If you're 18 years old and want to change the world... [part 1]
February 02 2009
If you’re eighteen years old and you want to change the
world, where do you start?
Most people could rattle off a few first steps. Register to vote, for one. Volunteer at a local hospital, shelter, or school. Join a campus activist group. Take a civics class, and learn how government works.
But what if you want to go further? What if you want to connect what happens within the classroom to what you’re passionate about in the larger world? Have you ever been involved in community service and found yourself asking questions like: “What caused this poverty? How did this war begin? Where did this ecological disaster or public health crisis come from?”
What if you could put your ideals into action, not as an extracurricular activity, but as part of your education?
A conversation along these lines had been brewing at Bennington for several years. And in the fall of Bennington’s 75th anniversary year, president Elizabeth Coleman announced a new curricular initiative. “We intend,” she said, “to turn the full force of the intellectual and imaginative power, passion, and boldness of our students, faculty, and staff on developing strategies for acting on pressing public needs.” The aim of the initiative, Coleman explained, is to reconnect thought and action, civic virtue and the most demanding uses of intellect and imagination. And the objective in this radical rethinking of curriculum is not just to study these issues but ultimately to do something about them—no matter what your area of study may be.
Learning Democracy conference, Bennington, 2005
In design labs, students and faculty come together to grapple with one particular, urgent, real-world problem.
Part of this new initiative has resulted in a new course format: design labs. Design labs do not follow a syllabus, nor rely on a single expert to guide the discussion. Instead, a group of students and faculty come together to grapple with one particular, urgent, real-world problem. Collaboratively, they explore questions within this problem, combining research, analysis, and contact with experts in the field. In the short term, the aim is to develop frameworks that can generate the most effective solutions; in the long term, it is to help students become the sort of people who can actually carry out that perennial commandment of commencement speeches: Now go out and change the world.
When pilot versions of three design labs were launched in 2007—addressing issues of the environment, conflict resolution, and education reform—huge questions loomed. What would happen when action was the driving, organizing principle of a class? Would it intensify the intellectual work, or diffuse it? Were genuine advances aimed at systemic change possible in the brief compass of a term—or a year-long course? What would actually happen in such an open-ended and daunting environment?
Branding Britain design lab: student presentation
A Case Study: The story of Rethinking Education
Rethinking Education, like each of the design labs, began with a single premise—in this case, that the education system in the United States is not working. On the first day of a lab that would span two terms, Coleman and Dean of Admissions Ken Himmelman greeted a group of about 20 students, mostly first-years. As Liz Meier ’11 describes it, the pair “started out by saying ‘We’re not experts, we don’t know any more than you do. But we all care about this issue, so let’s do this together.’ And we all kind of said, ‘What do we do now?’”
From there the lab began to read broadly. They researched private, public, and charter schools; the problems that crop up in classrooms; issues of testing, tenure, unions, and standards. “It was overwhelming at first,” says Crystal Barrick ’11. “There was no syllabus, no books I had to buy. But it was also really exciting.”
In retrospect, Coleman and Himmelman think the
“overwhelming” stage was necessary—not least because it mirrors how things work
in the world. Community and global problems don’t come equipped with syllabi,
either. “If you try to make things manageable,” Coleman says, “you miss the
great intellectual challenge. If you take something like education and say
‘Let’s talk about charter schools,’ it’s not that that’s not interesting, but
you’ve already answered the tough questions: ‘Where should you focus your
energy? What are the changes that will transform possibilities?’”
“What are the changes that will transform possibilities?”
Amidst this mass of information, the group was searching out the “critical variables”—the most powerful factors in determining whether a given classroom, school, or system works. Most students had opinions on what those variables might be; standardized testing and large classes were favorite targets. But Himmelman and Coleman urged the students to lay assumptions aside and look for evidence.
The Ocean Project design lab: student presentation
“Many people will tell you,” Himmelman says, “that class size is the most important thing in education, and if we could just get everyone in a class of 12, we’d be fine. But the research doesn’t bear it out. So that’s a variable, but that is not the critical variable. What we’re after is how do you know it’s a key factor? Don’t just tell me you think it is, show me how you know.”
Within a month, the group had uncovered key factors in determining whether an educational system works.
And within a month, the group had uncovered research—including a 2006 Brookings Institution report and studies from the Chicago Consortium of School Research—that pointed to their critical variable. “It turns out that what is critical,” Himmelman says, “is teacher quality. If you’re behind grade level in reading, and you have a bad teacher two years in a row, you can almost never make it up without some serious remedial intervention later. You’re behind for the rest of your life. A variable that powerful gives you multiple pathways for action. And that’s when the students get really jazzed: Now I have a foothold. Now the very hard work begins in making the transition to what do you do with that knowledge.”