Elliot Washor's TGIF 05.16.2025

“Are You With Me Now” – A.J. Ryder

View from Tasmania

I’ve been in Australia now with our BPL team and guests for about 2 weeks where we’ve been to schools and attended the Australian Int’l BPL Learning Conference with a focus on our fabulous students and the International Big Picture Learning Credential (IBPLC) in action. Everything has gone really well for a number of reasons that are quite unique to this trip. First off, about 40 of us have been together for over two weeks. Then, our visit included another 150 people from BPL AU schools with visits to four of those schools. Policy folks from New South Wales and Tasmania Departments of Education were with us as well. Finally, we had representation from BPL Kenya, Barbados, Canada and EU countries as part of the trip with a great mix of practitioners, policymakers and researchers from the US who are really gaining an understanding of our work that they honestly did not have before. I can’t explain it and don’t really want to but when people travel a great distance to see something even if they can walk across the street and see something similar, they react differently and in sharing that experience they also become friends. Here our close encounters with staff and students from BPL AU schools were of the best kind.

Throughout the trip our focus was mainly on being with and learning from students. To that end, Viv asked Pam Roy and I to start off the conference with a provocation about students searching for meaning around what matters to them and their communities. Now, it was not just about their over story where we see them growing upward through an exhibition or a deep dive into a performance but also, we had the time to hear their under story of how they get rooted and stay grounded muddling through the things that matter to them. The vast array of student interests surprised our guests. Not one student had an interest similar to another. If this doesn’t wake up policymakers and researchers around their decades of sanctioning a narrow band of career pathways, nothing will. Are we in it for our students or are we in it for the GNP?

Mingling…

On our trip we had quite a few staff from BPL – Andrea, Anthonette, Casey, Cynthia, Simone, Scott as well as people from our schools from El Paso, Houston, Kilauea, Lafayette, NY and NYC. It was a great crew. By being together in informal spaces, our small but mighty BPL community had even more nuanced conversations that are showing the many ways forward for the IBPLC. I loved it.

More mingling…

The sharing of our BPL practices across countries was a great part of this trip. Our discussions had both local and universal design appeal. I’m so glad that 20 years ago we decided to go international. A big thanks goes out to everyone from both Australia (Viv, Eva, Jax, JR, Joanne, John and Joe.....) and the US for all the time spent on logistics that made the trip more of a journey than a trip. Everyone said they had never experienced anything like it. There is lots of follow-up Andrea, Anthonette, Scott and I will have with everyone who now has a greater understanding and appreciation of our work from practical, research and policy standpoints and how they work together

More muddling with AI...

All throughout our journey, there was plenty of back-and-forth chatter about AI. I’m finishing up an article called, Privileged Information: The Unseen Knowledge That Shapes Meaning, Learning and Work. What fascinates me about this particular part of the AI conversation is that it forces us to get into the details of how we learn what we learn, and it leads us to a conclusion that if there was any doubt that good teachers in and outside of school are important, the limits of machine learning are helping put it to rest. Privileged information is based on relationships and human interactions as the key to doing and knowing. It can never be replaced.

One more AI thing…

Years ago, Lawrence Cremin wryly noted that educators respond to a new area of learning by creating a course in it. We can easily recall how schools respond to technology by creating a course “down the hall at fifth period” without ever thinking about changing every course because technology existed. Similarly, educators run the risk of demeaning AI work by creating separate courses for AI rather than bringing AI into all aspects of student work and thereby developing new ways of learning and working.

And… once again those courses are appearing:

8 AI High School Programs for Students In California

10 Best AI Programs for High School Students

The list goes on and on. Just to stop you from wondering, the universities and colleges offering these courses to high school students include Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, UCSF, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, UCSD, University of Washington, etc., etc.

more thing…

While I was in Tasmania, I was reminded by our geography that you can’t go much further away from where we started and yet have such fidelity to the design. Next stop, Antarctica! I’m not kidding.

Plenty, plenty, bye, bye!