Confirmation as Collective: A New Culture of Learning, part 3

See the first two posts in this series here and here.

Also, here’s a good review of the book by education policy expert Charles Kerchner.

Now, confirmation and the collective . . .

What if a confirmation class was a collective of self-directed learners? What if, instead of giving confirmands a series of lessons on the doctrines and practices that constitute Christianity, we unearthed some things about faith and church that these students had a personal stake in exploring and then guided their exploration?

If we did confirmation in the New Culture of Learning envisioned by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas then we would marry their internal motivation with an unlimited information source.

I feel sort of handcuffed about finding that internal motivation.

The unlimited information source, though, we have that. Youth can explore the full text of Scripture, all of our confessional documents, and an unlimited variety of Christian faith practices with online technology.

A YouTube search for “lectio divina,” for example, produces these results.

Here’s the full text of the Book of Confessions in searchable pdf form.

Oremus and Bible Gateway are easy-to-use, easy-to-search online Bible platforms.

Here’s a downloadable daily prayer podcast in mp3 format.

We could do this. Our task in guiding students in this process would be to help them see where their particular questions and insights fit into the overall canopy of the Reformed understanding and expression of Christian faith. There are several books and video curricula we can use for this.

Who’s with me?

What does this approach overlook? What could be limited about it?

The Collective: A New Culture of Learning pt. 2

In an earlier post, I introduced Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s book A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, asking how youth leaders actually get at the internal motivation that, married with access to an unlimited source of information, drives learning.

Here’s another key idea in the book: the collective.

“As the name implies, it is a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts. For our purposes . . . they are defined by an active engagement with the process of learning.

“A collective is very different from an ordinary community. Where communities can be passive . . . collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.

“[Collectives] are content neutral platforms, waiting to be filled with interactions among participants.”

What if youth ministry were viewed in a particular context as a constellation of collectives? What if, instead of The Youth Group, where one Youth Leader was trying to expose all participants to Scripture study, service, spiritual practice, worship, community building, etc., you instead had a collective of students who were participating in service and a collective that was focused on Scripture study, and any number of youth collectives engaging any number of things?

A student could choose to participate in whichever collective appealed to her. She could form a collective of her peers around forms of participation that don’t yet exist at the church.

In our congregation this year, a particular student has gathered a collective of her peers around her to engage issues of hunger. She recruited them to raise money for and participate in a walk. She got them to do the 30 Hour Famine. What that collective does next I don’t know. But I’m sure they’re not done.

I like what the collective suggests. What are the limitations, though? Does this appeal to you as much as it does to me?

Evoking Motivation in Youth: A New Culture of Learning

Mizuko Ito tweeted about a book a while ago, and since her past work leads me to think she’s super smart and to be heeded when she praises a book, I bought it. A thoughtful post by Adam Copeland reminded me of it last week.

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown is a terrific little read, deceptively difficult given its slim 115 page figure. Thomas is a Communications Professor at USC, where Brown is a visiting scholar.

The book succinctly describes the media landscape that students inhabit today. That landscape is characterized by constant change and “a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything.” The new culture of learning in that environment needs to allow for “unlimited agency [for students] to build and experiment with things” within given boundaries and structures.

It’s a compelling case, and it raises a number of questions for those of us doing ministry with adolescents in churches. The first of those questions has to do with motivation.

Brown and Thomas narrate a number of stories that involve students learning in a way that takes advantage of the massive information network through a deeply personal motivation to learn something, practice something, explore something. So Sam, a nine year-old, learns computer programming by participating in an online Scratch community. Students in a college course about Massively Multiplayer Online Games hijack the lectures to dissect what’s actually happening as they play these games outside of class. A freelance hacker learns all kinds of programming by experimenting with his own programs and using Google to figure out how to improve them when they crash.

In each of these cases, the learner brings a deeply personal motivation to the task of learning. Therein lies my problem.

I don’t know what motivates the adolescents I work with here at the church. The ones who come to a weekly youth group do so why? What do they want to learn? What do they want to master? What do they want to change about themselves and the world? Those motivations are in there, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to get them out. Instead, I bring a curriculum on something I think is important for them to know.

How do those of us who lead students in church settings draw out what motivates them–not just what motivates them to come to church, but what motivates them in life–so that we can help them build and experiment with the massive information network at their disposal to be more faithful people?

It seems to me that the annual flip chart exercise about “what do you want to talk about” doesn’t go nearly far enough. I need some more concrete ways to hear and observe what’s driving my students.

Any ideas?

Rushkoff to Google: Don’t Give Up on The Humans

Douglas Rushkoff gave a Program or Be Programmed talk at Google last fall, and the video of it is on his blog. It’s embedded below, but I’ve extracted the juiciest quotes, which churchy commentary interspersed.

“Computers are essentially anything machines.”

“After I had played with Basic for the first time, I looked at the New York city streets and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a grid pattern not because cities grow up into grids but because someone in history decided to make this a grid. And for a 12 or 13 year old that’s a profound moment, and it’s a moment that most people don’t have very often, if at all.”

Likewise, the congregation, the presbytery, the synod, and any nationally organized religious denomination is there because people in history decided to make it that way. The Christian congregation is modeled on the post-temple Jewish synagogue, which was a response to a particular historical situation. The model for it isn’t in the Bible. And the further up the associational pyramid you go, the more abstract and theoretical the decisions have been that the structure should be that way. North American Christians should all recognize this and be able to spot the biases of the structures that frame their religious participation.

“When I say, ‘program or be programmed,’ I don’t mean it just as a metaphor.”

“You wouldn’t know what an operating system was if there was only one operating system.”

The same is true of religion, isn’t it? Or of any theological construct within a religious tradition? My recent anxiety over the encounter of the youth from my quasi-liberal church with evangelical camp culture illustrates this. I want my kids to recognize that the altar call is an operating system programmed with a certain bias, just like the hymns they sing on Sunday.

“This media is biased towards binary logic, which then leads to polar conversation, which then polarizes the political landscape.”

“I so don’t care about what technology is doing to us. I care about what we’re doing to one another through technology. Technology is not doing anything to you. It’s people that are doing things to you.”

Every theory of technology has a hidden doctrine of humanity.

“Everything in the digital space is basically a snap-to grid in one way or another. You’re here or you’re here.”

“Just because you have more choices doesn’t mean you have more agency. It just means you have a wider number of choices.”

“The fact that you can keep going forever means that it doesn’t actually work.”

This pertains to the economic model of making money by getting closer and closer in what you do to the actual making of money. Abstraction is lucrative. Aggregation is the new content creation. So why not aggregate the aggregators? The problem is that with each step you get further from the creation of any real value until you have a culture of people who no longer know how to create it. How do churches help Christians actually create value in the world and not just combine and distribute value they got somewhere else?

“The more anonymity is an aberrant behavior, the better off we are.”

“The biases of our technologies matter. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, right? But guns are more biased towards killing than pillows.”

So what is the bias of the typical mainline protestant congregation? The top 15 megachurches in the United States have an 80% turnover rate. Scads of people come once or twice but don’t dig in for the long haul. That’s a bias toward occasional non-committal participation. What about your typical Methodist or Presbyterian church in anywhere, USA?