Flickr Photo by Sam Jacoby
Glass walls let the light in everywhere. What caught my eye was a series of small structures made of straws and tiny plastic connectors sitting on long white counters amid sleek computers monitors. Play, I thought…people here know how to play.
I had just walked into the M.I.T. Media Lab in Boston, where I could palpate disruptive technology, excitement and an exquisite open-endedness that was firing up my neural network. I glanced at the group of four teachers my America Achieves Teacher Fellowship had sent there and we all had the look of having stumbled into a candy factory. The 163,000 square feet around me had been created to be a literal laboratory fostering an anti-disciplinary culture that focuses on improving the human experience. Art, science, technology, and design converged in a place where Leonardo Da Vinci would feel at home in a dream.
For almost 30 years, the Media Lab has brought together inventors, artists and researchers to create for the future. The place is bursting with nanotechnology, data-visualizations, robots that express emotions, and work spaces where students and researchers can make gadgets they dream up at any time of the day or night.
Media Lab Director, Joi Ito, a major global thinker and advocate for the transformational power of technology, speaks of nine principles that will help us work in a future world of disruptive technologies. These principles emphasize resilience over strength, pull over push, risk over safety, systems over objects, compasses over maps, practice over theory, disobedience over compliance, emergence over authority, and learning over education.
What’s a teacher to do with all of this? Many teachers tend to like order, planning, and outcomes, but the virtual genie is already out of the bottle with a force that is shattering all known academic order like an anti-disciplinarian tsunami. Perceptive teachers know that all known territory is receding; yet the public demands that teachers become increasingly “effective” and accountable even as they are gripping onto the shards of life rafts from the last century and desperately trying to learn the habits of mind and skill sets needed for the future.
The truth, as I see it, is that we are all learning new navigation skills as we ride the waves together. Teachers, students and the people who organize and support schools will need to rely on a spirit of playfulness, courage, teamwork, insatiable curiosity, and new patterns of classroom flow that will be reflected in the way we organize time, space, and human efforts. We’ll need to ensure that students have the time they need to play while working on projects of their choosing, but still be supported by teachers, resources, and the sequential skills that school provides. We don’t have to sacrifice the nuts and bolts of learning; we just have to make sure that we allow our students to use them to create.
Early the next morning, the spirit of innovation I had witnessed at M.I.T. Media Lab found a home in my New Jersey classroom. My elementary school students and I brainstormed robots to become friends, help with tasks, protect them, or tell amazing stories. We talked about the limits and potential of artificial intelligence and what the world might look like when they grew up. As I watched my students playfully collaborate to design their perfect cyber-friend, I knew that the future was right here.
Maryann Woods-Murphy is the Gifted and Talented Specialist for Nutley Public Schools with thirty-five years of teaching experience. She is the New Jersey Teacher of the Year 2010, a Washington Teaching Ambassador Fellow 2011, and has served as an America Achieves Fellow since 2012.
