FOUNDATIONS OF A DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION SCHOOL MODEL

(As of this writing, early August, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to play high havoc with “in-person” schooling in the United States.  Education authorities are adjusting their plans for this school year and years to come accordingly with many continuing remote instruction either full time or as blended learning.  However, the face-to-face school is wholly anticipated to continue as the expression of the social institution of Education as the too entrenched current social organization of labor demands the custodial function of the in-person school to endure in excellent health well into the future.  This paper firmly assumes the need and thus the further existence of the in-person school.)

 

Democratic Education may be characterized as a Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid.  The hybrid structures a Communitarian, interdependent culture, governance and member support and a Libertarian student subject seeking, acquisition and use.  Personal success in living and working well within the organization is contingent on adult-youth egalitarian management of institutional administration, policy and social control accomplished through equality of rights, negotiation and mutual agreement between and among adults and children while individual student subject success is contingent on a high degree of personal self-determination supported by the mutual aid of other students and community staff.  Contemporary examples of The Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid center mostly on the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA, (www.sudval.org/) and its modeled schools, on Summerhill School in Leiston, England, (www.summerhillschool.co.uk/) and to a lesser extent on Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, (https://antiochcollege.edu/).. 

 

To assure the communitarian-libertarian habits of mind, behavior and expectation promised by the model, students ought to grow through schooling intentionally constructed to engender and express these traits.  Herein stated are the foundations of such an endeavor,

 

History

The antecedents of today’s Democratic Education schools go back to the early twentieth century with the Modern School Movement and Progressive Education and Francisco Ferrer, Mildred Johnson, Gertrude Ayer, Maria Montessori, and Alexander Sutherland Neill.  Ferrer in Spain looked to develop children’s knowledge and skills according to each student’s abilities rather than through drilled instruction and uniform lessons. (Avrich) The Spanish educator's ideas in the United States combined with Progressive Education’s emphasis on self-directed student learning and learning by doing sparked the Modern School Movement establishing schools beginning in 1910, one of which was Mildred Johnson’s Modern School in the Harlem of 1934. (Perlstein) Additionally, as a direct consequence of the Progressive Education of the moment, Gertrude Ayer’s New York City’s PS 24 in the Harlem of 1935 featured experiential learning, self-directed projects and democratic classroom living among other Progressive pedagogy. (Perlstein)  

 

Contemporaneously with Progressive Education, Ferrer and the Modern School Movement, Maria Montessori in Italy saw children striving to satisfy their immediate needs as motivating individual learning behavior. She noticed what she called “sensitive periods”, those times when a child’s mind is more in need of acquiring a specific knowledge set than at other moments.  Further, she observed how powerful and energetic natural curiosity was for learning, to the point where no adult need force a child to learn, especially during the sensitive periods. From these observations, she developed her “Method”.  (Montessori)

 

The Method centers itself in adults preparing a learning environment for children filled with material and activity calculated to resonate with each sensitive period. In the Method adults do not tell children what to do beyond an initial explanation on how to use the prepared environment. As children engage the elements of the prepared environment, the Method’s teachers consciously observe how each child interacts with the materials and the activities ascertaining each child’s needs and if required altering the environment-the material, the activity, even the spatial arrangements within a classroom-to put in the way of the child the elements to satisfy the child’s needs.  (Montessori) The Method became the driver of schools called Montessori.

 

In 1923, a psychologist, A.S. Neill, having twice moved a school he founded in Germany two years earlier, relocated again into a house in Lyme Regis, England, called Summerhill.  In 1927, Neill and Summerhill School moved once more finding their permanent and present home in Leiston, England. (http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/history.php)  In Summerhill, children were/are freed from psychic barriers to self-actualization: they were/are allowed to be themselves.  Neill’s school is a setting where formal learning is driven by innate ability, desire and interest, where imaginative play is of greatest importance, lessons are optional and social control ordered by the school community through a democratic process of adult and child having one vote on issues open to community decision. (Neill, 1960.)

