The school, despite everything
Reading Melina Furman is always a stimulating experience . Listening to her presentations and interviews is also a stimulating experience. There's no affectation in her, nor arrogance of intelligence. She offers intriguing questions, answers that don't preclude debate, and a passion for learning and teaching that excites. Gerry Garbulsky, in his many initiatives, and whenever he can, brings her back to the world of ideas. It could be no one else but him, someone whose lifeblood is a passion for learning.
“…Education must confront the temptations of the linear, the abstract , the bland, and the boring…” writes Axel Rivas, and the pedagogue uses these adjectives to characterize inert learning. That is, learning that is repetitive, purely rote, and unanchored in the knowledge intended to nourish our lives and understand the world around us.
At a time when the word "innovate" appears in every sphere of our society with the idea of destroying everything, Furman has understood that, in education, it means eliminating everything that limits students' desire to learn. "Change doesn't come from demolition," he notes in Learning Differently, and uses a very clear example: there's no need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to file away at what prevents it from working properly, what distorts it, what makes it turn poorly.
The school must be the center of transformation, he points out . But not the school in the abstract, as an idea, but the real one, the one where students and teachers meet. There, it is possible to put the tools for change into practice. And also to discuss them, improve them. And discard them if they are not useful for the context in which we find ourselves. The school as a space for total learning, as a stage for reflection and transformation, as a unique potential for cooperative training, as a laboratory for new and revised teaching and learning methodologies.
Always criticized, rarely praised, the pandemic helped us realize the value of school, she says. There, "…inequalities of origin are put on hold, it's a place of socialization and emotional well-being…" and if deep learning occurs there, it can help change the way those who attend it experience the world. Not only is content learned in its classrooms, Furman continues enthusiastically, it's a place that, if well run and lived, greatly influences the lives of its members.
A pincer effect, the author paraphrases Axel Rivas, is necessary for any educational transformation to advance and function: on the one hand, educational policies and the working conditions of teachers; and on the other, a careful, loving, and reflective look to improve what really happens in each of the educational institutions, while advancing a reform of pedagogy that aims to achieve a triumph of deep learning over inert learning.
Deep learning is learning that teaches us content and skills, enabling us to use what we've learned and apply it in different contexts. It's learning we can confidently share with others and connects with the natural curiosity and desire to learn of the human species. It happens in schools, but it's not the predominant learning experience.
Therefore, it is in the classroom and in school spaces where the centrality of change is destined to occur day by day, without neglecting the other parts of that pincer that, at different speeds, will contribute to reducing the obstacles in a wheel that is not moving forward as we would like.
Education is under siege from an unequal reality , which hardworking teachers strive to counter with the methodologies of a profession that is not socially valued as highly as it deserves. Likewise, the classroom is the quintessential territory for education to have meaning for those who learn and those who teach. It requires operating within it with realism, modesty, and ambition, taking ideas and testing them, discussing methodologies with passion and arguments proven in practice. With spirit and in school, despite everything.
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