A Vision of the Curriculum As Student Self-Creation: a Philosophy and a System to Manage, Record, and Guide the Process

A vision of the curriculum as student self-creation: A philosophy and a system to manage, record, and guide the process

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

Elizabeth Brott Beese, B.A.

Graduate Program in Philosophical Studies in Education

The Ohio State University

2012

Thesis Committee

Bryan Warnick, Advisor

Richard Voithofer

Elizabeth Brott Beese

2012

Abstract

This thesis draws upon the interrelated philosophies of constructivism, individualism, self- creation, and narrative identity, to propose a radically liberated and individualized vision of the curriculum. The curriculum is re-framed, here, not as a culturally-prescribed canon of important knowledge and skills, but as a process of aided student self-creation towards their own projected professional and social identities. Finally, a system – with applications of emerging technologies and descriptions of interfaces – is tentatively suggested, towards the aim of recording, managing, and guiding, such a profoundly individualized curriculum.

Dedication

To bigger and better things!

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Acknowledgements

With many thanks to the advisors/professors who so supported and/or indulged me in this enterprise, the friends who were sounding boards; and with further thanks to the one-man support system NICHOLAS BEESE, who I am going to marry ten days from the submission of this thing.

Vita

2007……………………………………………………………………….Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy

2011……………………………………………………....B.A., History, Case Western Reserve University

Field of Study

Philosophical Studies in Education

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iii Acknowledgements ...... iv Vita ...... v List of Figures ...... viii PART I: PHILOSOPHY ...... 3 For Orientation: An Overview of the Proposal and What it Implies for Schools ...... 3 A Word about Constructivist Learning Environments ...... 5 Introduction to the Part One: Philosophy Informing a Vision of the Curriculum ...... 6 Constructivism and Individualizing Education ...... 8 Definitions ...... 8 Continuity of Experience: Contrasting Realizations of a Constructivist Ideal in the Work of Montessori and Dewey ...... 10 ‘Learning Pathways’ ...... 15 Justification for an Individualized vs. Uniform Curriculum ...... 20 Self-Creation and Individualism ...... 22 Agency, Free Will, and the Practical Limits of Self-Creation ...... 25 Three Philosophers Espousing Highly Romantic Visions of Self-Creation ...... 28 Nietzsche ...... 28 Foucault ...... 30 Emerson ...... 31 Critique of Foucault, Emerson, Nietzsche ...... 33 Narrative Identity and Self-Creation ...... 46 Critique of Narrative Identity as a Construct ...... 52 PART II: THE SYSTEM ...... 55 For Orientation: An Overview of the System ...... 55 Current Work and Extant Technologies Which Inform this Thesis ...... 57 Learning Objects in Learning Maps: Narremes in the Narrative ...... 60 Introduction to Learning Objects and Learning Management Systems ...... 60 Accessibility of the Learning Object in the Age of the Web ...... 64 vi

A New Metaphor: Learning Objects as Narremes ...... 65 An Overview of Narrative Elements in the System ...... 66 First: Biography of Exploratory Learning ...... 67 Second: Themes and Goals ...... 68 Third: Themes Building into Goals, Building into Narratives, Building into Identities ...... 68 Learning Maps ...... 70 The Genealogical Learning Map: An Illustration ...... 72 Choosing Elements for Inclusion in Learning Maps ...... 81 Recombining Learning Objects into Stories: The Second Functionality of this Tool ...... 83 Identifying and Drawing Out “Themes” or “Subnarratives” ...... 83 Non-Linear Elements of Concept Maps – To Harness for the Imposing of “Revisionist” Narratives ...... 84 Goal-Setting Aids and Management of Goals ...... 87 Goals as Narrative ...... 88 Self-Set Goals and the Psychology of Ownership ...... 91 Projected Identities as Meta-Goals with a Narrative Component ...... 94 Mechanisms for Ensuring Rigor ...... 98 Ethical Teacher Intervention ...... 100 Technologies to Facilitate Guidance, Instruction, and Collaboration in the Context of a Radically Individualized Curriculum ...... 104 A Tension ...... 105 Possibilities of Data Mining ...... 107 Profiling and Advising Students Based on Data ...... 108 Matching Students with Learning Objects of Various Kinds ...... 110 Matching Students with Instructors ...... 111 Learning Groups and Matching with Similarly-Minded Peers ...... 113 Conclusion ...... 115 References ...... Error! Bookmark not defined.

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List of Figures

Figure 1. A sample visualization of a ‘learning pathway’………………………………………………….74

Figure 2. Close-up A………………………………………………………………………………………………………74

Figure 3. Close-up B………………………………………………………………………………………………………75

Figure 4. Close-up of a ‘connection point’……………………………………………………………………….76

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Introduction to the Thesis

This thesis holds that the true curriculum is not that familiar gauntlet of subjects we prescribe to students in school. Rather, the true curriculum is the series of personally significant ideas, skills, texts, role models, and projects – meaningfully incorporated by the student – which slowly and contingently build upon themselves to create the student’s ultimate social, economic, and personal identities. The true curriculum is as unique as the student. To support this vision of the curriculum, I draw upon some classic constructivist philosophers of education. Ideas of self- creation and individualism gleaned from diverse philosophers, from Foucault to

Emerson, and moderated by Dewey, will also profoundly inform this vision of the curriculum – as will some research in autodidacticism. And narrative identity, as an organizing construct for this self-created curriculum, will furthermore influence this thesis.

The ideal formal curriculum (i.e., the one administrated by a formal educational system) extrapolated from these principles would adapt, change, and grow with the student, supporting and reflecting their evolution from pluripotency to specialization and crystallized identity. Student choice would be harmonized with sophisticated, personalized guidance – all of which I will suggest can be realistically managed with the help emerging computer technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the appropriateness of such a conception of the curriculum, and then to suggest ways in which emerging technologies could support the administrative complexities of such a system,

prudently guiding and managing students in the struggle to curate and create such a curriculum.

The majority of the work in educational technology, currently, is directed towards automating instruction. Scholars are demonstrating just what a powerful, profoundly individualizing pedagogical force instructional technology will be, in the future. But what if we expanded the role of educational technology to personalize not only a student’s individual lessons within the prescribed curriculum, but to guide them through the curation and creation of an entire personalized curriculum, towards the creation of their ultimate personal, economic, and social identities?

The metaphor for this proposed technology would not, then, be a teacher or instructor, as in most educational technologies. Instead, perhaps the best metaphor is that of a preternaturally attentive advisor or guidance counselor, who constantly elicits input from the student and perceptively adapts long-reaching curricular plans according to it. Perhaps, more specifically, given the philosophy of curriculum put forth in this paper, the best existing metaphor might be an advisor at a radically individualizing liberal arts college on the Deweyan model (but with a broader and perhaps more economically pragmatic mission than training exclusively in the humanities than is common at such institutions).

PART I: PHILOSOPHY

For Orientation: An Overview of the Proposal and What it Implies for Schools

The first section of my thesis will principally deal with the philosophy undergirding this proposed vision of the curriculum. However, for clarity’s sake, I want to orient the reader by providing a more concrete description of what this vision of the curriculum entails, institutionally-speaking.

This thesis proposes a vision of education in which the standard curriculum is dismantled, and replaced with a more flexible, variable program that adapts and redefines itself at frequent junctures, based on factors of student choice and self- direction (relating to ideals of self-creation and narrative identity to be discussed later in this thesis.)

This atomistic, variously combinable vision of the curriculum draws much from the present conversation about “learning objects” and “learning management systems” in instructional design, but proposes an expansion of the idea across the whole curriculum, and proposes a very liberal, constructivist, individualist (etc.) idea of how that whole curriculum might be organized and cultivated.

To contextualize this in terms of implications for our actual educational system: whereas the most atomistic level of choice a student might have in our present system is the individual courses he or she chooses to take within an institution (and this mainly at the upper high school or undergraduate level), I will

argue that student choice ought to begin at an even more fundamental level than this. The classroom itself is a highly bounded, prescribed environment. It is most often ruled by a syllabus or schedule which prescribes the material, the approach, the sequence, and the work that every student in the classroom will do. Such organization makes sense considering historical limitations of resources, communications, and administration. These factors, have, in the past, tied a student to a single, geography-bound institution, and to its own unique and limited resources. One might, if one is lucky, find a fairly sympathetic institution, yet still likely experience specific instances of a lack of fit within its prescribed curriculum.

However, I argue that current and emerging technologies allow for unique customization of a students’ curricular path along constructivist and individualizing ideals of education.

A note regarding examples: while this thesis as a whole attempts relevance across all levels of the education system, most of my examples (such as the one above) will concern the education of older high school age and undergraduate students. This is because the fullest realization of student self-creation and student choice is possible at these more mature ages. Less mature students -- while I’d argue that they, too, ought to have more input than they do at present towards the nature of their lessons -- have more obvious limitations. Less mature students (say, elementary age students) cannot realistically project what skills or knowledge will be useful for them in the future (though I’d certainly encourage them to try, for the practice); and they are more limited as to the real range of appropriate subjects for

study, as such elementary subjects of arithmetic, scientific reasoning, and reading proficiency are undeniably foundational for participation in society.

A Word about Constructivist Learning Environments

To avoid any confusion, I will here acknowledge and discuss some interesting work being done towards the creation of “constructivist learning environments,” a growing field in learning technology. The project of “constructivist learning environments” is related but not yet identical to the project proposed by this thesis.

Authors of “constructivist learning environments” -- as pioneered by scholars like Thomas Duffy and David Jonassen -- often make the nod to constructivism chiefly to express values of learning that differ from the simple information-delivery model of more primitive automated instructional designs. Constructivist learning environments are an extremely important area of research, at the moment, and its aims are related and sympathetic to the aims of this thesis.

Nevertheless, constructivist learning environments, at the present, are primarily subject-bound. They are chiefly characterized by the fact that they allow for adaptable, customized paths through the same material…and yet, it is still “the same material” – a limited, domain-bounded scope of material. The constructivist learning environments currently in in the literature operate within domain bounds, usually to teach some particular subject matter; albeit, in a more fluid, constructivist, and user-responsive manner than traditional content delivery systems.

This thesis is more ambitious, in that it proposes the creation of a meta- constructivist learning environment – one in which the student might take nearly

infinite paths through a greatly expanded terrain of infinitely connected learning objects – routed by the most highly personalized guidance.

The system proposed in this thesis has more in common with the learning management system of further recent literature – although these, too, are nevertheless not yet quite applied in the manner I am going to suggest. However, the essential idea and name is applicable: a learning management system, broadly construed, simply helps to ‘coordinate learning.’ The tools suggested in this thesis, too, focus on the task of ‘coordinating’ learning experiences, across domains. Hence, it fits underneath the umbrella of “learning management system.”

Introduction to the Part One: Philosophy Informing a Vision of the Curriculum

In this first section, I will discuss the philosophy which underpins the vision of the curriculum set forth above. The central theme, again, will be that of education as a process of “self co-creation,” between a student and a highly adaptable and personalizable curricular guidance system – one which responds perceptively, based on accumulated data, to various levels of student input.

Education as self-creation begins with the notion of education as a process of “becoming” or “growth” (common themes in educational philosophy) and suffuses it (importantly) with a sense of creative ownership or agency on the part of the student. Allowing students a strong voice in shaping their own curricula is obviously an administrationally fraught task, and a risky one, without guidance; which is why my later chapters will propose some emergent technologies well-

suited to the management of such a curriculum. However, in this section, I will focus on the liberal, individualizing philosophy of education which undergirds this vision of the curriculum.

I will also, necessarily, address the limits of student choice and agency, and the supportive role of external guidance (hence, ‘co-creation’). Nevertheless, I firmly come down on the side of greatly increased student agency in the curation of their own curriculum, with limits to be discussed.

Constructivism and Individualizing Education

Definitions

The constructivist mood which suffuses most educational philosophy written in the last couple hundred years, certainly also informs this thesis. Constructivism affirms the profoundly contingent and profoundly personal nature of learning.

Clearly this affirmation intersects with an “individualizing” program of learning which characterizes its aims as “self-creation.”

As the very name suggests, constructivism posits the constructedness of human knowledge, setting itself up against empiricist “mirror image of reality” theories of knowledge. This is a powerful and diversely-applied proposition. There are a range of constructivisms active in educational philosophy today, with varying levels of radicalism (Phillips, 1995).

However: many moderate constructivists – including myself – believe there are limits to this constructedness; that while we may focus on the createdness and historical contingency of human knowledge and the disciplines, we do appear to run up against natural constraints in some world ‘outside’ ourselves, and that these constraints are often apparent to most, and somewhat agreed upon. That is to say, constructivism is not, among moderates, synonymous with radical skepticism or relativism. Constructivists are not necessarily relativists who believe that any human construction of knowledge is as good as another, and that each individual’s unique conception of the world is incommensurable with another. All are, however,

skeptically conservative in their assertions of correspondence between human knowledge and any a priori external ‘ultimate realities.’

As logically follows from such ontologies and theories of knowledge, constructivist philosophers have often stressed agency and participation of the student in the learning process, replacing an older model of simple “knowledge transfer” from informed teacher to ignorant student. Perhaps that example is a bit of a straw man, nowadays -- does anyone really believe in Locke’s tabula rasa? – But nevertheless, I, like many others, see it as extremely useful to focus especially on the role of the student in learning and constructing knowledge. I think it is especially important to focus thusly because our models of education are not yet quite harmonized with our more ‘student-centered’ ideals, and often uphold the role of the teacher as the primary effector of learning. Whether we believe this or not, our institutions often reinforce it, at the moment.

