There’s been a few
coffee connections in what I’ve been reading this week and it’s got me
thinking.
It started with
reading this entry from John Spencer in Education Rethink that a colleague sent
me while I was sat in a café on Sunday morning. In it there’s the lines, “I want
my classroom to feel a little more like the youth section of the library.
I want an atmosphere closer to that of Starbucks. I want it to be less
like we live inside of the pages of a textbook and more like we are a living
ecosystem.” As someone who’s been trying to rethink the role and relevance of
our library,is interested in classroom environments as well as having a
penchant for a decent brew this was an interesting notion. Should our
classrooms be modeled on cafes?
It stemmed from the
author’s visit to his own local library; “Visit the youth sections of the
Phoenix Public Library and it no longer feels like a library. It is not cold.
It is not sterile. It is not silent. Books are everywhere, but they are
displayed prominently like one would see in a book store. There are tables and
bean bags and multi-height chairs. Kids want to go to that library and kids
want to stay once they are there. And, despite the lack of silence, kids are
reading.” Much like the café culture coffee house, there’s a range of seating,
and the general impression is one of comfort, and conversation. And sure enough
as I sat there, one look around shows that people are absorbed in reading,
conversation and coffee.
What I like about the
idea is the parallel to an ecosystem, the idea that the classroom is an
organically growing environment, and one can imagine it, fertile with
questions, discussions, connections and meaning making. Spaces like this are by
there very nature collaborative spaces, not silent “I spaces”, but “We spaces”,
characterized by active metacognition and reflection, authentic contexts, students
building on their passions, peer and group feedback, and by teachers who know
when to cause learning and when to stand back.
And this is where the
coffee connection comes in. Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine: How creativity works,
draws on the example of the Pixar Animation Studios in order to illustrate the
power of collaboration. He talks about spaces such as the coffee bars, the art
gallery, and watering holes being hugely collaborative spaces. The spaces at
Pixar were strategically designed and positioned in order to encourage just
this- extensions of the office. Not that all conversations and connections were
of huge significance- just that some of them were. People constantly talked
about what they were doing, the problems they were facing and spent time
talking with colleagues that they wouldn't, in a more traditional setting, talk
to. Kursty Groves in I wish I worked there, refers to much the same idea, in
that the innovative businesses she visited all contained components of spaces
to collaborate, spaces to reflect, spaces to play and spaces to stimulate.
Ray Oldenburg, whom
Lehrer refers to talks about these spaces as ‘third places’ – interactive environments
that are not the home, or the office - spaces that bring together diverse
talents and view points. And he cites the eighteenth century coffee house as a
great example, places where people gathered to discuss politics, science and
literature. Which brings me to a paper that a principal on the Gold Coast sent
me last week and which, until this point, had remained, unread, in my bag.
Erica McWilliam’s takes
the coffee house notion a stage further and suggests that in terms of
environments for enculturating lifelong learning, there is much that we can
learn from the coffee houses of nineteenth century Britain: “The café provided
a convivial space, a place of sociability, learning and public display where
social learning opportunities transcended class barriers” (p. 258). They were
spaces where customers, (and yes they were mainly men back then), came to
discuss, read or be read to, share opinion and conversation and of course to
drink coffee. Isaac Newton, according to the piece, apparently even dissected a
dolphin in a London coffee house. Quite what dialogue was going on prior to
that is anyone’s guess and one could anticipate a number of problems in the
local Starbucks. But perhaps it simply illustrates the fact that these were
seen as centres of learning.
And this is where
McWilliam’s main point lies- the notion that in fact that seen alongside the
mandated, foundational education of the school, it is actually the more
bespoke, self- selected and sociable learning space of the café that serves as
a more appropriate model for lifelong learning. She suggests that traditionally
schools have been places of curriculum delivery, of socialization and places
that shift children from home to the workplace: “… schools have
done important work, but they have not, until now, been expected, or expected
themselves, to take responsibility for the sort of learning that was made
possible in the space of the café.” (p.
259). The space best suited to lifelong learning now, she suggests, lies
at the intersection of the two.
So what does it mean
for the space, and where are the parallels with what John Spencer was talking
about in his blog? McWilliam suggests that what we can learn from café society
is about the discretion people have about when
and how they learn. It’s about the
messages that a student receives upon arriving in a space. It tell them a lot
about what they can expect. Coffee houses aimed to be invitational spaces of
‘physical and mental comfort’, engaging spaces- places of “pleasurable learning
affordances” (p. 266). How then can we mirror this in our classrooms? Is it
about the aesthetics, seating, the layout and volume of furniture, the design
of spaces to encourage active dialogue and collaboration? Or perhaps it’s more
about personalizing learning and the parallels with engaging with lifelong
learning.
Certainly it’s an
interesting notion to be wondering about on a Sunday morning over a good flat
white. Enough then for the time being, time for a coffee. Now where did I put
that dolphin?
References
Groves,
K. (2010). I wish I worked there! A look inside the most creative spaces in
business. Chichester: Wiley
Lehrer, J. (2012). Imagine:
How creativity works. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
McWilliam, E. (2011). From school to cafe and back again: responding to
teh learning demands of the twenty-first century. International Journal of
Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, 14(3), 257-268.
