Podcast Season 1 Ep. 3 - Interdisciplinary Learning and Using Stories to Teach with Diane Walters

In Episode 3, Blue speaks with educational consultant, Diane Walters about knowledge-based learning, using storytelling as a way of teaching, and her vision of educators as "seed-planters" of knowledge.

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Podcast Transcript

Today, I'm talking with Diane Walters, who has been working in education for the last 36 years. And for the last 10 of those, focusing on educational consultation—both with parents, teachers, administration, and recently the faculty of a Mohawk immersion school of the Six Nation Territory in Ontario, Canada, plus teachers in China, Australia, and various regions of the USA. Diane will be offering online courses for teachers that she's calling “Trade Secrets.” And you can find details on her website, Teaching Into the Future in the show notes. I'm going to be asking Diane, is knowledge based learning still relevant in the 21st century? How can storytelling be used as a way of teaching? And what does interdisciplinary learning look like for her? 

Diane, thank you so much for joining me today on the show. I'm really excited that you can make time for us.

Well, thanks for having me Blue.

Let's jump straight into the first question that I have for you. Is knowledge based learning still relevant in the 21st century?

That's a great question. I've been asked it all the time. And I think that we have to really look at that question. From the vantage point of etymology, let's look at what knowledge is, first of all. So if you look that up, knowledge is based on the word Gnosis, which is G N, O, S, I, S, and it really means “to know” or the “capacity of knowing.” So you think, well, what is the capacity of knowing and understanding our world? Right? In the 17th century, that knowing in that capacity changed into, you could say, an economy based on deductive and reductive reasoning, which is still at work today. But prior to that, traditional knowledge was held as wisdom. So let's just jump into the 17th century for a moment. And say that deductive reductive reasoning is concept based. It's conceptual knowledge that is based on what you can see in here, which cancels out a whole ecosystem of diversity, and interconnectivity. And whole ism, knowledge and wisdom based understanding on all of life, and all many, many ways of knowing and perceiving. But to go into this question is knowledge in the knowledge-based economy still relevant for the 21st century? I think I want to break both knowledge out and then economy out. So right now, we're in what we call the attention economy. Right? So with algorithms taking over our attention, and guiding it and governing it, let alone that of our children. Are we going to just put our children in front of a computer screen and go into a reductive deductive rabbit hole of conceptually based knowledge? So I think that when we're looking at how algorithms rival diversity and compete for our attention, we have to ask ourselves the most fundamental question, the most fundamental, what is knowledge kind of question, which is “what makes us human?”. What is human about our humaneness? And when I think about that, I go back once again, just story to the role of imagination, and how it's played us from the Neolithic times, all the way up, why we became predator instead of prey, really, the capacity to imagine the capacity to think outside of the box, and how we want to lead our students to doing that, rather than guide them into a kind of cross-curricular tunnel of algorithm predictability. We want to teach children to think. And the only way to do that is through the imagination. As Einstein said,

“Logic will take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere.“

That's right. You know it. The thing that the tech age has given us right now is what we call computational knowledge. And computational knowledge is really based on individualized learning. It's working with interactive video, and no matter where we are in the planet, our geographical independence is absolutely not at stake. we can be at home in our living rooms, as we've discovered the last couple of years, and learn the same thing or learn those things along the lines. What we're missing is an in-person, in-presence kind of learning platform, that has been the traditional way of imparting our understanding for the world. So we have to ask ourselves, well, what have we lost? And what have we gained? We've gained our liberty in that way. It's liberated rather than cemented knowledge base structures, so that we're not conducive to what that particular teacher knows, or that particular school system knows. We're now in a wide range of a knowledge economy that can tap into multiple perspectives. And I think that's great. And we want to encourage that kind of independent individualized learning, and those platforms that are highly interactive, but I asked you, are they screen based? Or do they involve the heart and the hands, the other aspect of what it means to be human, in terms of learning and understanding our world?