Another clear influence of constructivism on this vision of the curriculum is apparent in the symmetry between the ideas of “constructedness” and “creation” – the latter of which is another prominent concept in this thesis. If our identities, our knowledge, and our theories about the world are not inherent or direct transplants from some outer reality, then they are in some way created by our own mental agency, intermediated by cultural constructs. The idea of self-creation shares certain anti-essentialist values with constructivism.

One helpful, pragmatic way to look at constructivism is as a perspective or a focus. Constructivists are intrigued with the power of human theory-making, and

the process by which humans shape the world around them by means of intricate and profound theories and disciplines. Constructivists might be said to simply focus on this human, constructed, creative side of truth and meaning, as it seems to bring clarity to certain kinds of problems in education.

The proposal in this thesis simply follows the logic in constructivist theories of learning. If learning is profoundly contingent upon students’ past experiences, and if the single agent with most leverage in the learning process is the student, then a radically tailored curriculum which evolves with individual student experience and student self-creation seems to follow as a logical application of these assumptions in educational environments.

Continuity of Experience: Contrasting Realizations of a Constructivist Ideal in the Work of Montessori and Dewey

John Dewey is perhaps the paradigmatic constructivist philosopher of education. Dewey’s constructivist principle of continuity of experience resonates particularly with this vision of the learning management system.

Dewey’s concept of continuity of experience foregrounds the historicity and contingency of learning, within an individual. Continuity of experience encapsulates the idea that every past learning experience, hypothetically speaking, affects the nature and direction of every future learning experience. These contingent experiences build, together – accumulate, over time – into the individual’s full, mature, and uniquely constructed “body of knowledge.”

Here follows a relevant and influential passage regarding continuity of experience, selected The Child and the Curriculum, and edited to highlight the

Deweyan heritage of the ideas in this thesis:

… [T]he “old education” tended to ignore the dynamic quality, the developing force inherent in the child’s present experience.” [Emphases mine.]

It “therefore assume[d] that direction and control were just matters of arbitrarily putting the child in a given path and compelling him to walk there.” [That is, the syllabus, or the heavily prescribed curriculum.]

Dewey then discusses the opposite evil: expecting a child to “invent” up the fundamental concepts of the mind for himself, in some kind of pure, unaffected, feral way. This is ridiculous, he says.

“Nothing can be developed from nothing…It is certainly … futile to expect a child to evolve a universe out of his mere mind…” Rather:

It is a development of experience and into experience that is really wanted. The problem of direction is thus the problem of selecting appropriate stimuli for instincts and impulses which it is desired to employ in the gaining of new experience. What new experiences are desirable, and what stimuli are needed, it is impossible to tell except as there is some comprehension of the development which is aimed at; except, in a word, as the adult knowledge is drawn upon as revealing the possible career open to the child.

It is the supposition of this thesis that continuity in student learning could be greatly improved with a more flexible, atomistic system, in which student choice, student interest, and student goals are constantly consulted as the determining factors of what learning materials a student interacts with, the order of those learning materials, and the work the student does on those materials.

The essential idea of Dewey’s continuity of experience could lead us down some radical lanes and radical definitions of the curriculum. However, while his rhetoric on the subject of the curriculum was often radical, Dewey often provided fairly tame examples of how such constructivist ideals as “continuity of experience” might be achieved in traditional classrooms. The tameness of these examples of

“continuity of experience” might be interpreted in such a way as to deem it sufficient for the teacher to curate a perfect lesson-world of continuous experiences, and then immerse the students into this perfect, continuous lesson-world (essentially achieving ‘continuity’ for the students by orchestrating and perfectly controlling student experience). This interpretation is not, perhaps, true to the broader spirit of

Dewey; but it would be an honest misinterpretation, based on some of his examples.

For instance, Dewey’s nods to student initiative (for, to be fair, he does make them) are often overshadowed by examples which seem to favor teacher- orchestrated continuity of student experience (here, we might easily read in: the

“perfect” prescribed curriculum, or the teacher-written syllabus). In the School and

Society, he gives an example of how students might be brought to an ideal understanding of economic history if they are given the opportunity to interact with primitive materials with primitive processing techniques (Dewey, 1899).

This is but one small example; but perhaps in a quest to appear more pragmatic rather than radical in his writings on progressive education, Dewey often punctuates his exposition of very liberal, child-centered ideals regarding the curriculum, with fairly traditional, teacher-centered examples of how to act upon

students in order to achieve within their minds the proper, continuous order of curricular subjects.

I do not think this is because Dewey did not conceive of a more fully liberated vision of continuity in the curriculum in the classroom. More likely, his conservative, classroom-bound examples reflect a sensitivity to the wariness of contemporary audiences regarding more radical classroom models – as well as the necessary limits to imagination which coincide with contemporary limitations of resources. That is: he was limited by the tools of his day: the teacher and the classroom were the only extant technologies of learning. He could not propose a radically individualizing technology as a solution; so he works with older, more limited solutions. And so, unlike Maria Montessori, he fails to propose a radically altered formal school model – even though it might more fully embody his ideals.

Maria Montessori is a second paradigmatic constructivist in educational philosophy. Montessori’s ideas are closely related to Dewey’s, but not as well- stated, explicitly. She is a practitioner, rather than a philosopher. An early advocate of a ‘child-centered’ education, she intuitively suggests a curriculum tailored to address continuity of experience in From Childhood to Adolescence – one of her few works dealing with more mature students.

She perceives a value to the economy of interest (my own term for a concept deeply implicit to these chapters in Montessori.) And she intuits the wisdom of following student interest from one topic to another, with an additional layer of subtle adult guidance and encouragement to rigor (Montessori, 1948). Implicit in

her examples is Dewey’s continuity of experience – but also there is a salient and perhaps additional element of student choice or student interest in Montessori’s example. Perhaps it is only more apparent because of Montessori’s practitioner’s eye: her examples more fully embody student choice, student engagement, and true continuity than do Dewey’s classroom-bound examples.

For Montessori, the organic input of student interest and student choice define the direction of the truly continuous curriculum. Montessori’s ideal teacher allows for more randomness, more student input into her evolving curriculum, and her examples bear out this philosophy. In one example, a boy’s curiosity about rivers directs the formation of a whole, integrated science and geography unit.

Her conception of continuity is more organic than Dewey’s, because it considers affective elements in student continuity of experience. Simple immersion into a carefully curated learning environment is not enough to constitute a lasting experience upon which to build further instruction. Authentic continuous experience would also include a certain element of affective attachment – some element of interest or engagement – which prompts the student to engage with the experience fully.

This principle of a fully realized “continuity of experience” – a sort of organic curriculum – are perhaps only truly realized at the most radical progressive schools

– the Sudburys and Summerhills of the world.

And if Montessori’s model (and Dewey’s ideas) are otherwise rarely realized in the real world, it is because – while its merits seem patently recognizable – it is an

impossible ideal to fully implement in a one-teacher classroom. For such a curriculum to work out, we’d almost need to assign such a teacher to each student -- which is unfortunately a material impossibility. This problem begs for a technology to economize this process, and to make a curriculum profoundly shaped and informed by student interest available for all.

‘Learning Pathways’

Followed to its logical conclusion, “continuity of experience” can lead us to an interesting visualization of an individual’s lifetime education.

It is an interesting exercise to visualize an individual’s continuous, constructivist curriculum developing as a contingent, branching pathway. Brigid

Barron, a qualitative researcher in education, is currently doing work with adolescent technical autodidacts – that is, adolescents who have developed extraordinary extracurricular proficiencies in various technical and computer-based skills. (Note: she does not use the term autodidacts, herself, in her work). She conceptualizes the unique personal learning trajectories of these self-directed adolescents as “pathways,” as the students move from one learning experience or material to the next, propelled by a profound subjective agency and sustained by interest and engagement.

First, a caveat: autodidacticism is an interesting case to study in light of the continuity of experience and, certainly, in light of the idea of education as ‘self- creation.’ I will treat the matter of autodidacticism, in depth, in a separate section on the romantic self. This is because the concept of the ‘autodidact’ (literally, ‘self-

taught) can partake of the same dangerous and romantic myth as the romantic

Foucauldian or transcendentalist self. We might be in danger of romanticizing those who would self-ostracize in educational environments: those who refuse to be mentored, or engage in any of the social aspects of learning. And this is a dangerous – not to mention ridiculous and impossible – ideal. The only pure autodidact, wholly independent of social influence, would be some sort of feral child, quite obviously – and this is no ideal to aim for.

Dangers and false ideals aside, however, we are fascinated by an element of profound self-determination in the autodidact. For my purposes here, the salient defining point of an autodidact is not, then, some romanticized hermetic separateness from the influences of society; but a profound ownership and self- determination in learning – a student who is capable to set their own goals and curate their own materials and mentors around them, with a sense of agency and lack of institutional prompting which we find exceptional and, perhaps, exemplary.

And Barron’s self-directed teenagers fit this description. They do not seal themselves off from outside influences, as romantic selves. Rather, they are purposefully and creatively engaged in compiling their own ‘curriculum,’ from across multiple resource domains, and towards proficiency in some technical pursuit of their own choosing.

Barron’s “learning pathways” have much to say about the powerful interrelation of continuity of experience, self-creation, and agency that comes together in an “autodidactic” enterprise.

First and most relevantly, Barron’s construct of “learning pathways” extend the logic of Deweyan continuity of experience in a way that is important to this thesis. The word pathways implies a certain historical contingency to ones learning

– an organic branching and building upon previous knowledge which crystallizes into a unique network. If we follow the logic of continuity of experience to its end, it leads us to conclude that the individual experience which fundamentally informs learning, is necessarily unique. This uniqueness implies that the contingent paths which flow from any given unique act of learning also necessarily form a unique connection, leading to an overall unique shape of an education.

Importantly, Dewey also famously calls upon the imagery of a map in describing the curriculum, in The Child and the Curriculum. The subject of the map’s analogy might be rather liberally interpreted. Most concretely, the map is the extant formal curriculum – a guide and foundation to student explorations. Most abstractly, it all of recorded human knowledge, broadly construed – for the heirs of our society to build upon. And, with a few tweaks, it a record the sum total of individual experience – for that individual to more intentionally calibrate their future learning and self-cultivation. I’m most excited and inspired by the idea that

Dewey is hinting at the latter. Here is the text which so inspires: “The map orders individual experiences, connecting them with one another irrespective of the local and temporal circumstances and accidents of their original discovery…[T]he map, a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort,

preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result. Through the map every new traveler may get for his own journey the benefits of the results of other’s explorations without the waste of energy and loss of time involved in their wanderings—wanderings which he himself would be obliged to repeat were it not for just the assistance of the objective and generalized record of their performances” (Dewey, 1938).

A very important element of Barron’s work is her focus on the propelling power of interest and the ability of interest to connect disparate learning resources and learning materials across various resource domains. Barron is fascinated by the cohesive “learning ecologies” (her term) that these students build up around their interests – from instructional manuals to tutorial videos to mentor and peer support networks – all of which are profoundly integrated by the unifying force of student initiative and student engagement.

Barron recognizes student agency as a potent generator of engagement. Renewed attention to the role of agency in learning directs our attention to the ways that learners not only choose but also create their own learning opportunities by choosing to pursue lines of activity that they find meaningful and worthy, by developing relationships with potential mentors or collaborators, and by pursuing material resources that sustain projects that support their interests (Barron, 2006).

A key focus of Barron’s work she calls “learning ecologies”(Barron, 2010). “Learning ecologies” describe the diverse origins and locations of learning resources compiled by students in their self-directed quest.

These “learning pathways” of Barron’s are an important informing aspect to the system proposed in this thesis.

The benefits to learners and their advisors of a visualized record of the contingent, branching, organic curriculum – in which the subjective, narrative logic of the informing connections between sequential learning objects is laid out – would be plentiful. Trends regarding the direction and nature of a student’s learning trajectory would be laid bare and made explicit. The “natural syllabus” – not a prescribed one, but a natural “groove” the student seems to have fallen into -- would be neatly recorded for analysis; and areas of student interest and strength made plain in the explication. Later, I will discuss some emerging data mining technologies which could further leverage such pathways as input into a computer system in order to generate meaningful guidance to individual students, based on concrete evidence about their past, self-reported organic learning sequences.

Justification for an Individualized vs. Uniform Curriculum

One key step in evaluating the appropriateness of this vision of the curriculum, of course, is to evaluate its implicit assumption that it is beneficial to adjust the curriculum to the individual, rather than maintain its uniformity across students.

It is important to distinguish this as a different question from whether instruction within the prescribed subjects ought to be varied and tailored to individual needs. It is relatively uncontroversial, today, that students learn at different rates and benefit from different approaches of instruction, and that, accordingly, personalized instruction is a worthy (if difficult to realize) aim for our education system. Educational technology is already addressing this pedagogical aspect of individualized education.

The rather more controversial question asked here is, whether it is good to adjust the entire curricular subject matter to the student. Our schools have always been characterized by traditional, discrete disciplinary subjects, connected by highly ordered and structured curricular paths. To break these subjects up, and to vary the paths and orders by which a student encounters them, is, essentially, to do away with the “school” institution as we presently know it. The technology I will present in the final chapter is, essentially, a novel organizing mechanism to fill the vacuum left by such an uprooting of the system.

