Monday, January 27, 2014

Project Citizen & The Politics of Play in Madagascar


As I watched the sun set from my balcony last night, a mysteriously booming bass speaker washed the beach in a lively party atmosphere. Local teens had organized an impromptu game of football; naked Malagasy children took turns flipping off each others shoulders into the public waters comprising Toliara's harbor; and couples in love strolled hand in hand along the rocky shoreline. All simply enjoying the glowing day's end by sharing this beautiful moment together. This scene, fortunately, is quite the norm here - with one exception. This was the eve of a much lauded visit from the newly claimed President of Madagascar, Hery Rajaonariampianina. The thumping bass music was, in fact, a call to the impending circus of political feather displays....

The kids in the classroom are more important than the president on the stage... 

Indeed as I write this the emergent President of Madagascar is leaving the city park just adjacent to my hotel complex, and oddly enough - I really really don't care.

I say oddly enough, because my teaching responsibilities for University of Toliara include training future High School teachers in the internationally acclaimed civics curriculum Project Citizen. How can I portend to be teaching civics and yet be so transparently disengaged from national-level politics here? Am I taking my job seriously or am I just playing around? On that last question - the answer is a most emphatic yes to both. I am dead serious about my job, yet I fully view my job as playing around. Let me explain.

If you google search "Madagascar Politics" you'd be quickly [mis]led to believe that the real action is happening on the national level. You'd learn about the cartoonishly despotic 2009 coup by Radio DJ Andry Rajoelina over former President Marc Ravelomanana. You'd learn about the ridiculous challenges to democratic presidential elections over the last two years, and finally, you'd learn about the questionably legitimate voting processes this past December. The western blog-o-sphere is, of course, filled with skeptically nuanced perspectives on the relative integrity and merit of this political embarrassment. However, with all due respect, I'm going to assert we need to listen to Benjamin Barber - and simply change the subject.

The many schools of Toliara, such as Lycee Mixte Betania
gather en masse to watch the political posturing of national-scale
politics in Madagascar. In the months to come we delve deeper
into urban civics education in this, the capital of the southwestern
region of the island.
There may or may not have been corruption and intimidation and at any and every level of this recent Malagasy election process. I really don't know, but I really do believe- that it's, almost, entirely beside the point. Attempting to build a respectable national-level government in current-day Madagascar is the equivalent of an architect trying to build a skyscraper before it's foundation; or the natural world trying to grow an organism before developing it's organs - it' just not gonna happen that way! The great many spheres of governance comprising the organs of the Malagasy super-organism are in urgent need of an injection of both innovation and polycentric prosociality . For the PEAR Lab - this means going to the grassroots first. When it comes to the future of Malagasy politics - you'll have a very tough time convincing me that the real action is happening at the national level - it's clearly with the students!

A Solution in the Science of Play?

The best way to train teachers in Project Citizen is to have them experience it first hand. So this years training explores the connections between local educational policies and the rising science of play. Using resources from The National Institute for Play and The Evolution Institute, my Malagasy Undergrads and International Interns are beginning a small-scale action-research project in a handful of regional secondary schools to explore the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to the positive application of play science in these local institutions.

You see - child's play isn't just goofing around. A richly interdisciplinary literature base details the absolutely crucial developmental assets that healthy play can foster across social and neuropsychological scales of organization. Besides individual psychological health, engaging a state-of-play is intimately linked to creativity and problem solving. In short - the bio-cultural roots of democracy are quite clearly enmeshed in the rippling developmental effects of play.

Let's Leapfrog Malagasy Education

In international development "leapfrogging" is when a 'developing' country can look at how a 'developed' nation has screwed things up, and then use modern innovation to leap over the problems of history and emerge perhaps better off than had they simply followed in the footsteps of the so-called 'developed world'. It's my challenge to the students of Toliara to see if the science of play offers an opportunity to leapfrog the Malagasy educational system in just this way.

If you can believe visionaries like Sir Ken Robinson, or the folks at Edutopia - schools can be environments that either kill or cultivate creativity. The science of play maybe, just maybe, can provide an evidence-based road map to educational policy that ensures that the future citizens of Toliara are richly equipped with the social and cognitive capital needed for more authentic bottom-up forms of democracy.

What will it look like? 
That's for University of Toliara students to show us!

Evolution is notorious for solving problems in a myriad web of similar but different solutions. When Applying evolutionary studies to educational design does not result in monolithic solutions, and caution is in order... this is where our students and international partners come in; the key is on-going engagement with the science.
Malagasy students of today face an uphill path
to authentic democratic governance. Designing
school environments to promote cooperative and
creative community solutions is likely to be a
keystone strategy in any such developments.
The science of play may be able to help.
we begin to explore the evolutionary science of play in Malagasy education policy I expect to see exactly such a radiant diversity of local solutions.

I suspect - just like in any other community around the world - Toliara will exhibit both strengths and weakness when it's educational policies around play around held up to the light of modern science.

