Last week we had a great presentation from Dave Cormier discussing his model of rhizomatic learning. At first listen I disagreed with much of what he was saying. After listening to the presentation a second and then a third time, he has convinced me of some valid points to his model. The “Why” of education is very important and I agree with Dave that all educators will never be able to agree on the “what” to teach. The normative for some will be quite different then for others. Dave admitted that he doesn’t know what skills will be needed in the future, I would agree many skills needed in the future are hard to pin down, but I believe that the skills needed in the future will have to be skills that are important in addition to the current skill we teach. Our students are going to have to learn more then we did as students. The workers that the education system previously produced will have to continue to be produced, most of the 7 billion people in the world are workers.(Is that because the education system made them that way or because that is what they want to be? Another question for another time, perhaps). To a certain degree I agree with Dave’s idea that I , as a teacher, am a soldier, but I am a soldier that works with other soldiers and workers to produce nomadic working soldiers.
So do we create nomads, or are all students nomadic and our current education system, stomps the creativity out of the nomads to create workers? I really appreciated the remarks Dave made about the structure necessary to create an environment where the nomads can flourish. As a construction teacher safety is a large everyday concern for me. Without long term plans that promote students to learn and master skills safely many nomads would learn lessons the hard way. My students are slowly encouraged to become(use their already exsisting) creative as they become more proficient with basic skills.This is where I create the space for nomadic learning.
I disagree, with Dave concerning the knowledge vs. memory part of the presentation. I think when we memorize things(master them), lets say for the sake of argument the times tables, it allows us the freedom to use our brains to solve more complex problems without struggling through the easy steps again and again. Do we really want our students growing up googling 6×7 every time they need to compute it? The point Dave made about the “real point of learning” or “isness”(Wynton Marsalis) really struck home with me. The moment that you see the look on a students face that shows he/she gets it, where the learning becomes part of them, something that they will never forget. As a teacher these, sometimes few and far between, moments are the most rewarding.
In my teaching I would like to think that I have an open syllabus. Or do I? Reflecting I think I give the students opportunities to be creative and learn different concepts at different times in different ways, but not until they are in grade 11 or 12. So does my teaching stifle them in grade 9 or 10, or is that when I build the relationships ( get to know what they need) and start to create the structure I think they need to become rhizomatic learners in grades 11 and 12?
Hmmm? Just more stuff to think about.
underconstructionagain 
I struggled as you do with the downplaying of memory as learning. Yes, it is a lower order learning according to Bloom, but steps repeated become habit patterns and then then tacit knowledge comes in after many repetitions of a skill, the stuff that no one can express in words to you – you just know, or know-how. I think of a novice nurse learning to start an IV. Initially a novice might be so consumed by the steps to the task on the hand or arm, they don’t “notice” other concurrent aspects, like increased shortness of breath, or sudden pallor. With experience, a competent or expert nurse can start the IV and calm and reassure the patient and assess many aspects person at the same time. Ways of knowing come in here, intuitive and spiritual as well as the more obvious ones.
Thanks for the critique (both of you) of my thoughts around memory. I think you’ve done a nice job exposing the weakness in the way i presented it.
I do think that certain things should be memorized. I do not think that people should ‘look up’ timestables. Memorize those. they’re handy.
I don’t think that mastery and memorization are equivalent however. Being able to remember your timestables and knowing when to use them are entirely different things. Being able to reproduce the steps for putting an IV in an arm on a test and actually putting the IV in are also very different things.
We need to remember the basics of the language and concepts for any field. My problem is in thinking of this as a ‘goal’ for an education system. Yes. we need language. Yes. we need the basics.
Your post makes me think about two rules I learned from my grandmother – and have written about elsewhere (http://virtual-doc.salford.ac.uk/writingresearcher/?p=70): (1) get the rules of writing right, and (2) write just what you really think. Or, know the basics and use them to think for yourself.
As teachers in classrooms where we – none of us – will ever be able to “cover” it all ever again, I wonder if we don’t need to be “nomadic worker-soldiers” who learn basics (rules and relationships among ideas) order to know how and when and where and why to break them to express ideas clearly and to move ahead with necessary changes.
In writing this reply, I keep fusing worker with soldier – can’t see then separately; perhaps because only two of the many soldiers I’ve known ever left the military as anything but “a grunt” – someone who followed and adapted and remade the rules as contexts required, who led not hierarchically but horizontally.
Down to two agentic roles in the rhizome metaphor, I’m wondering how to name that person who is in the pivotal gatekeeper/leader role. I’m listing toward Peter Elbow’s idea of gatekeeper, maybe expressed as sentry, for that person can both open and close gates.