What compels us? Pulls us? Catalyzes us? Connects us? Who are we and what are we doing in this profession? In this public sector? In this institution we call school? Why do some of us keep coming back, day after day, year after year, decade after decade until we look back and realize that we accomplished something called a career; even as we watched others go silently into the night across those years? Why do some of us keep pulling ourselves up and off the floor of the ring to continue on to the next round, in spite of our bruises and the blood we spill?
What binds – us – together?
Recent blog posts, twitter conversations, and #edchat discussions center the language of educators who attempt to answer these questions. Some capture the cadence of our conversation with the sometimes painful, sometimes achingly beautiful words and images of a poet. Others of us debate with impassioned, but crisp, political analysis and question whether we must return to another swing of our own perverse Newtonian pendulum. Or, is it possible, this time, we become the quantum butterfly whose beating wings shift air currents across this nation, creating a learning world that we could never have envisioned in isolation of each other?
Backchanneling as friends and peers, I fear we watch from the outside as the next sentence is being written in the his/herstory of American Education. We know well the drafting, revision, and editing processes in which our communities, our states, and nation now engage. We understand how mainstream media, political positions, new policy, new legislation, budget deliberations, and public hearings give voice to those who attempt to define the some, the all, of us. In parallel universes, two conversations exist. Ours, a backchannel voice exploring the meaning of words like passion, joy, drive, inspiration, learning, democracy. Theirs, a public voice of market share, votes, rules, money, incentives, brand placement, status quo rhetoric.
The intersection of these voices juxtaposes the pendulum and the butterfly. Both objects of motion- one coldly inanimate, the other joyfully alive. One defined by the freedom to move at will, the other by external control. One mechanized. The other, part of the ecosystem. In most ways, the current story of public education represents our commitment to Newtonian physics, the classical mechanization of the industrial school pendulum that many of us and our public hold dear. But, in the backchannel, our quantum butterfly wings unfold; with each pump of fluid we weigh our potential to take flight. So, what will give lift to our backchannel voices? Will it be new legislation, policy, funding, political voices? I think not.
We will loft education anew when we generate an ever-increasing ratio of educators who believe in a mission to create spaces of inspiration for learners and learning. It will take more than 1 or 10 percent of us speaking the poetic and political voices of passion, joy, and drive to create those spaces in which young people and educators can thrive in these contemporary days. Our vision must become a vision of lift, influence, and power that creates a front channel for our voices, shifting us out of the backchannel. We need our best educational technologists, our courageous leaders, our creative geniuses to create the front channel we must become. It’s our job, and our time, to increase the inspiration ratio in every community in this nation. Otherwise, we must accept again the next push of the educational pendulum and forget the potential of the butterfly.
“If not us, who? If not now, when?” Governor George Romney to the Michigan Legislature (9/20/63)