 

However, the psychologist’s and Summerhill’s influence would flower only after the release of Neill’s Summerhill: A radical approach to child-rearing in 1960.  Mary Leue, founder of The Free School in Albany, NY, Daniel Greenburg, founder of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham MA, and many other Americans in the 1960’s, including the founders of the public Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca, NY,  latched on tightly to Neill’s notion that the freedom from adult coercion to choose that subject engagement which affects the child individually, that which is of interest, of passion, of felt need, must drive learning for only under such freedom can the child grow to be the well-adjusted adult the child was meant to be.  They also fully appreciated and accepted Neill’s belief in and Summerhill’s practice of the democratic form of school community self-governance as necessary to securing that freedom.  These “free” or “open” schools, then as now, gave youngsters both the responsibility to define what it means individually to be formally educated and to collectively govern the community in which they were free to learn and grow in their own way and in their own time to their own ends.

 

In the early1980’s, Yaacov Hecht in Israel like many before came across Neill and Summerhill. (Hecht, p. 31, and pp. 32-35).  The psychologist, his 1960 book and his school made clear to Hecht the main components of his vision of a democratic school:

     “.  A choice in the areas of learning; the students choose what they want to learn and how.

      .  Democratic self-management.

      .  Evaluation focusing on the individual-without comparison with others and without tests and grades.

      .  A school where children grow from age four until adulthood (eighteen or over).”

         (Hecht, p. 34)

 

Hecht took his main components from Summerhill extended them to day schools, as Neill suggested only residential schools could provide the conditions for a democratic education, embraced access to the widest and the deepest of human knowledge available through a school, as Summerhill tended to circumscribe a good deal of instruction to state endorsed curricula, and founded The Democratic School of Hadera.. From Hadera, Hecht popularized his ideas, founded and helped to established schools throughout the globe under the collective label of Democratic Education. (Hecht, pp. 243-322, and 323-357.)

 

The Keystone:

The keystone of Democratic Education is in the cultivation of as well-balanced a developing psychology in each youngster as possible within a highly supportive egalitarian community.   As Neill points out, “If a child is free to approve of himself, he will not usually be hateful.  He will not see any fun in trying to make an adult lose his temper…” or to make another child unhappy, for that matter. (Neill, 1960, p  l9)

 

The principal means taken by the model to cultivate a well-balanced psychology is through an ever strengthening individual Ego consequent of a student’s self-determined learning aided by the mutual assistance of fellow community members, youth and adult.  A strong individual Ego builds confidence in youth's abilities to move through the world in his and her own way, to deal well with challenges the world throws up, to recognize the needs of others and to support others in whichever way they will accept without reproach if support is declined, to recognize the needs of self and to seek and accept support in meeting these needs, to construct and work through independent and interdependent relationships and to know which is necessary and appropriate in situations.  Also, such a strengthening cultivates high levels of emotional intelligence enabling a youngster to regulate feelings, even in tough circumstances.

 

Ego strength lives in the cultivation and use of an individual’s Autonomous Self-Regulation, a system of conscious personal management guided by the feeling that the behavior, the emotion, or the cognition being regulated is affected for reasons a person values, finds meaningful, and wholly endorses.

 

And healthy development of Autonomous Self-Regulation capacities unfolds within formal school settings as a direct response to a supportive learning community’s ability to satisfy the basic psychological needs for Relatedness, Competence and Autonomy.  Relatedness should be understood as close, affectionate relationships with others built on the reciprocity of factors like trust, empathy and personal habits of cooperation.  The Communitarian interdependence structured by and fully anticipated in individual self-endorsed cooperative habits of mind and behavior secures Relatedness in each of a community’s members, child and adult.  Competence is to be understood as the conscious awareness of doing well in applying and efficiently executing a range of or a specific skill or ability.  Here, the Relatedness fully fixed within members of a supportive learning community encourages risk so individuals can explore, experiment and test without negative sanctions until an inner assurance is built that one feels competent. Autonomy is to be understood as the development of the Self as an independent identity from others, as the deep inner sense of empowerment, as the ability to function independently without control by others.  The very nature of the Libertarian aspects of Democratic Education, the right to choose that which affects the individual, the searching for personal interest, the following of subject passion, along with the cultivation of Competence makes fast the sense of an empowered Self.  (See Deci, et al, 2008, for discussion related to the Self-Determination Theory grounding the above.)

