By Milbrey McLaughlin & Martin Blank
An increasing phenomena we see in our work at Lincoln is a growing detachment and apathy that the students feel towards learning. The following article addresses these concerns.
Both content and context make students want to learn and demand their full and concentrated attention. The teacher could not understand it. The only time 10-year-old Paul seemed awake all semester was during a unit on plants in his community. He did his homework, participated in class, and earned good marks. When she asked him why he was so interested, he said: “My Dad’s work is taking care of lawns.”
For Paul, the reason was simple. He wanted to learn about things that he already knew something about and that someone he loved cared about, too. Paul’s experience reminds us that learning isn’t about test scores or even preparing for the future. For most young people, learning matters when it is personal and serves a purpose. When students have an opportunity to use or share what they know, they want to learn more. It is time educators and policymakers paid attention to what our children—and the research—are telling us.
A special 2004 issue of the Journal of School Health documents that 40 percent to 60 percent of all students are chronically disengaged from schools. This “culture of detachment,” argues Johns Hopkins University’s Robert Blum, decreases their prospects for academic success and promotes a variety of high-risk behaviors. Blum says that rather than engaging students and helping them feel a sense of belonging, “essentially, we’re telling kids: ‘You’re on your own.’ ”
According to Temple University’s Lawrence Steinberg, less-than-expected national student performance—including soaring dropout rates and low literacy rates—results not from inferior ability but from low student interest in the content and value of what is being taught.
A 2003 review of research in multiple disciplines conducted by the Coalition for Community Schools confirms that students learn best when they are actively involved in understanding and helping solve meaningful problems. This is true across all ability levels and grades. A 2003 National Academy of Sciences report found that schools successfully engage students when they “make the curriculum and instruction relevant to adolescents’ experience, cultures, and long-term goals, so that students see some value in the high school curriculum.”
If we are serious about leaving no child behind, we must present the content that young people need to meet high standards in a context that has meaning and relevance in their everyday lives.
Despite these findings, many schools that are under the gun to show improved student performance continue to soldier on in the wrong direction. They have narrowed the curriculum, hammered away at direct instruction as a “one size fits all” strategy, and confused high-stakes testing with achieving accountability for high standards. If we are serious about leaving no child behind, we must present the content that young people need to meet high standards in a context that has meaning and relevance in their everyday lives.
Community schools, using a community-as-text approach, are showing an important way to do this. They know that local communities and neighborhoods, whether rich or poor, provide a rich context for learning that matters to children. Because they understand this, they use local resources and issues to meet challenging curricular standards and motivate students—right in their own back yards.
A community-as-text approach to teaching and learning uses hands-on, authentic learning strategies to breathe life into a standards-based curriculum. Service learning, place-based education, environmental education, civic education, work-based learning, and youth development are some of the arenas in which a community-as-text approach is being applied. Though each strategy is distinct, they share common features:
• The community provides the context for learning;
• The content focuses on community needs, issues, and interests;
• Students serve as resources to their communities and as producers, as well as consumers, of knowledge;
• Community-based partners collaborate in teaching and learning; and
• Learning in after-school and community-based venues is connected to core standards and brings together knowledge from diverse disciplines across the school curriculum.
We encourage this approach not as the only way to promote learning or to suggest that schools simply need to do a better job of keeping students amused. We know that motivation and concentration are needed for learning to occur at high levels. Reed W. Larson of the University of Illinois has found that students interrupted in the middle of school tasks report that they were concentrating on their work but not motivated by it. When interrupted with friends, they report the reverse. Activities like athletics or structured volunteer activities—those that are physically engaging and require a variety of skills, knowledge, and personal autonomy—typically combined both concentration and motivation and were most likely to promote real learning. Our experience has convinced us that a community-as-text approach does the same. Both content and context make students want to learn and demand
their full and concentrated attention.
