Mo'olelo's Principles

My next big step in pursuing the Mo'olelo project is doing a literature review and writing my paper. That process should clarify and deepen the project for me, and should help to ground it in a solid and intelligible background of scholarship. That said, I do know that part of what I am hoping to do is unusual. Exactly how unusual will also, hopefully, come up in my background research.

For now, my immediate concern is fleshing out the ABCDs and six principles, since I was not able to do so in my presentation on Wednesday.

AUDIENCE
The audience for Mo'olelo is high school students. In the long term, my hope is to run the program in Hawaii, but I would like to pilot it here in Palo Alto this summer. Because I am doing an internship at both Sacred Heart and East Palo Alto, I can ensure the kind of meaningful diversity I desire. That's the true key to the audience for me: I believe that keeping economically disadvantaged students apart is not healthy or helpful. By grouping East Palo Alto students with SHS students (by mixing Pearl City kids with Punahou kids), I hope to provide valuable perspective to each, and because I propose to teach writing so differently from what they normally experience, both should be on relatively equal footing.

BEHAVIOR
I want to create creative, critical thinkers who have skill with language. Literacy, broadly, is the behavior I wish to create, but literacy in a much more dynamic way than it is normally meant. Comprehending words, actions, movies, music, and so on is one thing. Being conscious of how and why those media have the affect they do is another.

In Greek mythology, Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice because he is so overwhelmed with the power of his own music that he cannot control himself. As he is leading her out of Hell, he cannot help but look back - the only condition Hades makes upon his rescue attempt is that he not glance at her - and so loses her forever. The reason he cannot help but look is his lyre: his music causes him worry, just as it allowed him to descend to Hell in the first place.

With words as with music (as with flash animations, even), there is tremendous power. Passion is an unstoppable force, when used in an art. It takes mastery, and a different kind of education, to bring natural passion to bare. To make it stronger and more precise whilst making it a tool instead of a tragic flaw. It's a fine line to walk, but it's the line that, once crossed, allows men (and women) to proclaim that they are truly free.

CONDITION
Because of what I call "meaningful diversity," the conditions of my students will vary. Regardless, the one expectation I will have of any student who applies is that they be able to read, and willing to write and speak. In this sense, Mo'olelo is not for everyone, because it expects basic literacy and a desire for conversation. For the short-term, also, I expect that students will be able to make it to wherever the sessions are held (perhaps Stanford? Sacred Heart? This is early on the priority list). Ultimately, the primary condition is that every student must want to be there, because without that, the program will fall apart quickly. This may restrict me to "higher achieving" students, but because Mo'olelo promises to be different from normal school, I believe it can attract students who feel otherwise left behind by traditional education.

DEGREE
It is difficult to assess what Mo'olelo strives to do. That said, I expect every student to attend the whole five weeks of the program, and to produce - alone or in groups - a meaningful and high-quality piece of writing. My hope is to reach between 10 and 50 students in this pilot, with numbers depending almost entirely on the amount of funding and the facilities use I can secure. While not central to the Mo'olelo mission, students should be able to transfer the writing, reading, and conversation skills they develop at Mo'olelo to college applications and interviews, as well as traditional coursework when they return to high school the following year.

Now for the six principles:
SITUATION
I am not convinced that the "problems" with education are what mainstream media and research claims they are. I know that's a controversial and difficult path to take, but to me the situation that is most in need of remediation is not, in fact, the loss of STEM students, but the loss of meaningful study in the humanities. Is education a vehicle for producing citizens, or employees? Is it more important that we have highly-skilled, non-critical cogs for a corporate machine, or that we have less-skilled, but more creative and more analytical individuals who will act according to conscience and reason, and who can have a debate without the profound anger that we see every election cycle? I believe that citizens are more important than employees, and that the humanities are the key to true education. I also believe that the humanities - increasingly called the "social sciences" - are in an ongoing crisis. As the emphasis on assessment continues to increase, so too does the "irrelevance" of humanities education to policymakers, teachers, principals, and students. That is a sure way to destroy an already fragile democracy.