I like how you spin that, actually, because you're right, it is actually very liberating in a way that we get to access knowledge from such a broad base, as opposed to just one person in a classroom, you know, accessing various textbooks that they may choose, we now have much broader access. But at the same time, as you said, I think that person-to- person connection can be lost. And so how do we integrate? You know, that kind of knowledge based learning through the computer through the screen, with making sure that we're interacting with people in the outdoors and everything around us?

Right, totally. And I think that the role that imagination has to play is a key one to inspire. So what are teachers doing, if not to inspire our students to learn more actively outside of the classroom and outside of our lessons, and outside of our agendas, we want to inspire them to learn about the ecosystem, and so to go out into their own world into their own geographic geography, and into their own backyards, and we want them to take that off. And so we can do that online. We can do that with inspiring videos, we can do that most of all, through human inquiry through the question, absolutely, is being activated on many platforms today. But imagination is at the core of Gnosis is at the core of what traditional wisdom would have used in imparting what they consider to be useful information for the future generations.

And so that leads me to another question I wanted to ask you today, which was, how can storytelling be used as a way of teaching? You know, particularly when we think of I think any age really, but if we think of the K to 8 age range? How can storytelling be a part of that teaching?

Well, Blue, I think that storytelling is at the heart of teaching. And if we're not telling stories about every subject, including science and math, we're not finding the story behind it. We're missing the eight ball. And so I'm currently designing a storytelling and connect teaching through storytelling and connection on a new platform for online course development for teachers and administrators and parents. And while I'm doing that, I've really explored my 36 years of telling stories in the classroom around every subject. And it's taken me a while to realize that not everybody has done that. And it's an actual technique and a tool. And when you look at traditional education, like the Mohawk, for example, teaching the story of Sky Woman—their creation story. They do that for years, they teach the same story over and over again. But they deepen it. And it's an incredible story that holds so many other principles and practices within it. And through their retelling and telling of the story of Sky Woman it has grown and deepened in the children until they can claim it as their own, and that they can see all Creation within it. And I think that that's a good metaphor to use for the rest of us in terms of interdisciplinary learning through one story, but you can find stories of sciences by going into the history of those sciences, find out who those adventures were, when was that subject or that practice invented? When did people on the planet first begin utilizing it, it's always a good place to start, is the history or her story behind a given subject? Behind a word, like I started today, with the word knowledge based on Gnosis so you can find the story behind that and what it really means. There's a story behind everything it's being used now heavily in marketing, by just about every business on the planet. And if you go onto Facebook and Instagram, or TikTok, what is that? It's all telling us our human stories. So it's the wisdom of what it means to be human, really, when we look at storytelling, and the role that it can play in learning. I love that. 

Yeah, they say that kids will remember 10 percent of the written word, and over 60 percent of something on video. Why? Because it moves. Hmm, interesting. Mm hmm.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I love that I hadn't really thought about learning in that way, with the storytelling piece. So what does interdisciplinary learning look like for you? Could you give us an example? And how could somebody weave lots of different subjects into one story? And you could sort of touched on that with the history piece, which I love.

This has been a question that I've carried for as long as I've been a teacher, as to how every subject relates to something else. And first with it, when I was in the Waldor system, I began to work with movement and art compared to that subject. And many teachers will do this, right, we'll find the art project that'll match the science experiment, we'll find movement that attaches to it, we'll find a biography that belongs to that, too. So now we've got history, art movement, in a science subject. And then I realized, what about the others? What about math? What about the social network of what I'm really doing in a classroom when I'm combining and connecting and when I'm combining and connecting students with one another. So I came up with what I call the “curriculum seal.” And it's a subject centered base, which is based on Parker Palmer's good work. If you haven't heard of him, he's definitely worth researching. Parker Palmer, and he has the idea that the teachers are facilitators, and that the subject is at the center. So rather than a sit and get model, where teachers are at the center of everything, and that then we teach from that platform, we put the subject in the center, and the teachers are the facilitators of that subject. I just took that for a spin and put seven subjects around math, science, and history or culture, the movement, the arts, and the social capacities that I was wanting to create and work within my students based on communication skills, or social practices, or community-based practices. I call it the curriculum seal, because it's it's a seal inside itself, but each one of them spins out very much like computational learning out into the ethernet of possibilities, right in universality of possibilities. So why don't you give me a subject, any subject and we can concretize this with a plan.