This is essentially a challenge to the absolute value of the established curriculum – or any established curriculum.

Questioning the canon of our curriculum has always been a vital and lively exercise. Since there have been schools, people have asked: “Why are we choosing to pass on the particular set of skills and knowledge that we are choosing to pass on? Is it the best stuff? The most useful stuff? Is the compulsory curriculum really the final word on vital knowledge for life?” The nature of the compulsory curriculum is a battleground for the future of society; it is intensely political, intensely passionate. And perpetually contested.

But it only makes sense that, after centuries of battling for the one true canon, the one true curriculum, we would eventually (and especially now, in this post-modern, pluralist world) we would begin to ask: is there really one good curriculum?

Nel Noddings is totally on top of this question. She eloquently questions the curriculum (chiefly of college preparatory and liberal arts schools) in her The

Challenge to Care in Schools:

I will argue that liberal education (defined as a set of traditional disciplines) is an outmoded and dangerous model for education for today’s young. The popular slogan today is, “All children can learn!” To insist, however, that all children should get the same dose of academic English, social studies, science and mathematics invites an important question unaddressed by the sloganeers: Why should children learn what we insist they can learn? Is this the stuff people really need to live intelligently, morally, and happily? Or are arguments for traditional liberal education badly mistaken? … My argument against liberal education is not a complaint against literature, history, physical science, mathematics, or any other subject. It is an argument, first, against an ideology of control that forces all students to study a particular,

narrowly prescribed curriculum devoid of content they might really care about…

Self-Creation and Individualism

The premise of this thesis is that yielding to students more power to determine the nature and direction of their own studies, by institutionalizing daily choice and reflection on the materials of their curriculum, will help them harness the motivating narrative of self-creation, towards more fulfilling, useful, and coherent personal educations.

In this section, I will discuss the lineage of this concept of “self-creation,” and

I will discuss both its dangers, as an ideal, and its potential benefits, as a perspective on personal education.

The verbatim phrase “self-creation” does not often appear in philosophical literature; yet sympathetic and related conversations abound within philosophy. It is an idea with a rich tradition in our society.

The most clearly pertinent canonized philosophers who touch upon the idea of self-creation are perhaps Nietzsche and Foucault. If the exact phrase “self- creation” does not appear as such within their writing, it is because it is an idea so central and suffusing that it never even earns its own name in their bodies of work.

But the American transcendentalists, too, among others, hymn the self and frame selfhood as a creative endeavor; and I will discuss Emerson in this thesis (as the paradigmatic American transcendentalist) because his particular version of “self- creation” seems to underpin the particularly American ethos of self-creation which

remains a powerful force in popular culture, through the American self-help tradition.

Ideals of individualism clearly underwrite the idea of “self-creation,” and so I will also pay some critical philosophical attention to individualism as an underlying theme. “Individualism” as it is often presented within these philosophers – with their rather romantic and sometimes anti-social visions of the self – often presents some difficulties. Some considerations along these lines are: how does a profoundly individualized curriculum impact the student, and how do students so educated impact society, together? What is the ‘best’ kind of individualism to encourage among students, and what are harmful individualisms to be avoided?

Again, self-creation, in philosophical literature, is very often associated with a highly romantic and often somewhat antisocial vision of the “individual.” In such romantic philosophies, the agent who is engaged in an act of self-creation is, by nature, apart from society; he refuses to be influenced by external pressures, by

Foucauldian ‘normalizing forces.’ Society is the individual’s natural enmity; and the individual’s main relationship with society is one of “overcoming” its constraints.

Such a radical ideal of self-creation is found in Foucault, and obviously in

Nietzsche, and also among the popularly influential American transcendentalists.

However, this romantic, eremitical vision of the self is perhaps rather insupportable as a universal ideal of education. Educating with such an ideal in mind for all would surely not pass the ‘what would happen if we succeeded’ test (a sort of Kantian test of universalizability) which Nel Noddings applies to certain ideals of liberal arts

education in The Challenge to Care in Schools (Noddings, 1992) . That is: if everyone were to create their own society-transcending self, there would be no society. As the economies of scale unique to a developed society are necessary to support such luxuries as philosophy and art and self-actualization, this becomes an absurd ideal.

Here might enter John Dewey and J.S. Mill with moderating voices. Dewey’s

“new individualism” reminds us that “individual vs. society” is often a false dichotomy, that the romantic, often anti-social created self is a vain and potentially socially harmful object for glorification. J.S. Mill’s utilitarian analysis provides the basis for a careful breakdown of appropriate contexts for a more radical individualism, which might help us to preserve a space for romantic individualism, within some boundaries towards sustainability and reasonableness.

In this section on self-creation and narrative identity, I will try to harmonize the romantic notion of “self-creation” with the more moderate, socially-amenable individualism of Dewey – and propose that as the ideal. I will also discuss the place of “radical individualism” relative to the aims of this proposed educational system.

In this latter project I will be aided by Mill.

I would like to synthesize a version of “self-creation” that maintains the inspiring narrative energy of the romantics, yet within reasonable and sustainable bounds. I will stress that “self-creation,” in as far as it is a realizable ideal, is predominately valuable as a motivating and meaning-bringing narrative. Self- creation in the more romantic Foucauldian sense is the business of philosophers or artists; and it will harm many who seek it. Yet I argue rousing narrative of “self-

creation” can be separated from its roots in radical romantic individualism, and its benefits be democratized, in an educational setting.

Drawing from the increasingly popular construct of “narrative identity,” I will describe “self-creation” as the application of a subjective sense of agency towards the deliberate manipulation of one’s own narrative identity. As a narrative, “self- creation” brings meaning and significance to the pursuit of education. This is a venerable tradition in the West; but one prone to certain excesses. Nevertheless, it is a powerfully motivating narrative for personal education, and a narrative which systems of formal education – bound by institutional procedures which tend to crowd out personal initiatives -- has previously failed to harness effectively.

Agency, Free Will, and the Practical Limits of Self-Creation

Before going any further it is perhaps necessary to establish the following question: to what extent can there be self-creation? I frame my thesis in terms of self co-creation, but I focus this section on the aspect of this “co-creative” endeavor that belongs to the self – the element of agency belonging to the individual.

A strict determinist would deny any agency to the self in the ‘authoring’ of his own destiny or path in this world, whereas a strong proponent of free will might be overly optimistic. Logical limits constrain us as well, obviously. And there are the limitations of past experience. If we take a contingent, historicist view of human development, then each choice a person makes expresses an opportunity cost of lost choices at the same juncture, even though from it blossoms a thousand contingent

new paths. In this sense, too, we are limited even by our own exertions of free will; an idea to be further explored as I discuss the technology of learning maps.

And yet, within these limits, the power to self-determine seems reasonably demonstrable. We behave as beings with free will; we structure our experiences in terms of choice. From a pragmatic point of view: the very belief that we have choice and free will to shape our own lives, and the mental experience of “deliberation” or

“planning” which is prompted by this belief, empirically leads to more desirable or predictable outcomes. This is sufficient, from my perhaps rather simplistic pragmatic viewpoint (this thesis is not a defense of epistemic defensibility of free will), to declare that free will, within limits, is “true,” and the agency which is so stressed in the ideals of “co-creation” is valid for discussion as a real if limited entity.

Is self-creation really possible? This thesis takes a Ricoeurian tack. We are all products of our historical cultural milieu; and yet, we have, atop this deterministic layer, a layer of agency and free will, which allows us to synthesize novel selves or objects or ideas or what have you from the materials dealt us.

Nietzsche’s thoughts, here, build upon Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding: human originality is basically limited to the abstraction upon and reorganization of objects originally perceived or received through sense, external to the individual.

The limits to self-creation are many. First, there is our historical cultural milieu, as previously discussed. This alone imposes severe limits on how many absolutely novel or original things an individual might create, be, or achieve alone.

Human originality is frail, and chiefly consists in synthesizing novel combinations of

existing cultural or ideational items. Furthermore, there are limitations more unique to the individual. There are limits of circumstance, for one. There are physical limitations.

And yet, atop all these practical limits, phenomenologically, we have a sphere of influence over our own fates. This experience of free will underpins self-creation.

Self-creation is the focus of this “free will” experience towards some aesthetically- appealing end – a goal, a character, a role in society. The role of narrative in this process shall be further discussed later.

Three Philosophers Espousing Highly Romantic Visions of Self- Creation

I will now give introductions to three philosophers with highly influential views of self-creation. The two notable themes I will draw out from among them are: first, the idea of free will harnessed towards a project of self-perfection or self- mastery, tinged (importantly) with a sort of heroic or epic aesthetic; and, secondly, the idea of society being the natural enemy of the individual, and thus a direct threat to this project of self-creation.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s glorification of the self, and his undertaking the self as a creative endeavor, is famous or infamous. The theme of a glorified self, transcending the constraints of society, suffuses Nietzsche’s writings from the Genealogy of Morals to

Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra’s ideal man – “the overman” -- struggles against the abyss, forging his own values and his own meaning in an otherwise meaningless world.

The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The overman shall be the meaning of the earth.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra).

The “overman” of both his Genealogy of Morals and Zarathustra of Thus

Spake Zarathustra are powerfully self-contained individuals, self-constructed, and utterly independent of their fellow humans.

The act of “creation” thoroughly characterizes Nietzsche’s “overman.” The thought that he is creating a glorified, overman self is the overman’s lone comfort in his struggle; it is a richly meaningful goal, narrated in terms of a quest, that brings

meaning to the would-be overman’s pursuits. Nietzsche’s program of creating meaning through a deeply personal, spiritual quest for transcendence points to the entrance of narrative meaning. Against meaninglessness, Nietzsche sings hymns and dances dances and pens poems. He says that man, wielding these literary and creative weapons, has the unique ability to bring meaning into the void. This is one account of how meaning comes to be; man makes it for himself, through narrative

(broadly speaking). This is the great existentialist “opportunity.” Instead of looking for inherent meaning in the world (or, to bring this back to earth: instead of looking for inherent meaning in education), we can bring our own creative powers to bear on the process of education, creating satisfying goals or life projects, and then experiencing education as the process of seeking fulfillment of those goals or life projects.

I will, in an upcoming section, discuss how this Nietzschean “creation” of an

“ideal self” mainly functions as such a motivating narrative. As Jim Garrison says, eloquently, “Nietzsche’s response to nihilism was aesthetic” (Garrison, 1998).

There is an obvious dark side, however, to Nietzsche’s overman. The

“overman” or “superman” preached by Zarathustra, in the latter work, is characterized chiefly by how unbeholden he is to the rules and customs of the world below him. (For, both spiritually and literally, in this fable, Zarathustra comes from a mountaintop, and the people dwell in a valley). Zarathustra speaks with some contempt of the denizens of the town below his mountain perch. They cannot understand him, which makes them contemptibly stupid. “Must one batter their

ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammerer?” asks

Zarathustra. “They have something that they are proud of. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds” (Nietzsche, 1872). Nietzsche’s self-creation goes hand-in-hand with contempt for culture-as-it-is. True self-creation, in Nietzsche, would take the materials of culture, and uses them to create a character entirely independent of that culture.

Foucault

Foucault is also, in his own way, concerned with the transcending self – the self who transcends the shackles that are social norms. His ideal man might very well be a philosopher; surely, the radically “free” and reflective self he idealizes is a slightly self-flattering picture.

Foucault’s historicist viewpoint gives us an interesting look at the mythology of “self-creation.” The idea of free will harnessed toward self-cultivation of an ideal self has a deep and venerable history in the Western literary tradition. From

Foucault’s portrayal, we might glean that self-creation has long been the business of intellectuals or the elite. He begins with the wealthy educated class in Greece and

Rome – those privileged men who had leisure to pursue a kind of self-actualization through philosophy. Foucault focuses on their “self-writings” – that is, the reflective writings which projected their ideal selves, and articulated their struggles and their

mechanisms towards achieving ideal selfhood. Foucault calls this “self-writing” a

“technology of the self,” from which a conscious “selfhood” emerges.

Technologies of the self are also “schedules” and “plans” for self-mastery. (In this thesis, a “self-set curriculum” is such a technology). A letter from Marcus

Aurelius is a characteristic record of the pursuit of self-mastery in quotidian life:

We are well. I slept somewhat late owing to my slight cold, which seems now to have subsided. So from five A.M. till 9, I spent the time partly reading some of Cato's Agriculture, partly in writing not quite such wretched stuff, by heavens, as yesterday…

Emerson

The chief thing to recommend Emerson’s Self-Reliance – perhaps even more so than Foucault’s or Nietzsche’s accounts of self-creation -- is its literary gorgeousness. It has stuck around in the canon, despite its flaws, for the very reason of its deep emotional or spiritual resonance. American culture is saturated with this romanticized individualism in no small part due to the influence of the Emerson and the transcendentalists.

Emerson articulates beautifully the quest for total individual independence from society, for total originality. Also note that the use of the word “education” in this passage very much hearkens to the idea of education as self-creation:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

If one takes Emerson’s language seriously, true individuality must alienate us from those around us: “To be great is to be misunderstood,” he says. And, to a 31

similar effect, “To be great is to be a nonconformist.” Furthermore, individuality must, at times, preclude the ties of relationships: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door- post, Whim.” (Hyperbole, maybe…but surely this raises an eyebrow.) At its most sociable, Emerson’s individual is clannish, and seeks company with the few like himself. Yet at the same time, abstracted “community responsibility” is meaningless to him:

There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Not only is the individual supreme, in this view: but abstracted social ties might be construed as moral weakness, if these words are taken literally.

