Critique & Creativity is the Path Forward

Rather than tweak the system, let's dismantle it. Then rebuild.

“We are all creative, but by the time we are three or four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.” Maya Angelou

Young students generally love school. They get to spend time with their friends and learn through playing, making mistakes, experimenting, and exploring. These students are excited, eager to learn and engage with each other and their teacher, and express an eternal hope for their future. They may be nervous or shy, but there is a palpable excitement about school, education, and their own learning process.

Eventually, though, this changes, and kids start feeling bored, overwhelmed, and forced in to school. Some of these changes can be attributed to growing older and having more varied interests. Or priorities shifting away from pleasing the authority figure of a teacher or principal and towards friends and social connections. But it is tough to ignore the possible connection between waning interest in education and the change in classroom environments, activities, and expectations. As students age, their educational experience oftentimes loses what attracted them in the first place, and they find themselves trading playing for testing, exploring for memorization and regurgitation, and excitement for tedium. In just a few short years, students learn that school shouldn't be fun, that they should stay in their lane and complete their track and move on to a predestined future. This, by the way, is part of the hegemonic dystopia discussed by critical theorists like Gramsci.

And on top of all that, we must recognize the perpetual debt faced by our brown and black students. Dr. Bettina Love, in her book We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Education Freedom connects the "achievement gap" between White and dark students to a brutal legacy of injustice and oppression: "Dark students and their families are sharecroppers, never able to make up the cost or close the gap because they are learning in a state of perpetual debt with no relief in sight." She calls for a turn to abolitionist teaching, a pedagogy that acknowledges and accepts the historically racist and oppressive education system and works in "solidarity with dark folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving." As educators, we must committ to the struggle of fighting racial injustice in our classrooms, building, districts, and universities.

But what role do students have? How do students push back against the legacy and history of racial injustice and chart a new course? How can students take back the power and control their educational environment and future? How can students thrive?

Enter creativity, an appropriate response post-critique. Maya Angelou put it well when she highlighted the loss of creativity as an act of conformity, of falling in to the hegemonic trap, perhaps. Some students thrive in conformity, but there is a real sense of loss of creativity, a loss of wonder, a loss of problem solving. Sir Ken Robinson claimed, "Education is meant to take us into this future we can't grasp. Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status." Paulo Friere, well known for his articulation of critical pedagogy, invisioned an idealistic "education of 'I wonder' instead of 'I do'."

And this, then, is the case for mobile technology in the classroom. In order to change the educational experiences of our students, we must critique the system and respond with creativity. Moible tech fosters creativity and connects students directly to the power of education. Mobile tech is personal, ubiquitous, and connects our students to an ecosystem of power and creativity that has the potential to change the educational experiences, and lives, of our students.