 

Democratic Education unfolds Relatedness, Competency and Autonomy sustaining a well-adjusted Autonomous Self-Regulation, leading to a strong Ego and, ultimately, to a balanced psychology in students through the twin schooling processes of Supported Self-Directed, Negotiated, Cooperative Learning and School Community Self-Governance.

 

Supported Self-Directed, Negotiated, Cooperative Learning

And School Community Self-Governance

As the title indicates, the scholarship process in Democratic Education of Supported Self-Directed, Negotiated, Cooperative Learning is broken down into four elements integrated in practice, separated for explanation 

 

“Supported” is the provision of two formal counseling structures, a long term mentoring and an immediate situational assistance, to help youngsters become aware of and place into reasonable perspective internal and external behavioral and performance expectations and how to manage and channel anxieties, frustrations and anger when undertaking to fulfill expectations:  Here, students engage in a close mentoring relationship of adult to youth where a trained instructional staff mentor and a youngster enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to cooperatively work on student social-emotional, psycho-dynamic, neurocognitive  and behavioral issues, on subject seeking, selecting and learning issues, and on common understandings of and agreements on specific learning and developmental goals and the action steps required to reach those goals.  The immediate assistance structures a trained instructional staff member and a student cooperatively working together on present situational self-regulation, interpersonal behavior, neurocognitive functioning and specific topic learning issues.

 

“Self-Directed Learning” places the locus of all subject decisions squarely within the individual student where each accepts responsibility for taking from the vast store of human knowledge available through a school what is wished to be known, the scope of knowing, when and how knowing is to be undertaken as well as determining the duration, outcome and success of any learning activity and the course of learning for a school quarter, term and entire residency.

 

“Negotiated Learning” leads students to navigate among intrinsically motivated inclinations, internal school community requirements and external social community obligations of achievement so students can determine their own course of advancement within the school, for graduation from the school and for life after graduation.

 

“Cooperative Learning” is the process of students working well together with other students and community adults through internalized habits of cooperation to achieve both individual and common learning and personal development goals. 

 

Thus, the Democratic learning structure develops mental wellness supporting the readiness and the actualization to choose the immediate and long term objects of study and the means of one’s own scholarship, to ask for and receive as well as to offer and have accepted assistance in study selection and acquisition, and to find one’s interest, passion, purpose and acceptance within community.

 

Now, Democratic Education students cannot assure themselves the close support, the self-direction, the cooperation and the collegiality, or the exposure and the access to the widest of human knowledge through a school from which to choose promised by the model unless they can safely anticipate these conditions as routine and as fundamental to the very existence of the school in which they are enrolled.  Such guarantees are to be found in the processes of School Community Self-Governance.

 

School Community Self-Governance is where learning community adults and students come together in meetings of the whole using a Democratic Process to decide on issues open to community resolution:  where adults and youth have equal rights to speak and to persuade within community forums and where a one person-one vote process settles issues in areas such as curriculum and instruction, achievement and assessment, projects and assignments, benchmarks in learning and developmental progress, graduation criteria and demonstrations satisfying the criteria, rules and behaviors consistent with and in violation of norms of the school as well as the means by which violating rules and norms are resolved, and in management issues as in some community self-governing schools, hiring staff, budgetary and fund raising issues, facilities maintenance and record keeping.

 

(While many in Democratic Education argue to include all ages in the entirety of school community self-governing processes, this paper maintains that ordinarily children up to the age of about eleven years given proper conditions will develop well in self-direction, negotiation and cooperativeness but will not have yet sufficiently developed the reflective faculties enabling the distancing of self from immediate experience necessary to objectify and to consequently analyze their own and other’s global and particular interactions within and around school environments against the needs of the community and the individuals in it and then provide means and methods of better satisfying those needs through organizational construction.  Consequently, these ages, the paper holds, are unable to meet the totality of self-governance duties.  Thus, full student participation in self-governing processes begins at Secondary Education age.  However, Primary Education ages should be capable of participation in their social control rule and norm making and in adjudicating rule and norm violations in an appropriately structured Restorative Justice system as well as democratically governing a range of immediate learning issues.) 