Self-organized, youth directed play is an outstanding cultural asset here that some communities in the WEIRD world might well be jealous of. That is to say - kids in Toliara certainly don't need adults to tell them how to engage in play. It's such an endemic and rich aspect of local life in this city - I am really excited to have our educational psychology students see this phenomena through the lens of play science. Yet - play in Toliara may be under threat. Madagascar has adopted a largely standard French model of education, which, like that in much of Europe and the US, is notorious for it's potential to deprive kids of the ample and diverse play we now know to be a fundamental human right and developmental necessity. It will be up to these very students at the University of Toliara to design a an educational system that honors this right and capitalizes on this most affordable and exciting of applied sciences!


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Monday, January 6, 2014

Searching for Superorganisms: An Urban Expedition in Madagascar

Every year, tens of thousands of international tourists and researchers descend into the wilds of Madagascar in search of the rarest of the rare organisms on earth. Lemurs, lizards, and even lacewings are just some of the hundreds of endemic species making the island a critical global biodiversity hot spot. While I love spending time in the natural lands of the countryside, these are not the important organisms that I am seeking. I am searching for superorganisms.

A superorganism is, simply, a larger organism - itself made of smaller organisms working towards a common good. Bees in a bee hive are a classic example of such phenomena. When groups become so well coordinated and integrated so as to function as a singular unit, so the metaphor goes - they become a superorganism. Alas - I am not looking for bees either... the endemic species of superorganism I am searching for is located only in very specific environments: the University Cities of Madagascar!

My lab at the University of Toliara has completed it's first year of experimental programming, and we now prepare for 2014 and beyond, focusing on our primary objective: the mapping and cultivating of the University-Assisted Community School (UACS) model in each of the six Malagasy cities housing one of the National University System campuses.

The UACS model, developed extensively by the Netter Center at University of Pennsylvania, supports strong partnerships between university students and regional schools. What's more, such partnerships work towards the aims of highly effective Community School models (in which schools and communities work collaboratively towards widespread benefit).

Now, if my international team of undergrads through PhD candidates is able to both find and cultivate strong partnerships between Malagasy universities, regional school systems, and local communities; how will we know if we are looking at a real superorganism?

Is a UACS model iteself a superorganism, or is it an ecosystem of superorganisms?
OR - is it just an ecosystem of human organisms??

I earlier described superorganisms as both a metaphor and a reality - and that is the exact point of exploration for the programming that lies ahead.

As our lab works toward the critical aim of cultivating UACS models in Madagascar, we will be guided by a top pick of global curriculum to aid us in developing scientific perspectives on the nature and narrative of the school as superorganism.

Pictured above is our (very fledgling) collection of resources. A sort of UACS incubator in a suitcase if you will. Through generous private donations, this year I bring a panoply of resources ranging from Tablets (3) and a Laptop (1), to a portable EEG headset* (1), and most critically - the absolute best in both science and civics curriculum from around the world!

Our three specific curriculum resources:
  • The Big History Project
    • 13.7 billion years of history and more  - on one little DVD-ROM! 
    • This incredible resource brings an internationally benchmarked curricular foundation to Malagasy schools, and one that integrates the physical, biological, and social sciences in a comprehensible and awe-inspiring way! 
    • It is within this context of Big History that students are given lenses through which to view their community as a nested complex of organs, organisms, and super-organisms in both metaphoric and scientific terms. 
  • Project Citizen (Malagasy Edition)
    • A service-learning project in which university students work with high school students to analyze public policy and advocate for positive community development.
    • This is the work-horse of our applied learning opportunities and provides tangible benefits for students, schools, and the broader community!
    • As students begin to search their own community for signs of the UACS superorganism, we will use the lauded Project Citizen framework to examine potential policy development opportunities. 
  • TED-ED
    • DVD's loaded with topical TED Talks on issues of Education, Community Development, Urban Studies, Digital Democracy, and much, much more!
    • All videos are offered with both french and english sub-titles. This promises to transform our previously struggling English Language Learning Center!
Our information technology resources are slim to say the least - the only way to proceed in such a harsh environment is to capitalize on social capital - bonding and bridging our way to a system of superorganismic significance. That is to say.... using the UACS model, we can now deploy our more than capable University of Toliara Teachers-in-Training into our regional K-12 school partners with the absolute leading-edge of curriculum in hand and mind. 

As the high school and university students of Toliara work together to map and cultivate a healthy UACS superorganism locally, they are really cultivating a healthy future for their city and university cities, globally. There is something about studying the big history of brains, schools, and society all together and all at once - which catalyzes the growth of this exciting prospect. I hope you'll join us over the year on our expedition in search of the superorganisms of urban Madagascar!

*For those wondering how we can use an EEG headset (a measurement tool for brainwaves), our educational psychology students have a special interest in neuropsychology, and this entry level tool, combined with our curricular resources will give them access to new horizons of understanding the effects of, for example, fear, stress and play in student learning and life success.