CULTURE
Culture is at the heart of what Mo'olelo does, because culture is at the heart of the humanities. It is not my aim to create a curriculum that integrates cultures seamlessly, or that advocates a singular culture over another. Rather, culture is a process of deepening and becoming aware of contradictions. Students should learn about their own histories, and the histories of the places they are from. They should see that writing - in one form or another - traverses all cultures, and that what it is to be human has something to do with language.

USABILITY
Mo'olelo's lessons are portable to every walk of life. There are many situations where perhaps reading, writing, or conversation will not be immediately useful, but there are few people who do not use those skills regularly. The usability of Mo'olelo is, ultimately, the foundational usability of foundational human skills.

THEORIES
There are a variety of theories at work in my thinking about Mo'olelo, but there are a couple that are particularly prominent.

Connectivism - The idea that making connections is more important than having "knowledge." In an age where there is an increasing amount of available information, it is less and less useful or practical to try to hold all of that knowledge in one's head. Instead, where and how to find pertinent information, how to connect it to other information, and how to analyze, share, and discuss that information takes priority.

New Literacy - Writing and reading is no longer constrained to written words on a piece of paper. Increasingly our literacy is and will be measured by our ability to understand digital artifacts of various kinds.

Cognitive Apprenticeship - One well-educated man is worth far less than ten well-taught men. Students from Mo'olelo will be naturally collaborative, and will strive to share what they have learned humbly and effectively.

Metacognition - This is a direct result, to my mind, of a discussion-based and Great Works based curriculum. That said, instructors will be specifically informed about and trained in the metacognitive goals of the program, because without metacognition, there is no learning of the kind Mo'olelo strives for.

St. John's College model - Not so much a theory as an effective practice with which I have much experience. Under-researched, from what I have found, because it self-consciously refuses to produce "assessable outcomes" merely for the sake of being assessed. The intangible outcomes, however, are profound in the level of critical thinking, self-consciousness, metacognitive ability, and adaptability of St. John's graduates. Consider: students with the same curriculum, degree, and undergraduate experience go into and are successful in education, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, business, music, law, movie production, philosophy, writing, mathematics, engineering, and so on. Why not port that to high schoolers?

SCALABILITY
For the short term, this is limited, but ultimately it need not be. The primary limiting factor is availability of teachers comfortable enough with true student-driven, discussion-based classrooms. Because there are so few people trained in the St. John's model, there is a misunderstanding of what "discussion-based," as I mean it, is. Assuming, however, that teachers with natural propensity for classroom discussion (and there are plenty) could be trained in the specifics of what Mo'olelo strives to do for a few days before the course starts, then scalability is essentially infinite. Because Mo'olelo adapts to the cultures of the places it finds itself, it can operate under the same fundamental model in any number of locations. It will never be for all students, of course, but with sufficient expansion, modular lessons and units could be ported into traditional school environments, giving all students a chance to be exposed to a different style of learning.

SUSTAINABILITY
As with any educational non-profit, grants and donations are likely to make up a significant portion of the long-term funding for Mo'olelo. That said, my rough estimates suggest that this program could be significantly cheaper to run than programs I am familiar with in Hawaii (like He'e Nalu), with a decreasing per-student cost as the program gets larger. That said, the primary cost will always be the high-quality teachers and staff necessary to make the program work as it should. Perhaps some of that can come from a small tuition required of students who can afford it. Alternatively, the products that students make could be published and sold as a source of additional revenue for the program (or, perhaps, allowing for a tuition reimbursement to students). Finally, the possible development of modular lessons suggests a way to raise funds through consulting. During the regular school year, Mo'olelo could visit area schools and do one or two day events which would bring in immediate funds and would serve as good recruiting tools for the coming summer.