The improv we're going to improv, and is any kind of subject that you would want to learn about that you would want to teach to conservation. 

Okay, so we're teaching conservation and no matter the age of save around Grade 5 grade eight could be in Grade 8. Let's take conservation. And first of all, what category would you put conservation in?

Oh, that's a good question. It's an environmental based subject. Yes. Can we do environmental studies? Yeah,it would be part of the sciences. 

Yeah. So part of the sciences, but it has a humanitarian, a humanities quality to it, right? And yet we're bringing in a social construct. So for conservation in the center of our circle, we're going into the sciences, the science of conservation, would be, you know, what, what are the statistics of those rivers and streams? What are the statistics of those fish that we were wanting to conserve, or those grizzly bears or those wolves? What are the facts that we can be looking at in math, for statistics, and in science, for what has been the hypothesis to date? What has caused the situation that we've got that in a way, that's a hypothesis, so we can take a scientific approach to conservation? We've got a mathematical statistical approach to conservation. And now we can take that into the social stream, the history stream? When did conservation first start? You know, who developed that? And when, and why. So it goes into the human component of human history, somebody on the planet got concerned? And where was that? And where did the word conserve start? And what does that mean? So that goes into language. So, you know, go into the etymological roots of the word environment, and environmental conservation, and what where that comes from and where the spin off is. So now you've got a language lesson. And not only that, but you know, you can break that apart, depending on the age group into this, from the spelling to the grammar, to the etymology, to the full scale research report, to the teaching of certain kinds of writing styles, from the first person, second person, third person, while they're writing about conserving a piece of an area in their in their region, or what have you take it away. But so now we've covered science, math, history, and language. Now we have the arts, how do we work with environmental conservation on the arts? Well, you often when I think of it, I think of a map a blueprint that has lots of different ecosystems based on it and how one relates to the other, I would take the kids outside personally, and I would have them draw what they could see as much as they could see the flora, the fauna, the the trees, the houses, they, that includes the people in the ecosystem that we are talking about, so that they have a real sense of what ecosystem really means from the inside out. And then speaking of inside out, we've got that social component, and how we can't be an ecosystem without one another. You know, and, and just like the animal world is dependent on one another, a fleet of flowers to insects, the apple, plus the apple is pollinated by the bee, for example, are the different pollinators. So where are we interacting with the landscape? And what is our role in pollinating the landscape? With love, with belonging, with connection, with kindness? How do we take that into a whole other sociological component of environmental conservation, rather than just sticking it over there in a deductive reductive kind of way, as a divorced subject, divorced from everything else, even though the very essence of environmental conservation is not deductive or reactive? It's expansive. But do you see what I mean how a curriculum seal can really bring a wide array of diversity in perspective into your teaching style?

I love it. What I'm doing is sitting here right now thinking I want to be in your class. Because it really engages me, and I studied conservation, and I'm listening to you thinking, ah, it would have been so much more interesting to have you in the during the lectures. But um, no, it's really wonderful. And I think what's nice, actually, too is that Live it Earth, our learning platform is very much based on this idea of getting out using the platform, but getting outside and yet touching on all of these different subject areas. So it's really great to listen to you today. And, yeah, I feel invigorated. So yeah, thank you so much for joining us. And we're gonna, I know you have your own website and you do consultancy work and things. So we're going to make sure that the website that's in the show notes, so we'll make sure that that goes in there. And any other things we may think of that might be interesting to share as well that you mentioned today as well. But yeah, Diane, thank you so much for joining me. It's been really great to have you in.

It's a great pleasure Blue. Thank you for the invitation. Yeah. We'd love to have you in any class I'm teaching.

Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us on the 21st Century Teacher, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Please subscribe so you don't miss out on the next show. And also don't forget to check out our fantastic online learning platform which is liveit.earth. Thanks again and we'll see you soon!