Democratic School Design

Good examples of Democratic Education schools here in the U.S. tend to be very small micro-schools, a single ungraded setting of say thirty or fifty or even seventy-five students with an age spread from as young as four to as old as nineteen covering early childhood through secondary education.   Learning communities of this size can easily support development of individual autonomous self-regulation and Ego strength while employing direct democracy governance, the vehicle of community self-governance.  Indeed, in a micro-school, staff and students have immediate and ready access to each other during all parts of the school day enabling comfortable long term mentoring and immediate situational behavioral and subject knowledge assistance while the school itself can effortlessly come together in regular meetings of the whole institution to resolve issues open for community decision.  Additionally, these tiny communities can effectively unfold in both students and staff the greatest sense of common ownership of the school and what goes on within it. 

 

These micro-environments are socially and educationally viable regardless of setting and they are fiscally sustainable as program offerings in public or private school settings adjunct to a general education, especially in low population density school districts.  However, they, as a rule, tend to be too small in student enrollment for comfortable medium to long term fiscal sustainability as stand-alone private or public schools, especially in low density districts.   

 

In the view of New York City’s Department of Education, especially during the Mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013) small schools are preferred for the best educational service to children.  A viable small school according to the NYC DOE has an enrollment of four hundred students.  But, setting aside the lack of youngsters in low population density areas for a four hundred student alternative to conventional setting, student bodies of that size, especially, intended as a single self-contained ungraded Democratic Education setting would confound effective self-direction, thwart negotiated, cooperative learning, overwhelm psychological and behavior support systems, make direct democracy self-governance unattainable, and destroy community controlled behavior systems.

 

Timely ease of initial resource access and ready availability to resources from which one has been working are at the heart of self-directed learning.  Student bodies the size of New York City’s defined four hundred or more in a single ungraded setting would create resource scarcity greatly frustrating the capacity, the desire and the movement of self-direction in learning engagement.

 

Additionally, just by the force of numbers, the type and the depth of connection among students themselves and with staff, building and maintaining the reciprocal trusting, empathetic and deeply respectful relationships necessary to fulfill the Democratic Education promise cannot happen.

 

More, a weekly All School Meeting, the Democratic Education governance structure, of four hundred students plus all staff is too large of a body to maintain an attentive orderliness and too differentiated in self-determination and cooperative capacities, not to say in interest and attention spans, to unfold a thorough individual participation in the democratic formation of school policy and management issues, no less to cultivate the ownership feelings in each and every member of the school community necessary for highly effective community self-governance.

 

Finally, the self-governance systems of social control of community members, from direct democratic rule-making to the adjudication of rule breaking and misconduct, forthrightly assume the permanent presence of congenial order which will be broken at times, but restored once inappropriate behavior has been adjudicated.   Now, the chaos causing interaction of a micro-school’s say fifty youngsters, especially, when energetic all at once, ripples the assumptions, but the intimate nature of the relations within a micro-school finds ready peer pressure either to allay the bad behavior or to feel comfortable in supporting a formal complaint to the judicial system, thus, keeping the assumptions and their systems whole.  On the other hand, the freneticism engendered by the energetic exertions of four hundred, especially when all at once, would in itself, notwithstanding the presence of a democratic judicial system, cause a host of bad behaviors far more supported than impeded by peer pressure nullifying the assumptions, collapsing the effects of democratic community social control and, by force, transforming the basis of social control to a top-down, authoritarian model, negating nearly the entire structure of a Democratic Education school.. 

 

Thus, a conundrum sets itself between a questionably unsustainable tiny micro-school and a disastrous large small school within the population density necessary for a fiscally sustainable stand-alone private or public Democratic Education school as assumed by New York City’s Department of Education.  The solution appears to be to reduce the NYC DOE enrollment some, still assuring enrollment producing economies of scale for the institution as a whole, and to divide the single ungraded, mixed age setting into micro-program enrollments in Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary Education and Early College.  Not so incidentally, breaking a sizable student body into ungraded mixed aged micro-programs keeps the benefits of older children modeling and helping younger, keys to successful single setting micro-schools, while creating a far more focused individual student assistance according to the particulars of developmental stages than is usual with a single mixed age setting of four to nineteen year olds.

