apparently not enough anymore to settle for being a mere teacher charged with passing on the accumulated wisdom of all of human history to a rising generation. Instead, why not become a “teacherpreneur” who combines edgy instructional panache with the managerial skills that will help you make some hefty profits on the side?
Disheartening as these developments are, whining about the loss of the “good old days” or the irritating distractions of the current moment gets us nowhere. Fire needs to be met with fire. Creative disruption from the side of the business sect needs to be met with creative disruption from those dedicated to public service.
This is why it has been such an unparalleled delight to watch the exuberant blend of pedagogical chutzpah and political savoir faire that has blossomed into the Finland–Alberta (FINAL) school partnership in recent years. For the uninitiated, this improbable partnership was born of a rediscovery of joyful experimentation: What if you found a way to bring together not only principals and teachers from two of the world’s highest-achieving jurisdictions, but also their students, to learn from one another? What might happen if instead of having a list of predetermined outcomes established from on high, you placed those closest to the learning nucleus—educators and students—into sustained interaction with one another to get a better sense of their granular, everyday experiences in schools in Finland and Alberta? What if instead of predetermining every meeting and interaction with a list of pre-established “deliverables” (we seem to have a special talent for creating ugly neologisms in education), you asked those closest to where the teaching and learning occur to activate themselves to pay exquisite attention to the many small cultural nuances that shape the learning environment and make it, in spite of many all-too-human obstacles, unusually rich in Alberta and Finland?
I’ve been privileged to have studied FINAL closely for three years now and to observe Finnish and Albertan educators working side by side (literally cheek by jowl) in one another’s schools. What has been most interesting in the whole experience is the way in which educators and students are just as insightful and penetrating (if not more so) in terms of their observations as the most sophisticated psychometricians or policy wonks. Finnish students, for example, have been delighted by the degree of informality and friendly interaction between Albertan educators and their students. They shook their heads in collective wonder and enthusiasm at a spirited game of floor hockey between students and staff in Crowsnest, for example. They were awed by the friendliness, school spirit, and appreciation of diversity they found in Alberta. They’ve taken back home a clear message for Finnish educators: Take the time to get to know us the way that Albertan educators do. Pay more attention to us as whole people and not just as students. Open up and relax a bit so we can enjoy one another more.
Albertan delegations, on the other hand, were initially startled by the degree to which Finnish education is in many ways quite conservative. In spite of the enormous presence of Nokia in the Finnish economy, Albertans saw little use of computers in Finnish classrooms, and frontal instruction was far more common than what they were used to back home. But as they came to learn that Finnish teachers have far more freedom (and time, precious time!) to develop lesson plans, they found that a meticulously crafted traditional lesson is better than an innovative one that has been thrown together at the last minute. They were impressed with the ability of the practically minded Finns to create a rich and diverse curriculum for non-college-bound youth by training them for trades and occupations with high social status and incomes. The consequence back home? Albertans have returned to their schools with a renewed enthusiasm for vocational education, not as a fallback option for the academically challenged but, rather, as an option with integrity and dignity in its own right.
So, has the best part of the FINAL partnership been what the Finns have learned from the Albertans and what the Albertans have learned from the Finns? Perhaps. But my observations have led me to suspect that the richest part of FINAL may actually be what Albertans have learned about Albertans and what Finns have learned about Finns. To be in Finland with colleagues from Grande Prairie, Edmonton, Calgary and the Crowsnest Pass, and to sit with them at the end of a long day of visiting schools in Finland, was to watch some of the highest forms of professional learning enacted before one’s eyes. Albertans wondered: Could it be that we are overlooking the talents of our kids because we don’t have vocational programs like the Finns? Might it be that we do a disservice to our profession by having such a daunting list of standards to achieve rather than the more open-ended and flexible Finnish model? How can we attain the same level of trust and professional judgment that Finnish teachers enjoy?
Finnish educators, for their part, have had a different set of questions to grapple with. They ask themselves, It’s great that we have high test score results on international assessments, but are we preparing our children as well as Albertans for a world marked by enormous cultural and linguistic diversity? We say that we care about our students, but could we take the risk of being more open-minded and curious about them, not just in the classroom but also outside of it?
All of which is to say that Albertan educators have been enormously enriched by the FINAL partnership. The various cultural blinders that we all suffer from to one degree or another have been challenged, and the twin delegations have had to come to grips with just how arbitrary many of our choices are in terms of how we construct our schools. Understanding this subjective dimension of education is empowering. It reminds us that, ultimately, we have more freedom than we often imagine. Consequently, we have a deep moral responsibility to exercise that freedom as wisely and benevolently as possible.
So, how should we think about FINAL in the final analysis? It’s actually not about what Finnish educators saw in one school in Calgary, or what Albertans witnessed in a school in Tampere. Don’t feel badly if you couldn’t join those Alberta delegations and if you stayed behind while others ventured abroad. In the final analysis, it’s really about breaking out of what English Romantic poet William Blake called “the mind-forged manacles,” which get in the way of imagining and enacting a better and brighter future for all our students.
Sometimes we need to get on a plane and go to a faraway place to develop a new set of lenses for understanding our everyday lives and our teaching. This is true, but it’s equally true that sometimes nothing is more electrifying than a quiet conversation with a student you’ve overlooked in the past but now discover is full of all kinds of insights and understandings.
Ideally, our lives are rich both horizontally and vertically, when we cross the artificial barriers we ourselves have created: our own school walls, system boundaries and jurisdiction bureaucracies. We benefit the most when we can harmonize ways of looking without and looking within. In that way, we can transmit to our students our own excitement about the unending project of education, whatever form it may take in the ever-mysterious and unpredictable pathways of our lives.
Dennis Shirley is professor of education, Lynch School of Education, Boston College. He is the co-author of The Mindful Teacher, The Fourth Way and The Global Fourth Way. Shirley is a regular contributor to the ATA Magazine.
