An end of year reflection: What a waste
Why do we always seem to finish the school year with so much unsustainable physical waste?
It’s the end of the school year in Scotland, and in many other places too, heralding a time to get rid of the old to make way for the new. In some areas of school this will mean clearing out folders, getting rid of lots of paper and clearing out desks, but in the Design and Technology department this waste is often more obvious.
The image above is the waste from just a single class, from one classroom, in only one school. Scale that to every school with a Design and Technology department. Then add the maker-spaces. It’s not hard to imagine how this begins to add up, and begs the question:
Why do we finish the school year with so much unsustainable physical waste?
One of the main reasoning is stems from skills being taught in isolation, with no ownership by the students for the process or the end product. Do we know if our students value the skills they are being taught? Some will, and although that is by no means a a bad takeaway it still leaves us asking why so many products are left behind: the majority students don’t recognise their achievement, value it or want to ‘own’ it.
It seems that the general attitude from our students is that these mug racks, shelves and boxes (along with plenty of other projects) are only completed because ‘you need to do stuff in school’.
Not only is this a huge waste of materials (never more so than in this age of recycling and reuse), but is a floundering wasteful pedagogy. Learning should be owned by the learner, and instead we’re being confronted here by the reality of what happens when learning is neither owned or valued.
Yet we know it’s not always been this way, at least not in the schools of Scotland. Students had the freedom to design and build what they wanted, and although we do still see examples of this, current courses are generally far more prescribed and offer little flexibility for individuals to create freely. Although this tends to ensure each student learns the same or a similar set of skills, it sounds better in theory than in reality. Instead we see many students just go through the motions rather than invest their interest in the subject or project at hand.
Over the past few weeks I have worked with a huge range of students around the world, from Amsterdam to Melbourne and home again. One such group brought together around 25 students, aged between 15 and 16, all of whom were stuck in school over the exam leave period, having no exams to revise and sit themselves. The students from St Andrews Secondary School in the East End of Glasgow were disconnected from learning for a wide range of reasons, with most only attending because the law dictates they have to. They want to leave as soon as they hit their 16th birthday.
NoTosh came in to facilitate a week long immersive experience for the group which saw them take on a range of challenges and problems, equipping them with the skills needed to get on in the workplace. I took them through the NoTosh Design Thinking structure which helped to give them ownership of their own learning.
The outcome was students connecting with the learning: they owned it. By being given the opportunity to choose what it was they were doing, which direction they’d take, and how they’d get there, students saw that they had the ability to not only run a project but their own learning, too. It wasn’t always an easy process, not by any stretch of the imagination but this was mostly born out of an expectation from students that this would just be like any other project they’d done before. Instead, when they realised it was the opposite, and that they were the drivers of the work. An experience based on good pedagogy and the support of a solid Design Thinking process.
I wonder about the pupils who didn’t value their work enough to take it home with them, like those long forgotten pieces in the image at the top of this story. Had they been given the opportunity to lead their own way a little more, define the direction of the work, and subsequently own that work a little more, would they have wanted to take their pieces home? Or is it possible that this is a sign of something more deeply wrong in the learning?
Maybe it’s a sign that learning is perceived as something that is just for school, and not for taking away.
We need learning to be authentic and connected to the world as well as the learner. We need to be the beacons of light that lead students through the dark, through the difficult, but without dictating their every move.
Learning is a process that should evolve with the learner, allow for freedom of expression and creativity to shine through, while preparing each student with the skills and knowledge to enter the adult.