I question this because such a vision as Emerson’s puts the individual’s needs at odds with society’s needs; and I struggle to envision a whole world of such self- reliant geniuses and individuals, and how it would work, and what it would look like. Such a radical individualism as Emerson writes about, furthermore, is a huge luxury which actually rests upon the achievements and interconnections of society.

Who in the world could be as free and liberated and intellectual as Emerson, without a huge cultural underpinning beneath him? This is the first of a series of critiques that I will now level against Emerson, Foucault, and Nietzsche’s interrelated, romantic visions of the individual and self-creation.

Critique of Foucault, Emerson, Nietzsche

I would argue that the radical, “society-transcending” self-creation of

Foucault and Nietzsche and Emerson is a ridiculous ideal to propagate amongst all students. (What would the world look like if there were only “society-transcending” artists and philosophers, and no nurses or firemen?) And even contained to a few students, it is an ideal that – misconstrued as an anti-social or narcissistic credo -- can do much harm. Nevertheless, I argue that there is a deeply motivating narrative or aesthetic embedded in the “self-creation” of those three philosophers, which would ideally be harnessed in a modified vision of the “created self.” With the help of Dewey, John Stuart Mill, and modern philosopher of education Jim Garrison, I will critique their ideal of self-creation and propose an alternative modified along these lines.

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Emerson wrote as revolutionary philosophers; and their philosophy of the self-mastering, society-overcoming self was to some degree a narrative peculiar to their own lives, as philosophical and artistic high performers.

I would not call every student to be a profound original. Foucault, Nietzsche, and Emerson are persons of extraordinary, lonely talent; persons who created their own paths up out of seemingly nothing. Nietzsche, particular, seems to rise out of nowhere and create modernity with his pen. The normative standard they prescribe of the ideal and wholly autonomous man, then, is (in the best sense) self-buoying; they are composing self-glorifying hymns to their own difficult journeys. And I do not begrudge them these hymns for themselves. Furthermore, their resentment of

their societies might be understandable: the cultures they grew up in were far more constricting, and far less accepting of individual difference than today’s more individualistic culture (we have perhaps learned our lesson!) But I will here again employ the Kantian rule: what would happen if everyone sought such a romantic self-actualization? A world full of fully autonomous, society-defying individualists is a ridiculous world. And most of us would agree, practically speaking, that not everyone is cut out for such a quixotic and romanticized destiny, anyhow. I will take J.S. Mill’s advice that a certain small number of such individuals is admissible and even desirable in a society, but only in a measured degree. In short, an education system which wants to churn out eccentric, self-absorbed geniuses is both unrealistic and probably imprudent anyway.

John Dewey provides us with a reproach of the old ideal, and provides a new ideal in its place. In fact, he dedicates his book Individualism Old and New partially to this pursuit of articulating a “new individualism.” Dewey is adamant on this point: the sort of individuality which Emerson, Foucault, and Nietzsche espouse is a vanity – an outdated, unrealistic ideal. Even as “our material culture…is verging up on the collective and corporate,” says Dewey, “[o]ur moral culture, along with our ideology, is, on the other hand, still saturated with ideals and values of an individualism derived from the prescientific, pre-technological age”(74)!

Dewey’s argument is that humans have outlived the usefulness of this old, romantic individualism; and that the new environment (which, he argues, is chiefly social where the old was chiefly natural or physical) calls for a “new individualism.”

Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy urges us to accept the reality of our times, and not to bang our heads up against things as they actually are.

“Things as they actually are” means that our modern society is inescapably collaborative, cooperative. The rugged individualism of the American transcendentalists draws upon the values of a past pioneer age. In Dewey’s time, an industrial age was well under way. The industrial age called upon man, as perhaps never before outside of wartime, to imagine his everyday efforts as part of something incredibly large, complex, and only tangentially related to fulfilling his own needs. His economic identity, now, was as a small part of a large and complex cooperative effort. The necessity of learning to work in a corporate environment and accept ones identity as participant something immensely complex and larger than oneself, remains true as we hurtle towards an information age.

A new individualism, then, ought to prize finding a unique place within society. Individual creativity can find outlet in forming novel associations and collaborations with others: “The tragedy of the ‘lost individual’ is due to the fact that while individuals are now caught up into a vast complex of associations, there is no harmonious and coherent reflection of the import of these connections into the imaginative and emotional outlook on life.” And also, Dewey adds, with his perpetually sunny outlook on science and technology, a new individualism might find itself through the creation and discovery of technologies and sciences that will improve social existence.

Dewey’s diagnosis of the change in times and the necessary change in ideals to match this change has a sort of stoic, unblinking quality to it:

The artist remains, one may say, as a surviving individual force, but the esteem in which the calling is socially held in this country measures the degree of his force. The status of the artist in any form of social life affords a fair measure of the state of its culture. The inorganic position of the artist in American life today is convincing evidence of what happens to the isolated individual who lives in a society growing corporate (Dewey, 1930).

I’ll also say briefly that Dewey’s arguments can lean a little bit too far in favor of society at the expense of the individual, for my tastes. He leaves perhaps too little room for the eccentric, for the odd tinkerer who Mill’s philosophy (to be soon discussed) would leave a place for. Also, one must deal with the question of whether or not such a philosophy potentially causes harm to a small minority of people who will always be ill at ease within their contemporary social milieu. In short, Dewey’s philosophy is perhaps a little too inhospitable to the eccentricities of the individual; and places a bit too much value in conformity to a “social purpose.”

Nevertheless, there’s much wisdom in this view. It doesn’t flash and sparkle like Emerson’s or Nietzsche’s, but there’s something courageous and grown-up about it. Dewey replaces an entire romantic narrative of individualism with another, more humble ideal. And I heartily agree with this essential premise: that it makes much more sense to elevate collaboration-as-individuals, rather than stark, independent individualism, as our cultural ideal. And yet, while this ideal can inform and color my question about the place of a radically individualized curriculum, it can’t answer it practically. I also prefer Mill’s analysis for solving things practically.

Jim Garrison is contemporary philosopher looking at self-creation as an idea, specifically in Dewey and Foucault. He, too, finds a contrast between Dewey’s self- creation (which he renames social-self-creation), and Foucault’s self-creation

(which he calls selfish-creation) (Garrison, 1998).

To Garrison, “self-creation” is an aesthetic solution to the problem of the bottomless search for the “permanent essence of self.” “Once we recognize with

Foucault and Dewey,” he says, “that the deep hidden essence of humankind is that there is no such essence, we are truly free to re-create ourselves and reconceive the aims of education.”

Garrison embraces the potentiality of “self-creation,” but disagrees with

Foucault’s search for a “struggle for autonomy and detachment from other individuals and culture at large.” The great paradox in Foucault is that while he seems to demonstrate through “his own archaeological and genealogical analyses” that “such detachment is impossible,” he still “seemed to think that the pursuit of this impossible goal was not only noble, but the highway to freedom.”

This is contrasted to Dewey’s more mature view, in Garrison’s (and my) opinion. Dewey, too, sees self-creation as a pragmatic stop-gap to the “bottomless” quest for true selfhood.

But we do not create selves in a vacuum. Garrison quotes Dewey’s “ethical postulate” on individuality, which once again gives an excellent view of the collaborative frame for the “new individuality”:

In the realization of individuality there is found also the needed realization of some community of persons of which the individual is a member; and

conversely, the agent who duly satisfies the community in which he shares, by that same conduct satisfies himself (Dewey, 1891, quoted in Garrison, 1998).

I put forward the above discussion so that it is clear that the evolving curriculum proposed in this thesis, despite endorsing a profoundly individualized approach, does not put forth the radically romantic paradigm of individuality as the ideal. It embraces a different ideal – a Deweyan ideal – as its exemplar.

At its best, such a system as the one proposed in this thesis would help such students as are inexorably called towards originality reach it with a minimum of the active resistance which plagues more inflexible institutions, and which (it is hypothesized in this thesis) leads to resentment. However, such solipsistic individualism is not the paradigm of the system. There is another kind of individualism which is a much more suitable goal for idealization or institutionalization in an educational system. It is the earthier, more lovable, and more accessible ideal of Dewey.

However, it does allow for such a Foucauldian vision of individuality to coexist with the Deweyan ideal. This might confuse readers.

My justification for this is a kind of reasonable pluralism. Society can only stand so many individuals with Foucauldian and Emersonian levels of radical individualism. However, they can be as “salt of the earth,” adding something valuable to society even in their small (and necessarily small) number. I have a slight unfounded hypothesis, too, that if such personalities are allowed to flourish, and the barriers to their ‘self-actualization’ are taken down, that they might end up

being less anti-social in general. Perhaps Foucault, Emerson, and Nietzsche perceived society as the natural enemy of the actualized individual because their societies were so inflexible.

J.S. Mill’s On Liberty is helpful in parsing this out this matter. Mill’s analysis of individualism is helpful in that it embraces something about both the myth of society and the myth of the individual, refuses to sacrifice one to the other, and then seeks a fruitful balance. Mill establishes his position in the middle ground by first trotting out the “extreme” views at stake:

No one’s idea of excellence in conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing but copy one another. No one would assert that people ought not to put into their mode of life, and into the conduct of their concerns, any impress whatever of their own judgment, or of their own individual character. On the other hand, it would be absurd to pretend that people ought to live as if nothing whatever had been known in the world before they came into it; as if experience had as yet done nothing towards showing that one mode of experience or of conduct is preferable to another (54).

Mill later describes this same dichotomy in terms of two extremes which he deems “Pagan self-assertion” and “Christian self-denial.” The golden mean between these extremes, he believes, is a “Greek self-development” (58).

In Mill’s view, the individual and society are distinct; but the individual is dependent, to some extent, on society; and the society benefits from the quirkiness of the eccentric, society-challenging individual. “There is always a need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more

enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.” And yet, these individuals, Mill claims, will always be few – must, perhaps, even necessarily be few.

This is an interesting departure point. As we try to work out the proper balance to optimize the needs of individuals and the needs of society, it is important to consider the actual desires of any given individual in that society. It would seem unethical to pursue an ‘optimal balance’ of individualism in society in ignorance of the matter of how many individual people in society actually wish for radically individualizing educations and nonconforming lifestyles. It may be impractical to have everyone be a radically liberated individual (as shown by Dewey and Mill above); and yet it seems pretty repugnant to quash people’s wishes to pursue individual aims, in service to this abstract balance, should they have such desires.

Philosophy cannot necessarily provide an empirical answer to this question; but it is interesting to see Mill and Emerson, in particular, draw separate conclusions about the actual proportion of people in a society who wish for radical self-actualization.

Dewey does not directly address the urge-to-individualize and its frequency in the population – though I’d guess he might dismiss it as a sort of base instinct. He sniffs at those who attribute the need for individuality-apart-from-the-crowd to a kind of ‘unchanging human nature’ (77) (he perhaps does not believe that this is a legitimate component of human nature?). This is perhaps the source of some of my discomfort with Dewey; I think that he ought to take the ‘urge to nonconformity’ a bit more seriously.

Mill and Emerson both address the problem more directly – and draw opposite conclusions. Mill assumes that such an urge to self-actualize is a rarity, while Emerson writes almost as if it is a universal! Whatever the empirical case, the answer makes a difference in how we ought to behave as educators. Assuming it is a widespread urge: to what degree is it ethical to discourage a student from a radically individualized path – even gently, in service to Dewey’s very sensible caveat about social cohesion? And, in deference to Emerson’s ideal, to what extent is it ethically permissible to passively allow barriers to individualization to persist – or even just, to not explicitly encourage it or work towards it being a goal for everyone?

Emerson, for one, presents his radical vision of individual genius as an aspiration for all. He speaks, often, in broadly inclusive terms – much more so than elitist Foucault or Nietzsche – which has probably helped him secure his place in popular culture as a patron saint of American self-help individualism. Furthermore,

I believe Emerson and his romantic and transcendentalist kin would say that a lack of desire for individualism is a kind of ‘false consciousness’ foisted upon individuals by society, and that educators have an ethical duty to help individualize students.

He says, “There is a time in every man’s education” (emphasis mine) when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself, for better, for worse, as his portion.” And that’s not all: “…that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

A rousing line – as are so many in this gorgeous essay. But -- really? Every man, with this level of nonconformity? Is this realistic? It is appealing; but is it really a proper ideal? Or perhaps there is an exclusive sense in which Emerson is meaning “man” and “education.” Perhaps “man” means a certain kind of person … and “education” means a special and very specific kind of enlightening process. It is unclear, really; we can take it either way, perhaps by design. But Emerson certainly means it to sound inclusive as an ideal – a universal aspiration.

Mill, on the other hand, believes the urge for radical individualism is rare. He calls profound individualism a kind of ‘genius,’ loosely, and says of such individuals that --

…persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people -- less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character (60).

Both Mill and Dewey have something to offer us, in the end.

Dewey’s contribution is a new ideal of individualism; a new narrative of self- creation which does not consider society an obstacle to be clambered over on the way to self-actualization; but rather, as a key, integrative part of selfhood.

Mill, on the other hand, might be read as presenting us with the larger, pragmatic picture. Mill isn’t one for offering ideals. But he does provide a reasonable place for the social contrarian, within bounds. He doesn’t idealize the contrarian; but he doesn’t outright denounce him like Dewey.