 

Therefore, a Democratic Education, i.e., Communitarian-Libertarian Hybrid, exemplar for population dense areas would be a single school of four separate, sequential micro-programs:  an ungraded, mixed age Early Childhood program of say fifty students from approximately four to six years of age; an ungraded, mixed age Primary Education program of around seventy-five students from approximately seven to eleven years of age; an ungraded, mixed age Secondary Education program of about seventy-five students from approximately twelve to sixteen years of age, and an ungraded Early College program of roughly one hundred-twenty five .students from approximately sixteen years of age.. A Democratic Education exemplar for low population density areas would still break the student body into schooling levels of Early Childhood, Primary, Secondary and Early College but would, obviously, enroll many fewer in each level and consequently might combine levels, such as Early Childhood and Primary, and Secondary and Early College, resulting in a program resembling more of a single ungraded mixed-aged micro-setting than its high density sibling. 

 

SOURCES

Avrich, Paul.  The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  1980.

Bell, Stephanie. “Project Based Learning for the 21^st Century:  Skills for the Future”. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas. 83:2, 39-43.  2010

Botstein, Leon.  Jefferson’s Children:  Education and the Promise of American Culture.  New York:  Doubleday.  1997.

Cadwell, L. Bringing Learning to Life: The Reggio Approach to Early Childhood Education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.  2002.

Deci, Edward L, Jang, Hyungshim, Reeve, Johnmarshall, and Ryan, Richard. “Understanding and Promoting Autonomous Self-Regulation:  A Self-Determination Theory Perspective”, in Motivation and Self-Regulated Learning:  Theory, Research and Applications, Eds., Dale H/ Schunk and Barry J. Zimmerman.  New York:  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  2008.

Dewey, J. Experience and Education. New York: Collier MacMillan Publishers. 1938.

Edwards, C., Gandini, L. and Forman, G., Eds., The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach-Advanced Reflections (Second Edition). Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp. 1998.

Eisler, R. Tomorrow’s children: A blueprint for partnership education in the 21st century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 2000

English, M. C. , & Kitsantas, A.. “Supporting Student Self-Regulated Learning in Problem-and Project-Based Learning. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 7:2, 128-150. 2013.  Available at: https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1339.

Graubard, A., Free the children: Radical reform and the free school movement. New York: Vintage Books. 1972.

Greenberg, D., Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Framingham, MA: Sudbury Valley School Press. 1995.

----------A clearer view: New insights into the Sudbury School model. Framingham, MA: Sudbury Valley School Press.  2000.

Hecht, Yaacov., Democratic Education:  A Beginning of a Story.  New York:  Alternative Resource Education Organization. . 2012..

Holt, John Caldwell, How Children Fail.  New York:  Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence. 1982..

--------------------------How Children Learn.  Revised Edition.  Reading, MA:  Perseus Books.  1984.

--------------------------Learning All The Time.   New York:  Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., Inc.  .1989.

Johnson, David W. and Johnson, Roger T. Learning Together and Alone: Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning, 2^nd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1987.

--------------------------------------------------- Cooperative Learning. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co. 1991.

Johnson, David W., Johnson, Roger T. and Holubec, E. Circles of Learning: Cooperation in the Classroom. Rev. Ed. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co. 1986.

Mercogliano, C., Teaching the restless: One school’s remarkable no-ritalin approach to helping children learn and succeed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 2004.

Miller, R/, What are schools for?: Holistic education in American culture. Brandon, VT: Holistic Education Press.  1997..

----------Creating learning communities: Models, resources, and new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Brandon. VT: The Foundation for Educational Renewal.  2000.

----------Free schools, free people: Education and democracy after the 1960s. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.  2002.

