The Tension Between Reform and a New Start

I spent last week in Minnesota caring for my parents while my brother and his family got a much needed vacation.

I’m back and still struggling to swim upstream in my rss feeds, but I do want to comment briefly on two important posts regarding higher education that appeared while I was gone. Both posts were written by George Siemens. One is Here we are…there we are going; the other is Change that prevents real change.

The first focuses on OERs; the second on textbook alternatives and Flatworld Knowledge. But each post speaks to a deeper underlying issue that is captured in the following quotes (one from each post):

I’m increasingly dismayed at the quality of thinking with regard to educational reform.

If we are to change, we might as well have the right kind of change. If we are going to expend energy envisioning a new world of education, we might as well be bold, creative, and future-focused.

From this core, the two posts fray (at least for me) as Siemens thinks through his concerns. Some of what he writes makes sense. Some doesn’t. And some seems just plain wrong. But this is a minor matter really. Siemens succeeds wonderfully in broaching a difficult topic in an engaging manner. In the two posts, you can almost visibly see Siemens weigh the various factors that influence his position on whether to “work within the system or create a secondary system” [his words].

While in Minnesota, I almost accidentally discovered two poems that address the same tension that Siemens identifies. Both poems were written by Kay Ryan, who is the current Poet Laureate in the United States. They appear in her book from 2005 called The Niagara River. Because of copyright concerns, I won’t quote either in its entirety.

In “The Past,” Ryan laments that “sometimes there’s suddenly no way to get from one part to another, as though the past were a frozen lake breaking up.” In “Least Action,” she puzzles about “the principle of least action, by which in one branch of rabbinical thought the world might become the Kingdom of Peace not through the tumult and destruction necessary for a New Start but by adjusting little parts a little bit.”

The tension between these two poems, one expressing an absolute need for discontinuous change and the other wishing that incremental reform might suffice, reflect a tension I hear in each of Siemens’ posts.

I suppose it’s a tension we all feel to differing degrees. And while the two extremes are not mutually exclusive, most of us do choose a position on the continuum, even if it’s an unconscious decision. It’s wonderful to see Siemens make such a conscious consideration in such a public manner.