Though Dewey might be annoyed at the social contrarian, I agree with Mill that perhaps we can ever get rid of that strain of human nature which would seek transcendence through nonconformity, and it might even do some good for society to have some nonconforming cranks and eccentrics thrown in there. And though we might speak with stars in our eyes of liberating every individual, with a profoundly individualized course of study aimed at uncovering the authentic self, it might just not be for everyone – and a society filled with contrarians is no society at all, especially in our modern corporate, industrialized world.

Considering all this, perhaps the best option, as Mill’s philosophy would suggest, is to leave open a path for the contrarians and the individualists who would pursue Emerson’s promised land of self-reliance. (And perhaps here, also, is our answer regarding the benefits and the dangers of a widely available, profoundly individualizing curriculum.) There is a balance we must seek which both leaves the path open for individualist, and yet does not encourage a socially threatening

‘overgrowth’ of whimsical Emersonian contrarians. Of course, as in all things, this balance is more easily talked about than practically achieved … but with principles like Mills’ under our belts, we at least have some clear thinking to guide us in the search of it.

A profoundly flexible, student-led curriculum eliminates one institutional

“barrier” to self-actualization or individualization or whatever we’d like to call it. It makes the path easier for those for whom there is no place in the traditional curriculum. An evolving curriculum led by a student’s projected future identities

could still be quite conventional in its shape, if the student is comfortable with convention (and I will agree with Mill that I think at least the majority of people are). In other words, we might expect the great number of students to “re-create” existing learning paths. A student with a projected identity of a future doctor might still learn elementary chemistry as a sixteen year olds, volunteering at a hospital their senior year in high school, taking organic chemistry at a college level, and then taking the MCAT and entering medical school.

What in the world, then, is the use of opening up the curriculum for rearranging by students? For those who would make their own paths: it removes another passive cultural barrier to people achieving beneficial, interesting, and slightly off-beat things. This is the purest “self-creation” as hymned by Foucault, etc.

And what of those who would, via the “atomic” curriculum, simply “re-create” existing paths to existing roles and positions in the world? These are not “self- creators” in the Foucauldian, Nietzschean, or Emersonian sense. Yet, a system which calls upon such individuals to help curate their own curriculum, even towards some existing goal, would partake in the more moderate brand of self-creation synthesized among these philosophers and Dewey.

Such a system prizing “self-creation” would provide two fairly concrete benefits even to these latter individuals: first, a psychological sense of ownership, and second, a deep understanding of the sequence of concepts underlying ones discipline.

And, one further, less concrete benefit: it seems that perhaps most individuals simply have an inborn “narrative tendency” which they must fulfill for their own happiness (Strawson, 2004). Such a curriculum would afford these individuals a sense of participation in the important cultural narrative of self- creation – which, through either their own innate psychology, cultural pressures, or some combination thereof, might be a key to their own requirements for self- fulfillment. They might not achieve a Foucauldian self-creation; but they can, with some scaffolding, achieve a moderate sense of ownership and authorship over their life path which would bring them (this author posits) many of the same psychological benefits of fulfilling a more rigorously defined “self-creation.”

In the next section, I will argue that “self-creation” is a powerful cultural narrative; and that the principle virtue of the romantic and prototypical view of self- creation is not its actual logical content; but rather, its narrative, aesthetic, meaning- making power.

Narrative Identity and Self-Creation

In the past few decades the social sciences and humanities have been infiltrated by narrative theory – that is, the application of the vocabulary of narratology (the study of literary narrative), to problems in psychology, cognitive science, and other disciplines. This has been referred to as the so-called “narrative turn” in the social sciences (Czarniawska, 2004). The basic idea is: that narrative is an essential facet of human cognition, human experience, personal identity... the list goes on. Narrative is woven into the fabric of our consciousness. Narrative is how we make sense of the world around us. Its vehicle is not only words and texts, but also in “fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, drama, comedy, mime, painting…stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation…All classes, all human groups, have their narratives…Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself” (Barthes, 1977, quoted in Czarniawska, 2004).

Narrative as the human process of fabricating meaning is an essential idea to this thesis. The stories and aesthetics we cast up around our livelihoods, hobbies, likes, dislikes, manners, social lives, etc., are a chief source of the joy they bring us.

And narrative identity, which is a psychological theory about how personal identity is constructed through a similarly narrative process, touches profoundly on the project of education as self-creation.

I here propose that “self-creation” is an aesthetic narrative frame for the lived human experience of exerting “agency” towards the realization of some coveted habit or skill in oneself. It is culturally situated in a body of Western literature, the influence of which seeps even into American popular culture. (What is “self-help literature” but a harnessing of the narrative of “self-creation”?) It may not be a hard “truth” of nature (the author of this thesis is rather agnostic on this point); but it is a “human truth.” “Self-creation” is a story that tangibly shapes human behavior. It brings meaning and significance to a human enterprise

(learning). It is purposeful harnessing of narrative identity towards self-knowledge and self-actualization. It is the story of writing a story; the story of authorship and creative control.

Reframing personal education as authorship of a social/economic/ intellectual identity harnesses some of the powerful motivations intrinsic to story.

Stories are rife with purpose and meaning – the very things which cynical teenagers complain are lacking from their standard high school curricula. The students who thrive in high school are ones who have found purpose or meaning in the prescribed curriculum.

“Purpose” is usually in the form of some teleological goal. For some, it is sufficient that this goal be purely artificial and institutional. That is, if high school is a prerequisite to college, and high performance in one pays off in the next stage, this provides some with sufficient “purpose” to pursue their studies rigorously.

Fulfillment-of-institutional-requirements is a fairly weak narrative (and is often challenged by your basic high school student); but it suffices for some.

Other students are lucky enough to have career goals and an understanding of those career goals which illuminate the traditional curriculum in a meaningful fashion for them. Their traditionally sequenced high school economics class seems to them to be immensely relevant to their future professional identity, and they pursue it eagerly, as an important learning-object-narreme along the creation of their own life curricula.

For others, however, the traditional curriculum does not accord with any goals or narrative identity of their own; either because they lack a reflective narrative identity (fairly common), have given up on the pursuit of a professional identity (it requires much trial and error), or are simply ill-matched with the items of the traditional curriculum.

Narratives, meanwhile, provide an automatic frame of purpose.

Barbara Czarniawska summarizes Alasdair McIntyre eloquently:

[T]here is a certain teleology – sense of purpose – in all lived narratives. It is a kind of circular teleology because is not given beforehand but is created by the narrative. A life is lived with a goal but the most important aspect of life is the formulation and re-formulation of that goal. This circular teleology is what MacIntyre calls a narrative quest. A virtuous life, according to him, is a life dedicated to a quest for the good human life, where the construction of a definition of a ‘good life’ is a process that ends only when a life comes to an end. Rather than being defined at the outset, a ‘good life’ acquires a performative definition through the living of it. A search looks for something that already exists (as in a ‘search for excellence’); a quest creates its goal rather than dis- covers it. The proponents of means–ends rationality defend the notion of the a priori goals, while the pragmatists declare it to be impractical. A narrative view gets rid of the problem by reinstating the role of goals as both the results and the antecedents of action. Whole

communities as well as individual persons are engaged in a quest for meaning in ‘their life’, which will bestow meaning on particular actions taken (Czarniawska, 2004).

Alasdair MacIntyre’s groundbreaking philosophical work After Virtue principally concerns the foundations of ethics in society. Nevertheless, its historicist, narratological vision of ethics, as well as its focus on “roles” and

“practices” has a strong bearing on this thesis’s concept of “projected identities.”

MacIntyre stresses narrative as a vehicle of ethical and moral dispositions within the “classical” ethical paradigm. He describes how a culture’s heroes embody

“roles” (entailing moral and social dispositions) which are often strongly associated with their economic position or activities in society. For instance: the paradigmatic

English gentleman was a man of a certain class and a certain income. The manners which were appropriate to a “gentleman” prescribed behaviors which would make a member of the stratified English gentry pleasing to those above and below him.

Similarly, the heroic code of Greek epics prescribed a set of patriotic warrior-values which sustained that hard, war-like culture. These character-roles were preserved, praised, and passed on in the form of both formal narratives (Jane Austen and

Homer, respectively), and in every-day narratives – again, according to Barthes, even the quotidian value-laden conversation contains a narrative, with its own aesthetics and heroes and villains entailed.

This prompts some important thoughts about achieving “excellence” or “the good life” through inhabiting narrative-roles in modern society – which is much less codified and scripted than in the classical ages from whence these ideals came.

Increasingly, people’s lives are unmoored from pre-scripted “careers” and from the traditional, hereditary livelihoods which ready-made come with richly meaningful narratives or “ways of being.”

Self-help and adult education has perhaps increasingly focused on “self- creation” (expressed in many diverse terms…) in order to help modern first-world adults adapt to this chaotic, ever-shifting modern social and economic environment.

If traditional stories and career paths cannot cohere and bring meaning to our lives, then the best solution is to empower the individual with the narrative-making power in their own life – to charge them with the same creative narrative freedom so espoused by philosophers from Emerson to Nietzsche.

While MacIntyre mourns the lack of cohesive ethical narratives in modern society, the flipside of this coin is that opportunity arises for the construction of individual meaning, in this void. The narrative quest is democratized – for better, or for worse – when hereditary ways-of-making-a-living fade fast, in a modern economy. We hear, sometimes, the mourning of these old, solid, ancestral ways of living, sometimes, in our popular art. I think of the 1940s John Ford film, How Green

Was My Valley, about the nostalgia and displacement felt by the child of a hereditary mining town, now defunct. Or even in Billy Joel’s (!) hymn to the passing way of life of career fishermen: “I was a bayman like my father was before/Can’t make a living as a bayman anymore…There ain’t much living for a man who works the see/There ain’t much island left for islanders like me.” When these narrative identities, cleaved

to ancient, codified mode of economic participation or trade, fade into obsolescence, a valuable kind of meaning is lost.

We still have a good number of these whole, satisfying, professional narrative identities left in our society. A paradigmatic profession with a strong, meaningful narrative identity associated with it is the medical profession. We hymn doctors, surgeons, and nurses in our movies and our television shows. There is a heroism and a romance to the scrub uniform. However, other modern careers lack these strong, purpose-bringing narratives. Insurance salesmen, and administrative assistants, perhaps, lack strong narrative professional identities.

Here I might bring Joseph Campbell into the conversation. Campbell’s

“hero’s journey” stresses unique personal narratives; heroic narratives. Yet he retains a space for those who would form their lives along existing narrative paths; as long as they find these meaningful and sufficient. He speaks maybe just a little condescendingly of such individuals, which I disapprove of, but I find his point worthwhile: “The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed through millennia.” He’s speaking of religions; but we might just as well talk about narratives of participation within any fairly codified sphere of modern culture – whether it be the narrative of ‘striving for middle class comfort,’ or the perhaps

more satisfying narratives (for many people) of participation within religious or civic communities.

Campbell’s full pity, however, is reserved for those individuals who neither adhere to the rugged, self-forged hero’s path, nor to some well-codified MacIntyrean social role. “It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate” (Campbell, 1949).

I wonder if it is these individuals who would not be among the most helped by an educational system which presents the curriculum as a means to form narrative identities --- always foregrounding the search for and focus upon some teleological “projected identity.” Devoting unprecedentedly serious attention to helping these students discover a narrative– whether inner or outer – to cleave to, as an organizing factor of the education of their adolescence, might be a great service to them.

Offering maturing students a very atomic, recombinable curriculum, constrained only by basic and flexible parameters, and cohered by self-projected identities and goals, seems likely to foster a sense of authorial control and meaning- making for students.

Critique of Narrative Identity as a Construct

Importantly, while the so-called “narrative turn” has been famously popular in the social sciences, not all have embraced it. “Narrative identity,” while a popular construct, is not without its critics. I will take a rather pragmatic stance on this issue: narrativity need not be some kind of concrete structure in the brain, and

neither must it be a universal aspect of human psychology, for it to be a useful way of thinking about … human thinking. Despite the critical voices which I am about to engage, I believe that a system which foregrounds a narrative view of education would be beneficial to many more than it would disadvantage.

Critic Galen Strawson claims to reject both the “psychological Narrativity thesis” and the “ethical Narrativity thesis,” as he distinguishes them. The first thesis holds that narrative is somehow innate to human cognitive function; and the second thesis contains a normative claim that life is improved with a narrative understanding. Strawson rejects that all normal, non-pathological humans think

“narratively” about their lives (he charmingly offers up himself as one example non- pathological, non-narrative individual!); and he further rejects that a narrative construction of ones own life story is somehow a requisite to human happiness.

Besides himself, he proposes a number of historical (and mostly literary) figures – including Proust, and Woolf -- as examples of fulfilled individuals with “in-the- moment,” non-narrative lifestyles. He points to these as proof that narrative thinking is neither universal nor universally desirable for a “meaningful” life.

In some ways, Strawson’s is a modest critique. It seems quite reasonable to me that there are many people who do not naturally construe their lives in a highly formal narrative fashion. Certainly, there is a sort of spectrum on which individuals fall, in regards to how formally or coherently they structure their lives as narratives.

Moreover, there are probably some minority of people who barely reflect upon their lives as coherent narratives at all, and who do not suffer overmuch for it. It seems

reasonable that a “meaningful” life might just as well be “in-the-moment” or

“hedonistic” rather than part of some grand, coherent, narrative quest (though we might be ornery and introduce the idea that the hedonistic, in-the-moment mode partakes of a certain narrativity, as well…)

But even using Strawson’s logic: it must be noted that those “diachronic” individuals who are also predisposed to be “narrative” (in Strawson’s words) reasonably might be expected to suffer without a coherent narrative to their lives.