Montessori, Maria. The Secret of Childhood.  Translated by M. Joseph Costelloe. New York:  Ballantine Books.  1966.

Morrison, K., Free school teaching: A journey into radical progressive education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 2007.

Neill, A. S., Summerhill: A radical approach to child-rearing. New York: Hart Pub. Co.  1960.

-----------Freedom – not license. New York, NY: Hart Publishing Company.  1966.

Nyquist, Ewald B. and Hawes, Gene R., Eds.   Open Education:  A Sourcebook for Parents and Teachers.  New York:  Bantam Books.  1972.

Pecore, John L, “From Kilpatrick’s Project Method to Project Based Learning” Accessed at https://ir.uwf.edu/islandora/object/uwf%3A22741/datastream/PDF/view

Seldin, Tim and Epstein, Paul.  The Montessori Way:  An Education for Life.  Sarasota, Fla.:  The Montessori Foundation.  2003.

Wien, C.A., Emergent Curriculum in the Primary Classroom. New York NY: Teachers College Press.  2008.

REFRAMING THE ACADEMY FROM INSIDE THE QUADRANGLE

PROJECT THE MASTERLY VOICE was the direction in a dog training pamphlet my high school English teacher father read out loud to me well over sixty years ago when he brought home a new puppy..  And it wasn't only the amateur dog trainer to which this advice obtained,  Indeed, it was and remains as well applied to the School Master and Mistress in the form of, “On the first day, you, the teacher, must set the tone.”  

From the first I entered the teaching profession to the last course I taught, I heard colleagues claim that the Masterly Voice is needed to successfully accomplish the job.  But, also from the first, not only did the Masterly Voice sit poorly in me, and perhaps because of this, whatever the age of students in my charge, it appears they did their best to ignore my commands choosing to do their own thing, with too many showing annoyance when I intentionally asserted my authority.  To the good order of my classes, students’ own things tended more often than not to coincide with many a lesson. 

Reflection on the dynamics over time finally dented the thickness of received wisdom to awaken in me the realization of a naturally arrived at Constructivism, the view “…that individuals create their own new understandings on the basis of an interaction between what they already know and believe and ideas and knowledge with which they come into contact. “   (Richardson, pp 1623-1624)  Thus, the results of my instruction would always be unique to each individual whether I wished it or not.   

Yet, the convention, especially in the higher education settings in which I sought and was given employment, was and remains to fix common course standards and then measure each student’s achievement of them on assignments, exams and even in class participation culminating in a single score for the course.  But, if each takes from instruction that which is unique to the individual, then the common standards and their measures of achievement become mightily invalid. 

So, the first change I made in deliberately employing Constructivism was to alter my grading policy.  On the first day of classes I facilitated conversations among the assembled undergraduates on the purposes of grading.  As they had never thought about it before, they could not find voice to my probes and the exercises morphed quickly into brief lectures on my grading philosophy and design of practice.  On the second class day I implemented the huge leap in asking each student to write the grade for the course they wanted and a reason for me to accept that grade on a large index card.   If the statement was well argued, I said, I would accept the grade and then they could take from our considerations of the material in question that which they found compelling without worry the effect on course grade..  In reality, unless the space was blank I accepted any reason. All complied and off we went.  Except…I got called on the carpet by administrations consequent of student complaints over my grading system and had to return to convention.

Further contemplation told me that I needed to reframe the situation of students in my courses so they might understand and find congenial my employ of Constructivism.  “To reframe”, Watzlawck states, “…means to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the ‘facts’ of the same concrete situation equally well or better, and thereby changes its entire meaning.”   (Watzlawick, p. 95) 

To arrive at the new frame for my Constructivism I needed to make the old fame plain to myself. I discovered the old frame could be characterized as The Authoritarian.

The Authoritarian is the overwhelmingly dominant form of schooling at every level and in which I have done all my teaching.   It is hierarchically structured with individual adult and youth success within it contingent on personal integration with caste roles and satisfaction of authority expectations.  The Authoritarian’s Universe of Discourse is to be found in control, dominance-subservience, compliance, order, punishment.  Its Voice can be portrayed as The Domineering Parent.  Its Forms of Address are as in You must/must not, You should/shouldn’t, You need to, etc.  

