I love and use the “ecosystem” metaphor for thinking about education systems. It returns the schema to a biological one, remembering there are living things at the heart of what we’re doing. It opens the door to other biological terms and considerations - sustainability, food webs, even predators and prey.
The thing I worry about is the relevance of the metaphor in 20 years when we have marginalized basic sciences within education systems save for those students who enter our schools with the capitals necessary to qualify for such opportunities. Once basic components of education, they are being pushed out either for hyper-focus on remediation or perceived disabilities do to a lack of universal design.
It’s close to my concern connected to calling everything a literacy - media, information, digital, AI, etc. We have not yet shown an ability to design for equity in literacy literacy. This move to pour time and attention into these “new” literacies strikes me as chasing the shiny and new rather than solving for the urgent and wicked. While troubling on many levels, this also fails to account for the likelihood that bringing all learners to proficiency with these new literacies would be exponentially advanced by attending to this foundational one.
Largely, we’re not doing this. And so, the students who are going to be trained up in these literacies and the sciences that will help to see the ecosystems are the same students who are privileged to show up to schools with their intellectual pockets flush with the capital necessary to grant them access to extension activities, robotics teams, and maker clubs.
I love and use the “ecosystem” metaphor for thinking about education systems. It returns the schema to a biological one, remembering there are living things at the heart of what we’re doing. It opens the door to other biological terms and considerations - sustainability, food webs, even predators and prey.
The thing I worry about is the relevance of the metaphor in 20 years when we have marginalized basic sciences within education systems save for those students who enter our schools with the capitals necessary to qualify for such opportunities. Once basic components of education, they are being pushed out either for hyper-focus on remediation or perceived disabilities do to a lack of universal design.
It’s close to my concern connected to calling everything a literacy - media, information, digital, AI, etc. We have not yet shown an ability to design for equity in literacy literacy. This move to pour time and attention into these “new” literacies strikes me as chasing the shiny and new rather than solving for the urgent and wicked. While troubling on many levels, this also fails to account for the likelihood that bringing all learners to proficiency with these new literacies would be exponentially advanced by attending to this foundational one.
Largely, we’re not doing this. And so, the students who are going to be trained up in these literacies and the sciences that will help to see the ecosystems are the same students who are privileged to show up to schools with their intellectual pockets flush with the capital necessary to grant them access to extension activities, robotics teams, and maker clubs.