Strawson himself concedes that these people seem to form the majority of the population. The tools in this proposed system are for this majority.

This system need not be useful for everyone. But it is reasonable that it would be useful for a great many – as even a critic of narrativity such as Strawson might concede. And that it is useful for many is sufficient justification, for this author.

Moreover, the tool might partake of different “levels” of narrativity, and thus be adapted for – if not the most non-narrative of the “episodics,” as Strawson calls radically un-narrative individuals – a wide variety of individuals.

PART II: THE SYSTEM

For Orientation: An Overview of the System

I have previously set out a philosophy of education as “self-creation” – drawing upon constructivist philosophies of education, philosophies of the

“romantic self,” and narrative identity.

I‘ve argued that a curriculum which responds directly to a student’s evolving vision of his future identity in society, adapting at frequent junctures with student choice, would foster greater engagement between students and their schoolwork. I claimed that this would also ultimately lead to more satisfied or actualized participants in society -- through harnessing the motivating power of the deep cultural narratives embedded in a conception of education as “self-creation.”

Now I raise the question of how we might use extant and emerging technologies to record, manage, and advise this evolving curriculum, integrating student choice and student vision. The act of recording and reflection upon an evolving curriculum is a powerful exercise of “self-creation.” It is a potent realization of “authorial” control over the curriculum-as-narrative. Moreover, such a record of the personal curriculum, as it evolves, might be mined to provide better guidance to students.

I am essentially proposing the creation of a technology to manage the complexities of a system in which every student could have a different curriculum,

organized on completely unique, individual principles – chiefly, individual interests and “projected identities.”

As has been previously mentioned, there are sure to be concerns about the quality and rigor of student-led curricula; and this thesis will discuss reasonable limits and how standards might be incorporated to such a curriculum without unduly impeding student freedom. While student agency and student interest are ideals that I believe are long overdue for focus in schools, there is with any ideal a danger of following it to harmful extremes, and ignoring downsides. Perceptiveness and pragmatism will help guard against zealous application of this ideal.

For instance: we may find that different levels of self-determination are ideal for different types of students. Some students may thrive with much independence; and some may require constant oversight and stricter parameters. Clearly, there are many practicalities such as these to consider.

However, if my thesis accomplishes anything, I hope it helps to push the pendulum back a little in favor of student agency in their own educations, and to demonstrate that an educational system which accommodates this ideal is administrationally realizable, despite past real limitations.

The technological applications discussed hereafter are suggestions of how existing or emerging technologies could be used to realize the aforementioned vision of the curriculum.

Current Work and Extant Technologies Which Inform this Thesis

Knutov, De Bra, and Pechenizkiy reflect on “twelve years of adaptive hypermedia” projects (now nearly fifteen years). They comment on the unique pedagogical opportunities of adaptive hypermedia: it “offers personalized content, presentation, and navigation support” through adaptively delivering a variety of experiences and sequences of experiences in “a large hyperspace.” (Knutov, De Bra,

& Pechenizkiy, 2009).

Personalization is the operative word, here. Instructional technologies – with the inherent dynamism of computing – have the ability to personalize lessons like nothing we’ve seen before.

The first and most primitive adaptive learning environments were sort of

“choose-your-own-adventure” hypertexts, in which the sequence in which the user interacted with components from a set list was determined by the user. This is still a primitive constructivist pedagogy, obviously. Games, and so-called “constructivist learning environments,” in a new generation of instructional technology, seek even more meaningful personalization and engagement, by trying to reconstruct

“authentic” learning environments within a computer program. Simulations are excellent examples of these types of technologies. They engage personalization mainly through frequently adjusting and adapting feedback to students as they navigate through a highly adaptable and complex learning environment.

However, anything so contained as a desktop computer program still exerts significant “boundaries” on a student’s learning experience.

While the above are all noble uses of the personalizing capabilities of technology, the project of this thesis seeks to expand the logic of the “constructivist learning environment” beyond such instructional-designer-imposed boundaries.

The system proposed in this thesis might incorporate such games and constructivist learning environments as learning objects within its bounds.

The project of this thesis is the construction of a type of “learning management system” -- or “LMS,” as such systems are often called in the alphabet- soup world of instructional design. A “learning management system” is the

“framework that handles all aspects of the learning process. An LMS is the infrastructure that delivers and manages instructional content, identifies and assess individual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals and collects and presents data for supervising the learning process of an organization as a whole” (Szabo & Flesher, 2002, cited in Watson &

Watson, 2007).

The project of this thesis – as an LMS -- is differentiated from other, more commonly discussed instructional technologies for its all-encompassing-ness. It is not bound to just student record-keeping (like many Course Management Systems), or just pedagogy (like most adaptive learning environments); and it is not bounded by one course or subject domain. Rather, it encompasses an entire curriculum – although, importantly, these “entire” curricula which LMS’s have traditionally administered have always been fairly standard or traditional. Think, for instance, of

the stand-standards based K-12 curriculum. Despite these historical differences between the vision of this thesis and the ways in which “learning management systems” have been historically implemented: as the system proposed in this thesis is to help shape an entire curriculum, the broad reach of the term “learning management system” makes it the most appropriate designator for this project.

The most novel aspects of this particular, proposed learning management system would be, first of all, the ‘unboundedness’ of its incorporable learning objects, and, secondly its user interface -- which would focus on student narratives as input through a sort of very involved concept-mapping tool (to be discussed later in this section). Instead of a focus on the delivery of uniform content to students, this LMS would draw from an almost “infinite” pool of content. And, using data mining techniques, it would deliver content based on a student's chosen curricular trajectories, as communicated through their curation of a “learning map” user interface, and through their input of “goals” along this learning map, to be discussed.

Differences in assessment and teacher/advisor interaction implied by this novel set- up will also be discussed at later junctures in this section of this thesis.

I am suggesting that similar technologies be used to create a system in which student interest and student agency help to set a continuous, individualized course through a rich, diverse system of carefully categorized learning objects. This system, importantly, would be unbounded by a syllabus or course or set five-to- seven-subject curriculum. The latter is the distinguishing features of this thesis’s suggested learning management system.

Learning Objects in Learning Maps: Narremes in the Narrative Introduction to Learning Objects and Learning Management Systems

The “learning object” has been the standard name for the fundamental unit – the “atom” -- of instructional design for decades, and the concept has underpinned instructional design since the inception of the field. David Wiley provides a helpful review of the origins of the so-called “learning object.” It comes out of the object- oriented strain of computer science; a paradigm which emphasizes the fabrication of reusable functional code components. Reusability in a variety of contexts is the takeaway idea, here; and the concept of a “reusable” element of instruction is a key informing idea in instructional design (Wiley, 2003). Wiley cites Reigeluth (1977), who highlights the naturalness or inevitability of the “learning object” concept by pointing out that pedagogues naturally break up lessons into smaller sublessons.

Wiley notes that definitions of “learning object,” beyond universally including the essential components of reusability and recombinability, are remarkably broad and varied. Furthermore, the term is used more or less interchangeably with many cousin-terms in instructional design, including Merrill’s “knowledge object” or

ARIADNE’s “pedagogical document.” At its broadest and most abstract, a learning object is (according to a Learning Technology Standards Committee definition), is

“any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used, or referenced during technology-supported learning.”

Wiley objects to this definition of learning object, particularly the “non- digital” and “reference” parts, which he claims make a “learning object” just about

“anything in the world that has ever existed.” 60

Especially when applied to the vision in this thesis, the issue of granularity presents itself. “Learning objects” can be of many different sizes; they may be chunks of lessons, or they may be whole texts.

Instructional design pioneer H. Wayne Hodgins describes his “Lego epiphany,” which metaphor for learning objects has been the dominant one since the inception of the field:

My journey into this world of learning objects started with an “epiphany moment” watching my children play with LEGOTM blocks many years ago. As it struck me that both [his by-the-book child daughter and his resistant-to- imposed-order son] had their wonderfully different needs met equally well with these simple blocks of plastic, I began what has been more than ten years of refining a dream of a world where all “content” exists at just the right and lowest possible size, much like the individual blocks that make up LEGOTM systems. In this dream, these “prime sized” blocks of content have a fundamental “standard,” the equivalent of the “pin size” of the LEGOTM blocks, such that they can be assembled into literally any shape, size, and function. Some people may find the most value in taking a pre-assembled unit and putting it to direct use. Others will want to assemble their own, possibly from scratch, but more likely from sub-assemblies. Some will want instructions and guidance on how to assemble the blocks, while others will want to determine their own results. However they may be used and applied, the empowerment of literally every individual by such a world full of learning objects is staggering (Hodgins, 2004).

Hodgins is a visionary with a broad, global vision of the future of the learning object. His vision – the world as a comprehensively catalogued assembly of learning objects -- is sympathetic to the vision of this thesis.

The first and most ambitious proposition of this thesis (and by no means unique to this thesis), then, is the creation of a specifically education-focused, carefully categorized, universal database of learning objects of disparate type and

origin – or, more likely, a universal system of attaching metadata to any and all objects online to allow centralized handling by a learning management system.

Projects such as this have been previously attempted or continue to be attempted. The ARIADNE project of the European Union describes its aim thusly:

“to provide flexible, effective, and efficient access to large-scale educational collections in a way that goes beyond what typical search engines provide.” The

“learning objects” in projects such as ARIADNE’s, however, are often limited to digital documents such as the following:

 Recorded lectures  Books, articles, and other texts  Instructional games and adaptive learning environments

However, textual and audiovisual resources are not the only – or even the most important – learning objects. One does not have to stretch ones imagination very hard to imagine that many students’ self-reported learning narratives would prominently feature learning-experience-narremes of a relational or experiential nature.

Ideally, we will someday soon catalog non-digital learning resources online, as well, so that users might be matched with/recommended human and other valuable non-digital learning objects. The non-digital objects that would ideally be tagged and cataloged into this universal system would include:

 Human domain specialists/librarians  Tutors with special track records of success for ‘types of students’  Organizations or membership societies associated with an interest or a pursuit  Field trips and diverse experiential learning opportunities – from conferences, to programs, to internships, to apprenticeships.

These human and community resources, too, are “learning objects,” under the broadest definition. M.D. Merrill’s classic “types” of “knowledge objects” (an early synonym) include entities, properties, activities, and processes. We already have some practice attaching metadata to human beings and placing them within a large database to be sorted and matched by various algorithms. Right now, however, such applications are limited to the world of online dating!

If programs, experiential learning opportunities, internships, field trips, domain experts, and even subject-matter tutors and fellow students, were systematically attached with metadata and interspersed among this universal catalog of learning objects, how much richer and more realistic could the process of creating and reporting learning maps, and providing predictive guidance to students, become. Including all these diverse resources -- whether they be textual, human, organizational, etc. – speaks of their being all of a level together; all are equally worthy narremes along the path to a projected identity.

Often a students’ “academic” education (through the means of the texts and tests administered in a formal school curriculum) are separate, in the minds of students, from the “experiential” and “relational” elements their educations. The latter dwell in an esteemed, yet separate sphere, known as the “extracurricular”

sphere; and valuable connections between one and the other are foregone, because of this mental separation.

However, including, in the great library of learning objects, resources traditionally esteemed “extracurricular,” speaks to the idea that the separation is unnatural. All these experiences, relationships, programs are part of the natural or true curriculum, if they are significant learning experiences for the student, and if they build toward some future identity. A system which incorporates learning objects of these diverse types alike (textual, relational, experiential), then, legitimizes them all as valuable potential elements in a student’s personal curriculum. Moreover, a system which recognizes input learning objects of these types might make better recommendations and predictions for users going forward.

Accessibility of the Learning Object in the Age of the Web

The web has changed the very nature of learning objects, by means of their radically expanded accessibility.

The web allows for centralized resources which can be shared across geographical distances. Obviously, this has been a major informing trend for education in the last ten years, as highlighted by the rise of online education. The advent of the web means that more learning resources are more widely available to more people than ever before. With the help of modern search engines, people can sift through a seemingly infinite repository of information and learning resources, delivered directly to their home computers.

The implications of the rise of the web for education are obvious and much discussed. Whereas educational resources and information was once physically or geographically bound in discrete objects or people, the web means that many if not all educational resources can be digitized and placed on the web, where they might be widely and variously accessible. The web is an excellent, central place from which cataloged “learning objects” from disparate sources might be shared with a wide variety of learners in diverse places. The recent rise of so-called “open learning” projects has seized upon this ripe opportunity. From the beginning, the

Open Knowledge Initiative at MIT has seized upon the democratizing power of the web to disseminate the elite lectures and learning materials associated with MIT courses (Vale & Long, 2003).

An integral part of the modern internet, search engines allow users to find content; and targeted marketing allows content to find users, based on past interest.

Much innovation on the web currently is focused on the latter, as harnessed towards marketing purposes.

The same technology – i.e., adapting and targeting content towards web users- - could be easily applied toward educational aims, helping a system target diverse “learning objects” at likely receptive learners.

A New Metaphor: Learning Objects as Narremes

Hodgins’s metaphor for the learning object is a LEGO; Wiley’s is an atom.

Both metaphors harmonize with a vision of an education as a logical or rule-based structure.