The new frame I found could be characterized as The Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid.  The Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid structures an interdependent culture and governance for a school as a whole and an independent subject knowledge seeking, acquisition and use for each student.  Personal success in living and working well within the organization is contingent on adult-youth egalitarian, cooperative management of institutional administration, policy, and social control, and of individual self and interpersonal regulation while each student’s subject knowledge success is contingent on a high degree of self-determination.  Examples of The Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid center mostly on the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA, (https://sudburyvalley.org/), and its modeled schools, on Summerhill School in Leiston, England (http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/), and Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (https://antiochcollege.edu/ ).  The Libertarian-Communitarian Universe of Discourse tends to be situational with community, group, interpersonal and self-regulation concerns found in negotiation, mutual agreement and consensus while individual student subject concerns are to be found in personal autonomy and individuality.  The Hybrid’s Voice for community can be portrayed as The Arbitrator with Forms of Address as in Are you willing to, Would you agree to, as in The condition, situation, goal warrants, indicates, suggests, recommends, as in I hear you, I think I understand, I can only imagine, I can’t imagine.  The Hybrid’s Voice for personal subject decisions can be styled as The Solo Sailor with Forms of Address from youth as in I’m going to/not going to, I  want/don’t  want, I have/don’t have, and forms of adult address to youth as in  Here are options, It’s up to you, The choice is yours, If you wish/want.

I could now see that my Constructivism veered heavily to The Libertarian when it came to course content:  As I remarked to more than one undergraduate without a drop of sarcasm, “I place ideas, concepts and propositions before you for your pleasure to take or leave as you like.“ I could also see that I adopted The Libertarian Universe of Discourse, Voice and Forms of Address when it came to subject content but projected The Communitarian when it came to student self-regulation, interpersonal and group dynamics.  In essence, I was trying to create within my courses an Interconnected Community of Solo Sailors. 

Then like the anvil dropping in a cartoon, it hit me that this definition of the classroom situation was grossly inconsistent with The Authoritarian expectations of the institutions within which I had been employed and the students enrolled. Still, I thought to give reframing the good old college try.

I employed Experiential Cooperative Learning activities focused on concepts found in the course syllabi and the assigned texts to reframe self-regulation, interpersonal and group dynamics to the Communitarian. I strongly encouraged the use of The Arbitrator Forms of Address when students were negotiating on group agreements.

I promoted youth Solo Sailor Forms of Address for students to use during topic class discussions while I used the adult forms owning my own specific topic information to reframe perception of common course content to the Libertarian. I reinforced The Libertarian perception by not assessing the degree of retention of either student or instructor derived content information   Further, I did not directly instruct on or assess retention of material from the assigned readings, but left the decision to engage and the content to take from readings to each student; I provided the beginning of each class session for discussion of readings if a student or a group of students wished to do so always using the adult Solo Sailor Forms of Address when eliciting student interest for discussion.  However, I surrendered to The Authoritarian accountability expectation of institutions and students by using The Domineering Parent Forms of Address to steer methods by which students arrived at their own content knowledge from class activities, guided pivotal questioning, lectures and readings and, then, by assessing the degree to which each student achieved an instructed technique. 

These reframing efforts kept on failing.  Consistently having to justify myself to administrations which constantly declined to agree with my reasoning certainly demonstrated the failure.  My reframing methods may have been insufficient to the task and my implementation of them may have been less the stellar, but the global Authoritarian environment of the institutions in the end had the most substantial effect.

