Radical change starts with education

Radical change in education doesn’t start on screen but “Radical” – the Mexican film written and directed by Christopher Zalla – transmits the type of emotions you need to keep believing in the power of education to change the world. As Frank Capra said: “I thought drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”

“The experience of watching a film – in words of Ian Christie for our EXPeditions platform – is one of being drawn into a world which is not the world in which you are sitting. You cross a threshold and you enter a world that has been created on screen for you.”

Is that true for “Radical”? Is “Radical” one more “Americanada”, one of these typical north American films with an happy end or a symbol of a radical change in education that could happen in real life?

“But you do have one thing that makes you the equal of any kid in the world,”Juárez Correa said. “Potential.”

José Urbina López Primary School sits in Matamoros next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school has no computers and almost no access to internet. To get to the school, students are under threat of armed groups when not already recruited by them. Just across the border in Brownsville, Texas, students have laptops, high-speed Internet, and tutoring. Everything seems to be decided beforehand: students in Matamoros are born to be among the worst in the country. Prediction seems to come true: 45 percent had failed the math section, and 31 percent had failed Spanish in the Mexico’s national achievement exam at the end of primary school.

The story – originally told by Wired – is one of a visionary teacher, Juárez Correa, that will try a radical new method to unlock his students’ potential and beat the odds. And it worked: “Paloma (one of the heroines) will receive the highest math score in the country, but the other students won’t be far behind. Ten will get math scores that placed them in the 99.99thpercentile. Three of them placed at the same high level in Spanish.”

What do we learn from “Radical”?

- Innovation doesn’t exist in a nutshell. Correa, the teacher, got inspiration from the best education innovators. One of his key references is Sugata Mitra who back in 1999 sunk a computer – but no instructions – into the opening of a wall near his office in New Delhi and was amazed to see how children came running out of the nearest slum and began to click and explore.” Mitra drilled a hole in the wall of ignorance and despair. He was not the first one (and not the last). Montessori schools, Waldorf schools, democratic schools…  have all been at different times the proponents of radical education where education had to be considered an “inclusive fabric” based on new learning practices. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, developed in the 1960s, sought to bring together “educator-learners” and “learner-educators”, who would dialogue together to develop new critical knowledge. Célestin Freinet introduced printers into his schools in the 1920s. Maria Montessori built her pedagogy around scientific thinking. Seymour Papert even predicted a student revolt if they continued passively consuming pre-digested knowledge.

- “On the start of the school year, Correa walked into his classroom and pulled the battered wooden desks into small groups.” Education is about space and design. According to Ken Robinson conformity, compliance and linearity still define our learning spaces. In her book on learning spaces, Diane Oblinger reminds us that “there is value from bumping into someone and having a casual conversation, there is value from hands-on, active learning as well as from discussion and reflection, there is value in being able to receive immediate support when needed…” Learning has to do with the way we occupy the space, with the way we live together, we engage into conversation together.

- Our “Radical” teacher thought technology would make a difference. But computers at school didn’t work, so he had to find an alternative pedagogy: The “pedagogy of the question.” Correa asked: what is the sum of the first 100 whole numbers? It was supposed to take an hour, but Paloma (like Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1700) had the answer almost instantly and could explain it to the rest of the class: “The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.” Another question was : how can we determine the right number of people to board safely a rescue boat? This made the students want to learn about flotation, which means math and physics but also philosophy to decide who to save when there is not enough room. We discover that radical learning is not about technology.  Classroom discussion, reciprocal teaching, jigsaw method, feedback intervention are some of the learning techniques and tools with the highest probability of success

- “Radical” highlights the importance of collaborative work. When working in groups, children can teach themselves. Their ability to do so is independent of educational background, literacy level, social or economic status. Learning from the others, learning with the others are fundamental elements of the learning experience and essential for students to get full ownership of what they learn. Roger Hart wrote: “Only through direct participation can children develop a genuine appreciation of democracy and a sense of their own competence and responsibility to participate.” This is what I call the “Art of interaction” i.e. the capacity of teachers and students to engage into a continuous and granular conversation about learning.

Juárez Correa is one of these high-wire teachers whose main concern is to mobilize all the resources at hand to achieve their goal.  In words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, he is a “bricoleur”, and the rules of his game is “always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand”. Correa set up his scaffolds in the classrooms for an academic year, just the time he was given to fix or improve education. We will argue that our high-wire teacher stimulated creativity in the classroom in a much more powerful and sustainable way than through the use of technology alone.

Martha Nussbaum once said (Cultivating Humanity, 1998) that “we produce all too many citizens whose imaginations never step out of the counting house”. “Radical” shows us “Socratic citizens” active, critical, curious, capable of resisting authority and of thinking for themselves.

“Radical” shows us a way to “tear down the wall” that prevents the many from succeeding in school and life.

It’s only a movie. It has nothing to do with AI! And it feels really good!!!