However, within the context of this thesis-- which seeks to harness the motivating narratives of self-creation that suffuse our cultural and literary heritage -

- the most apt metaphor for a learning object is that of a narreme. The narreme is to narrative, within the literary study of narratology, as learning object is to a lesson, within the field of instructional design. The “narreme” is the hypothetical, fundamental aspect of a story, and that even the most staid and reusable of

“narremes” are recombinable into infinite permutations of stories.

If the careful, detailed, branching record of a student’s “whole curriculum” mirrors his or her narrative identities – (social, intellectual, etc.)-- then each atomic

“learning object” within this grand narrative could be viewed as a “narreme.”

An Overview of Narrative Elements in the System

Now I will turn the discussion to ways in which narrativity is served in this system, in accordance with previous claims that “projected narrative identities” are the lodestars of the “true” curriculum.

The three levels of narrative in the system would be:

 The recommending and recording functions of the system, which both

encourage and “track” organic, exploratory learning;

 The institutionalized user process of selecting out themes from

amongst this biography of explorations; and,

 The organizing of goals and future curricular directions, as based on

some kind of constructed “narrative identity.”

First: Biography of Exploratory Learning

We start with a biography of learning; the record of a student’s “learning pathway.” Again, this is to be the record of a student’s organically unfolding explorations in various domains. In this biography, there are elements of classical narrative, of course: just one of the many “narrative” aspects to this system.

Specifically, this record partakes of a linear tradition of narrative, connecting events by cause-and-effect over time. The student defines genealogical relationships between interests, represented as manipulable icons in a large “concept map” like interface.

To put a concrete example to this: an interest in “gardening” leads the student to pursue pertinent textual resources and a local community garden. Soon the interest in gardening is refined: the interest has matured into an interest in perennial gardening. Several resources on perennial gardening are sought, which give birth to a further refined interest in English perennial gardening. At this point, the interest branches out, gives birth to a tangential interest: discussion of architectural accents in English gardens has provoked a small side interest in period architecture.

Not a glorious story, maybe; but easy to imagine and of a manageable scale for an example.

This very primitive linear story is the basis for further layers of narrativity.

Second: Themes and Goals

Upon examining the primitive “biography” of exploratory learning, the student and his or her mentors/teachers/advisors as well as the system itself might then set upon a sort of revisionist task, whereby themes are identified in the student’s explorations.

These themes might then be framed. That is, they might be “artificially” pulled out from amongst the great big organic mess of the learning map, and given names, and designated for future focus.

Here data mining technologies might once again come in handy. There are extant technologies which can compare and contrast concept maps (Kao, Chen, &

Sun, 2010). Hypothetically, across a large sample of user-generated learning biographies in concept-map form, the system could identify patterns and themes, and suggest to the user when themes are becoming statistically apparent (could be heavily based on what other users have identified as themes).

Third: Themes Building into Goals, Building into Narratives, Building into Identities

Themes begin to build into goals and narratives. We see this play out daily in schools. A young student has a persistent, long-term interest in biology and an aptitude for math. These interest-themes and capabilities begin to suggest a future for the student: go into medicine! Go into biomedical research! adults and advisors might suggest. Or, over time, a student’s interests and skills begin to cluster in technology and music. Media! their high school A.V. club leader tells them.

Armed with this projected professional identity – a sort of “goal” suggested by emergent themes in their explorations – the emergent interests of their previous explorations take on a more meaningful context. This is the powerful framing or meaning-bringing aspect of narrative,at work. Certain subjective experiences – a sense of value or a certain special aesthetic – might suffuse the aspired-for narrative identity. The projected state of doctorhood or soldierhood or being a writer or a musician casts, perhaps, a romantic light on any small learning task done, in the present, in service of this projected identity.

We all know that these projected identities are thrown on and thrown off profligately in childhood, and shift, often at a slightly slower rate, through high school. Nevertheless; these projected identities – often chosen, amongst the vast catalog of ways-of-being and things-to-be in the world, due to their congruence with emergent themes in student interest and known personal stregths – provide powerful motivation for learning activities, while they last.

Learning Maps

To extend this metaphor of the learning object as a narreme, as previously discussed: if a learning object is a narreme, then the manner in which these learning-object-narremes are connected and strung together creates the narrative.

The learning map is the first, most basic narrative which underpins this system.

I will now spend some time describing a tool that would allow students to record and manipulate their sequences of learning objects, as narremes, into meaningful narratives.

What does an evolving curriculum look like? This section is concerned with modeling the evolution of this whole curriculum in a dynamic visual fashion – i.e., on a screen. The digital record of a student’s evolving education here suggested is inspired by the conception of the curriculum as a sort of branching timeline or tree -

- in which metaphor the entirety of the tree represents the usable and integrated knowledge and projects a student has learned and experienced. I will refer to this visualization/interface as a student’s “learning map.”

This “learning map” tool would seek to preserve a record of such a profoundly individualized, evolving curriculum. It re-purposes the tools of mind- mapping to demonstrate both genealogical and revisionist relationships among salient ‘learning artifacts’ selected by a student. I will briefly explain these two uses of the proposed learning map tool.

The genealogical dimension of the learning map is the dimension which displays the record of a student’s ‘organic’ exploration in any given domain, as one

learning object prompts curiosity in and selection of another. It would provide information about pure, empirical, demonstrated student interest. As students explore the wide world of learning objects, are exposed to new things, and select items by intuition or through recommendation, this great, hairy, ‘genealogical’ learning map naturally builds up upon itself. This record of their explorations in learning-object-space, as propelled by interest, can be used to demonstrate relative time and effort spent in various pursuits and inquiries. It can, importantly, reveal trends in interest over time. Such data could provide the raw information a student or their advisor might need, in order to predict which inquiries the student ought to invest in, going forward, based on a demonstrated steady ‘interest’ over time.

The revisionist functions of the learning map are, meanwhile, those functions whereby students can rearrange their learning objects into clusters and formations meaningful to them. This revisionist functionality has an authorial or “self-creative” aspect to it.

The “story” in the genealogical learning map is, likely, mostly natural or unconscious. Contrastingly, in this revisionist layer of user input, self-creation comes into play. Here, the student must take the raw elements of the story born of exploration (helpfully recorded with the aid of the learning management system), and recombine these elements into something meaningful. Here, the student

“identifies” (or “creates”) stories, using the raw material from the genealogical map.

They can draw out trends into “stories,” which become their curricular focuses, around which they might begin to plan their goals. This revisionist task is aided and

complemented by goal-setting tasks, including reflective exercises in which students play with “projected identities,” to complement their burgeoning curricular focuses.

The Genealogical Learning Map: An Illustration

The following illustrations will hopefully demonstrate the concepts of an

“exploratory” or “genealogical” learning map, to the reader.

For the purposes of creating this illustration, I impersonated a high school upperclassman or early undergraduate college student circa the year 2010 (that’s the last time the “current event” included in this learning record was actually current). The student in this example is curious about literature and philosophy

(coincidentally, things that I was curious about at this age! I thought this would add realism) -- and has a burgeoning if primitive interest in understanding public policy and civic discourse.

You will basically perceive a sort of mind-map, repurposed as a genealogical or evolutionary tree. The objects have been arranged along a sort of timeline, from left to right. The sequence is one of exploratory interest. One learning object, guiding question, idea, or project, inspires the next in the sequence. Sometimes multiple branches result from one single learning object, and the concept map branches accordingly.

In the first figure, you will see two ‘trees,’ designating different lines of inquiry. Beside each of these trees, you will see an evolving inquiry. Each icon represents a learning object, a reflection, or a question which shapes the tree from

that point onward. Learning objects and actions/goals include: books, essays, questions, ‘ideas,’ web resources, etc., etc.

A “tree,” in the context of this tool, will be a set of branches with one common parent, which is itself a sort of “first cause” in the chain to follow. Trees are artificial. The student defines a “starting point” in a way that makes sense for him or her, and can rearrange trees as makes sense to him or her.

Ideally, there would be far more ‘trees,’ and more highly developed branches to observe in this exemplary model; I think that the value of this tool increases with the volume of content and inquiries input to it. However, for the purpose of this example, there are two trees.

Once again, a key visualization, in this system, will be the evolutionary view of the curriculum. That is, it shall tell the story, in the time dimension, of how one activity, question, inquiry, or learning material, spawned the curiosity to investigate and incorporate another activity, question, inquiry, or learning material. The illustrations which follow privilege this genealogical aspect of the visualized evolutionary curriculum.

Fig 2

Fig. 4 Fig. 3

Fig. 1 – Bird’s eye view, of the two ‘trees’: Tree A has been labeled by the user, “An Inquiry into ‘Freedom,’ and Tree B has been labeled by the user “The Debate Around a Policy Issue.”

Fig. 2 – A close-up from Tree A.

Fig. 3 – A close-up from Tree B.

Fig. 4 – Connection between two points in different trees.

Why model this curriculum as a dynamic visual – i.e., on a screen?

Why model this curriculum on a screen, as a dynamic visualization? Through screens, we can create worlds of our ideas. Through the creation of “totems” of these ideas, and the technology of the screen, we can manipulate those ideas in a space outside our own minds. James Ash brings an academic background in geography to the study of video games, and has some relevant words which extend to the philosophy and potentiality of screens in general:

“[I]mages on screens produce, and are part of, the proliferation of a multiplicity of differently composed spatialities, all of which have their own singular phenomenal and affective existences. … [T]he screen creates the potential for producing images which can be directly manipulated by users. This manipulation increases the image’s capacity for producing a ‘world’ by actively drawing upon users’ embodied, navigational knowledges and spatial awareness” (Ash, 2009).

Increasingly interactive visual technologies onscreen help to make the creation of this “world” of ideas possible.

An externalized, visual-spatial representation of the content of our minds, and of the relationships among that content, can act as a metacognitive “aid.” Our minds are freed from the task of generating or holding a web in the mind’s eye, or of specifically recalling content -- and instead, we are free to focus on performing metacognitive operations upon those webs and that content, now neatly laid before us, with no continuing effort on our part.

As a venue for humans to manipulate, cluster, and organize large amounts of information, the screen is an unparalleled tool. Each “learning object” becomes a

dynamic object that can be re-used, re-organized, picked up and placed elsewhere, to tell a new story.

This concept is highly related to James Paul Gee’s principle of “material intelligence.” Gee, like Ash, is an academic with an interest in video games. When

“thinking, problem solving, and knowledge are ‘stored’ in material objects and the environment” of the game, “this frees learners to engage their own minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects” (Gee,

2003). He gives the example of a game in which the game-object of a “lock-pick,” itself ostensibly obtained through prior problem-solving, effectively “stores” ones knowledge of how to get into locked doors, so that each new door is not a new puzzle. Gee’s concept of “material intelligence” is the general concept behind “mind maps,” which idea I will discuss next.

Concept Maps

The traditional “concept map” greatly informs the user interface which I think would be ideal for a constantly evolving curriculum. have an inherent narrativity to them: they take place in a time domain, they unfold in contingent, cause-and-effect patterns.

David Jonassen hints at this potentiality of mindmaps in Computers as

Mindtools, when he says “Meaningful learning requires that students connect new ideas to knowledge that they have already constructed. Concept maps help to

organize learners’ knowledge by integrating information into a progressively more complex conceptual framework” (Jonassen, 1996).

The graphical ‘language’ of mind-maps, with its nodes, links, and arrows to spatially connote relationships between items, is drawn from the tradition of mind- mapping. However, it expands the basic graphical language of mind-mapping to a large, overarching scale -- aiming to “map out” the entirety of an individualized course of study. It also adds hypermedia functionality to the traditional mind-map

– with dynamic display options showcasing alternative organizational schemes – both more exploratory, or “genealogical” displays of learning objects, and

“revisionist” displays in which the student has rearranged or clustered objects in service of some particular curricular focus, or sub-narrative.

The mind map – also known as the concept map – is a method which predates screens, but which has been greatly enhanced by the invention of the screen. Through processes of meaning-making best described with the language of semiotics, mind maps form a kind of graphical language. Mind-maps are a peculiarly precise kind of visual language. In our culture, the signifiers usually saddled with the responsibility to convey precise, logical relationships, are textual words. Mind- maps take on the difficult and unique task of signifying tight, logical relationships through non-textual signifiers. The graphical language of mind-maps is comprised largely of “symbols” – that is, arbitrarily designated bearers of meaning – such as the conventional “arrows” which connect ideas, and are understood universally as such.

As such, the mind-map occupies a unique semiotic place, among images. While it is

a kind of image, it yet contradicts Massaris and Abrahams “properties of an image,” by including a nearly “explicit propositional syntax” (Massaris and Abrahams, in

Rodrigues and Dimitrova, 2011.)

In “Concept Maps: Experiments on Dynamic Thinking,” Derbentseva, et al, define concept maps by their most basic element: a proposition, consisting of two concepts and their relationship. Propositions, in concept maps (sometimes

“CMaps,” in the literature), are characterized by “node-link-node” triads – in which nodes are static concepts, and links describe the nature of the relationship between these two stable concepts. (Derbentseva, Safayeni, & Can, 2007).

The tool described in this thesis is deeply influenced by mind-maps. It co- opts the basic element of the mind-map: the visualized, tripartite “proposition.”

However, in seeking to encompass all learning objects a student ever interacts with, it has an unusually universal purpose.