An explanation can be found in Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.  First comes the adoption of a single all-encompassing paradigm, which Fleck defines as “… a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details and relations…[offering] enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it.” (Fleck, p. 27)   Because  the paradigm belongs to a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, he maintains, perception wholly directed by that paradigm undergoes social reinforcement constraining the individual by determining what can be thought in no other way:  “Whole eras”, Fleck states, “will then be ruled by this thought constraint.  Heretics who do not share this collective mood…are rated as criminals by the collective [and] will be burned at the stake until a different mood creates a different [perception] and different valuation.”  (Fleck, p. 99)

 “What we are faced with here”, he suggests, “is not so much simple passivity or mistrust of new ideas as an active approach which can be divided into several stages.  (1) A contradiction to the system appears unthinkable.  (2) What does not fit into the system remains unseen; (3) alternatively, if it is noticed, either it is kept secret, or (4) laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not contradict the system.  (5) Despite the legitimate claims of contradictory views, one tends to see, describe, or even illustrate those circumstances which corroborate current views and thereby give them substance.  (Fleck, p 27)    And I will add:  or the individual holding contrary views is ignored by and eventually expelled from the thought collective.

Put simply: the institutions of higher education in which I taught and students acculturated exclusively held the thought constraint, the paradigm, of The Authoritarian; I held an opposing thought system, The Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid.  The different thought system I employed presented a contradiction to The Authoritarian, especially, in student expectations of instructional attitudes and professorial behaviors and in individual student learning and class group-dynamic behaviors creating a cognitive dissonance within each student in each course I structured through my form of Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid.   They partially resolved the conundrum through responding well to Authoritarian expectations inherent in the need to comply with my directions in class session activities and in successfully acquiring instructed methods, but confusion reigned.  

A switch in situational expectation, Watzlawck contends, causes confusion and the need to resolve confusion causes a readiness and eagerness “…to hold on firmly to the next piece of concrete information that is given…[thus] setting the stage for reframing.” (Watzlawck, p. 101)  Unfortunately, I experienced a complete absence of readiness and eagerness in students to anticipate any next unfolding of my form of Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid pedagogy, so the next piece and the next after that and the next after that of the form continued an unresolved confusion.  Most students lived with the bewilderment while continuing to act according to their Authoritarian expectations.  But, those few more severely disturbed by being in the middle of the reframing process complained to institutional administrations and I continued to be called to account and compelled to abandon the Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid for The Authoritarian.  While I was not burned at the stake, my heresy was rewarded by constantly being discontinued in employment.

Being true to the strong innate inclination toward independent thought within an egalitarian community, insisting on instruction through a paradigm reflective of this inclination but alien to the one structuring the organization in which I was employed and students integrated, and working to change the conceptual setting of the classroom for students so they experienced it through that different paradigm, I, in the end, led my students into a logical paradox:  as  Watzlawick would say, I ordered them to Be Spontaneous.  (See Watzlawick, p. 64)  

In Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution Watslawick, et al, use reframing as a tool for change at the level of a single person. But, the manner of its use here centered on change of collected groups of individuals bound tightly within a given paradigmatic system.  While I may have wished reframing precipitated a second order change, “…whose occurrence changes the system itself” (Watzlawck, pp 10-11), the social reinforcing thought constraints of the system in which we labored could only allow first order change, “one that occurs within a given system which itself remains unchanged”. (Watzlawck, pp 10-11)  The confusion I engendered in classes of students suggested first order change was possible and underway.  However, as repeatedly displayed, the integrative power of the system, in this case The Authoritarian, and its fourteen to fifteen year hold on these groups of students eventually precluded even first order change.  Moreover, only in my courses were students being asked to substantively change in this manner, the overwhelming majority architecture of their studies deepening integration into the system.  Further, the fifteen week semester turned out to be an unrealistic period within which to successfully reframe even to a first order change.

Ultimately, reconceptualization to a Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid college classroom just could not be had within The Authoritarian system.  If a Constructivist Libertarian-Communitarian Hybrid conceptualization is to be had within groups of students, then, they will have to have grown to higher education and be attending a college wholly constructed by that paradigm.

Indeed, to assure the constructivist, libertarian-communitarian habits of mind, behavior and expectation, students ought to growth through schooling intentionally constructed to engender and express them/

References: 

Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.  Eds. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton.  Trans. Fed Bradely and Thaddeus J. Trenn.  Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press.  1979.

Richardson, Virginia. “Constructivist Pedagogy”.  Teachers College Record  105:9, 1623-1640, 2005. 

Watzlawck, Paul, Weakland, John H., and Fisch, Richard.  Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1974.