Our dialogues showed that we believe in the mainstream educational system; we were delighted in discovering helpful learning techniques as well our challenges to get access to this knowledge.
Our dialogues revealed that people never stop learning; if the educational system exclude some people, they survive through using other knowledge, believing that they do not need the mainstream schools.
We learned that the mainstream system needs our help to be successful to include us: Our dialogues showed the outsiders reaction to some practices that have been taken for grant and most of the time not been perceived as excluding practices.
Despite the educational system being based on the idea of scarcity (selling, competing, reasoning, trying to repeat past successes, hording for the future), our experience showed the classroom as an opportunity to experience the idea of abundance, where the words are diversity, present, quality time, caring, collaborating and innovation. Students and educators are in class together to make a difference on each other.
We explored what knowledge is and we feel there is a call for a complementary knowledge paradigm; we need to care deeply about what we are doing; we need to be empowered to pay attention to our intuition, empowered to spend more time with heart and soul issues.
In order to increase the number of students who succeed on the academic path, people need to listen to the uniqueness and the unexpectedness of each event, of each person as a whole being. This listening style requires the use of other paradigms than the traditional science-industrialization one; the traditional science-industrialization paradigm listens to the general situation, classifies commonalities, establishing safe known paths to be followed, it divides and focuses on only one part of the whole, it separates mind from soul. Paraphrasing the Swiss sociologist Max Frish[1], the educational system calls for students and there came human beings, it calls for teachers and there came human beings.
Teachers and school staff should to be empowered to use their humanity. Measures, rules, plans, career, and benchmarking are important to give us an overview; they belong to the science-industrialization paradigm. After the overview, in the classroom, when it is time to pinpoint, teachers need powers and tools to be more than teachers.
From the dialogues and narratives, three themes emerged LIFE, SCHOOL and CLASSROOM.
a) We experienced LIFE as a place where STUDENTS ARE MORE THAN LEARNERS.
b) We experienced the SCHOOL as a place where SCHOOL STAFF ARE MORE THAN CAREERS and where students go to build more than a career
c) We experienced the CLASSROOM as a place where TEACHERS ARE MORE THAN TEACHERS and LEARNERS ARE MORE THAN LEARNERS
- In LIFE, we emerged proud of our achievements as friends, as family members and as survivors. This means that words like present, honesty, care, trust, respect, fun, current job, family orient our reasoning more than words like future, graduation, class attendance, career;
- In SCHOOL, the dialogues portrayed culture shocks between our reasoning and the school's; there are plenty of opportunities to improve flexibility, versatility, communication, young adult and adult learning suitability and community integration;
- In CLASSROOM, the dialogues opened a revealing window to the daily struggles of people with learning or social challenges and to the impact of a teacher who accept the challenge of an enriched teaching job, where instead of only focusing on the transforming the student minds, he is in life together with the students, focused on the whole person (mind, body and spirit), engaging in conversation, transforming students and being transformed by them. The dialogues showed different kinds of culture shocks and revealed the impact of the dominance of the left brain style on people’s lives. In CLASSROOM, the dialogues showed practical examples of actions that allow all students and their teacher to better integrate; the ability of showing the will to address the student's needs was crucial to the success of our time together: the teacher was a learner.
Enrichment and empowerment are not easy tasks; there are tradition issues, paradigm issues and comfort issues. But our experience suggested the mainstream educational system has been trying hard, and today there are computer technologies as well managing/business/marketing techniques to help. Students and community voices are coming in to complete the puzzle!
[1] Frisch said about his country’s immigrants policy“ we call for workers and there came human beings”.
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