This particular visualization of the evolving curriculum – that is, a sort of branching timeline-tree -- clearly privileges contingency, connectedness, trajectories, and genealogy or historicity, in a student’s learning. However, clearly, not every learning event is easily connected to previous learning events, in a neatly historical fashion. It follows that the ideal interface for this interactive learning map would have a variety of “connection” options for various learning-object nodes besides simple parent-and-child connections occurring in the time domain. Ideally, clustering functions and other non-linear organizational features could be

integrated to better reflect how a student feels learning objects relate to one another, within their own visions of their evolving curriculum-identity.

Choosing Elements for Inclusion in Learning Maps

Narrative theory – specifically in the application of narrative identity—is an excellent way to look at how a person might choose and curate his or her learning map. What factors influence the individual’s curation of a unique, personal learning map?

I will here adapt Bryan Warnick’s application of narrative identity theory to issues of exemplarity and imitation in education. He contends that imitation is central to learning; and that the process by which an “example” (framed by some ostensibly positive narrative) brings about “imitation,” is through its congruence with a learner’s narrative identity. He actually frames the theory in a negative way: the example must not be incompatible with the narrative self. (Warnick, 2008)

Nevertheless, I will seize upon this idea of “congruence” and this process of

“appropriating” items with origins outside the self, into one’s own identity, based upon an individual’s narrative identity. Once again, I will draw upon the idea the

Lockean/Nietzschean idea that originality is but a recombination of pre-existing entities into a novel form. Self-creation, then, is not done alone; but is, paradoxically, a remarkably social process. The self-creator must look out into the world and find those elements which accord with some core narrative of their own, and incorporate and harmonize these within him or herself.

Imagine if this process of appropriation of congruent external influences –

(broadly construed, from books, to programs, to role models) were thoughtfully recorded and organized by a student, and the record thereof was called his or her

“curriculum.”

Ideas of “narrative identity” would theoretically underwrite any choice made in an evolving curriculum. Even when simply “exploring,” theoretically, students would gravitate towards some elements over others due to ideas about themselves

– ideas about what interests them, about what kind of things they “like.”

The influence of narrative identity in the exploratory phase would of course be the faintest. However, as the learner draws out themes, organizes them, and frames them as distinct “pursuits” which increasingly characterize their learning, they are exerting a stronger and more deliberate narrative force upon their learning.

And when these drawn-out-and-identified pursuits begin to converge, or begin to tell a story, in their combination, they might begin to inform a whole identity – the identity of a writer, or an engineer, or a nutritionist; and these possible futures can bend back and further color the student’s learning goals and pursuits.

Recombining Learning Objects into Stories: The Second Functionality of this Tool

Identifying and Drawing Out “Themes” or “Subnarratives”

Exerting an authorial “narrative” upon the evolutionary curriculum necessitates some kind of frequent user reflection, and a frequent exercise of drawing out of themes or focuses, in their curriculum.

The idea is to notice trends in interest, and identify some of these trends as special “focuses” of the students’ curriculum. A focus might be broad, narrow, practical, or intellectual, or otherwise: it might be, indoor plumbing; it might be, the

Civil War, it might be the whole field of psychology, it might be rollercoaster engineering, or Russian literature. Whatever the case, a vital principal of adding

“narrativity” to the curriculum involves students selecting out “narratives” from their general explorations, and framing them together. It is, after all, framing that partially makes a narrative. Setting a “frame” around a pursuit – finding a group of learning objects which appeal to the user similarly and clustering them together, using the concept-map functionalities of the tool – adds a sort of “authorial” level of control to the curriculum, and also has the important feature of focusing the curriculum in a particular direction, giving an increasingly more defined shape to the student’s curricular identity.

The more time and energy a student “invests” in certain branches (which investment, hypothetically, would follow some sort of subjective sense of “success” within activities related to those pursuits), the more those branches become the

prominent features of the tree. It is in the decision about which pursuits/branches to nurture that a student exerts a sort of narrative-building or self-creation. Once again, this self-creation is best done with outside help and guidance; it need not be a romantic, eremitical quest. Hence, one of the main functions of this system would be to integrate timely guidance as the student sets goals and visions for their curriculum.

Several non-linear functionalities of concept maps might help a student organize these emergent themes.

Non-Linear Elements of Concept Maps – To Harness for the Imposing of “Revisionist” Narratives

You will notice that the two trees in Fig. 1 are connected by a shadowy arrow. This non-hierarchical connection between two hierarchical structures is known, in mind-mapping, as a “cross-link.” Only minimally developed in this particular example, the “cross-link” feature, is an entirely distinct layer of organization on top of the prevailing sequential/genealogical scheme of the tool.

Again; this is only an example/model; but in the ideal, dynamic realization of this model, there would be a ‘display option’ which reconfigured the organization scheme to display “cross-linked families” – further serving the tool’s aim to function as a facilitator of “cognitive flexibility.”

As Derbentseva, et al, describe, in their work on CMaps, or concept maps,

“Cross-links are encouraged because they reflect interconnectedness of different map segments within the hierarchy, resulting in a more complex graph structure”

(Derbentseva, et al, 2006). Hierarchies, or linear ‘genealogies’ as in the case of this 84

tool, are by nature constricting. A cross-link is a way of momentarily breaking the hegemony of the linear organizational structure, and acknowledging that the leading or apparent mode of organization is not the “only” possible form of organization.

The constructivist philosophy behind “cross-links” is well-addressed in Spiro and Jehng’s work on cognitive flexibility, hypertext, and ill-structured domains. In describing the second of these three concepts central to their work, Spiro and Jehng draw on a book by Wittgenstein, in which Wittgenstein famously laid out his arguments in the form of a map – as a “crisscrossed landscape.” The authors summarize Wittgenstein’s motivations like this: he felt that, “to weld his complex ideas into a conventionally unified exposition, to force his ideas in any single direction, crippled those ideas.” Say the authors, hypertext “space” is like this

“crisscrossed landscape.”

By crisscrossing topical/conceptual landscapes, highly interconnected, web- like knowledge structures are built that permit greater flexibility in the ways that knowledge can potentially be assembled for use in comprehension or problem solving. The likelihood that a highly adaptive schema can be assembled to fit the particular requirements for understanding or acting in the situation at hand is increased.

The reason for inclusion of this “crosslink” feature, and the reason for the dynamic and alterable nature of starting nodes for trees, is to avoid, as hinted at before, a sort of “hegemony of the tool.”

In Dale Cyphert’s review of PowerPoint technology, “Presentation

Technology in the Age of Electronic Eloquence: From Visual Aid to Visual Rhetoric,” the author quotes a critic of PowerPoint, who cites this very issue, regarding

“visualizing” software. PowerPoint, he says, “helps you make a case, but it also

makes its own case, about how to organize information, how much information to organize, and how to look at the world.” (Parker, qtd. in Cyphert, 2007). Tools, like institutions, are vessels of “power,” (Foucault, via Smith.) The more flexible a tool is, and the less rigidly linear, the more it steps back to let you make your own case rather than its own case. As the aim of this tool is to cede as much power as possible to the user, such features as this are central to its purpose.

This model displays, in multiple dimensions including the time dimension, student evolution in terms of the materials and projects he or she chooses to interact with. With branching connections, it displays the personal educational logic which leads a student from one resource to another resource – and from there, to an idea, to another resource, to a project…etc. It uses the language of mind-mapping to preserve the record of this evolutionary curriculum over time. Thus the language of mind-maps is easily blended with the logic of the timeline to create a sort of genealogical record of an education.

And then, after that: when a student can see the meaningful moments of their education laid out before them in a dynamic and visual fashion, they are empowered to perform metacognitive operations upon these diverse materials and connections. The dynamic interface of the tool allows for manipulation and reorganization along emergent themes important to the student – supporting the development of narrative identity.

Goal-Setting Aids and Management of Goals

The emphasis on an “evolutionary” or “emergent” curriculum in this thesis – in which students pursue their interests without the imposition of a formal curricular structure -- is balanced by an equal reverence for goals. However, in keeping with the values of this curriculum, these goals are, of course, to be set by and belong to the student. Nevertheless, there is a delicate balance to be sought between the exploratory side of learning, and the goal-directed side of learning. It is the position of this thesis that goals are the natural outcropping of explorations, and that a tool such as the one proposed in this thesis would help optimize the transition between “casual exploratory interest” and “goal-directed study.”

The ideal use of this system would find a balance between “exploratory” learning, guided by interest, and “goal-directed” or “project-based” learning, in which specific aims or activities are identified for achievement ahead of time. In this section, I will talk a bit about the psychological benefits of having students select their own projects or aims, and discuss how goal-setting can be harmonized with the more “emergent” elements of this vision of the curriculum, through the monitoring of evolving interests as they are recorded in students’ learning maps.

Goal-setting within constructivist learning environments has already made an entrance to the literature, though usually at fairly trivial levels; “goal-setting” is often more a reflective exercise than a truly curriculum-defining institution.

However, a system such as the one proposed would use goal-setting writ large. Goals, in the student-led curriculum, would be distinctly non-trivial; they

would be the key structure-bringing elements to an otherwise fairly free-ranging curriculum.

The user would set short-term goals such as the following:

 Books to read  A task towards completion of a project  Activities/programs to participate in  A sub-topic to master

As well as midrange goals:

 A full topic to master  A project to complete

And long range goals:

 An employable skill to learn  A social manner to cultivate

And, importantly, students would set and revise projected personal narrative identities, which will inform all the goals set by the student:

 To be a capable “engineer”  Or a sensitive, perceptive professional nurse  To be an informed and extremely knowledgeable democratic citizen

Goals as Narrative

It is essential to note that goal-setting is an important narrative element of this enterprise.

The narrative structure of a goal is inherently satisfying: it has a telos, a moment of resolution. Concrete goals along the arc of the “narrative quest” can both encourage the hero, and ultimately, begin to slowly build themselves into the shape and direction the ultimate goal of said narrative quest.

Classic narratives and epics are often teleological – the working out of some great quest in the wide world, punctuated with episodes along the way. Then, often following a gauntlet of little episodic plots, the hero makes his return, with the goal to be achieved or the object to be won, in hand. We need only look as far as Joseph

Campbell’s Hero with the Thousand Faces for confirmation of this aspect of classical and traditional narrative; the quest, the boon secured, and the return with wisdom or greater power is the essence of the monomyth.

Interestingly, and perhaps worth discussing here: the “goal” or the

“teleology” in the monomyth is not always well-defined. In many classical narratives, the quest into the unknown is vague; we only know that some evidence of victory or some “boon to bestow upon mankind” (as Campbell says) is sought in the supernatural or mythical region, before a return home. And yet, the episodes that make up the middle of the epic are very immediate, visceral, and goal-oriented; and tend to shape and inform the ultimate boon which is to be secured in the quest.

This informs us about the nature of narrative goals as we apply the idea to the shaping of a curriculum. Sometimes goals only become clear after some exploration and some discrete goal-oriented episodes or assays into the material.

Barbara Czarniawska summarizes Alasdair McIntyre eloquently:

performative definition through the living of it. A search looks for something that already exists (as in a ‘search for excellence’); a quest creates its goal rather than dis- covers it. The proponents of means–ends rationality defend the notion of the a priori goals, while the pragmatists declare it to be impractical. A narrative view gets rid of the problem by reinstating the role of goals as both the results and the antecedents of action. Whole communities as well as individual persons are engaged in a quest for meaning in ‘their life’, which will bestow meaning on particular actions taken (Czarniawska, 2004).

Nonetheless, goals of various levels lend structure and accountability to the exploration that is the evolving curriculum. The institutionalization of student- made goals is perhaps what distinguishes this program from other radically progressive curricular programs – such as the freewheeling Summerhill and

Sudbury schools, where children roam school-grounds and take up whatever activities suit them most in the moment. The program proposed here does not totally shun formal systems of curriculum. Instead, it would seek to institute a formal system of curriculum that maximizes freedom, within a structure that nonetheless encourages rigor. In this system, the student manufactures his or her own structure, with the help of a mentor, at regular intervals. The hope is that, psychologically, student-made goals have more inherent meaning, to that student, than externally imposed goals. Mentor support is vital as some students will lack the knowledge or maturity to make appropriate, achievable goals without advice.

There is some limited empirical evidence and much psychological theory purporting that student-set goals really do have a motivating factor, through some mechanism of “ownership.” I will briefly look to the construct of “self-regulated

learning” in psychology, and examine some research done on student-set goals and their effect on student motivation, to buoy this point.

Self-Set Goals and the Psychology of Ownership

I’ll draw from the research around the construct of “self-regulated learning” -

- a construct concerned with “systematic efforts to direct thoughts, feelings, and actions, toward the attainment of one’s goals” (Zimmerman, 2000, cited in Schunk,

2001). Clearly, goal-setting is an integral part of research on “self-regulated learning.” Furthermore, in so-called “SRL” research, there is an important sub- construct of “ownership.” I call this a sub-construct, because “ownership” is a concept without its own place in the literature, but which frequently appears as a germane concept within self-regulated learning literature.

Dale Schunk’s review of theoretical literature in SRL, Self-Regulation through

Goal-Setting (2001) distills the theory of fellow scholars in the field, Bandura, Locke and Latham, and Zimmerman into a series of recommendations. These recommendations are, respectively, to: a) Subdivide long-term goals into proximal sub-goals, b) Self-monitor-progress, c) Self-evaluate capabilities, and d) Reevaluate goals and timelines (Schunk, 2001). Schunk’s theoretical piece, importantly, also references the nature of self-set goals – which maps onto the sub-construct of

“ownership” discussed previously as a focus of the study at hand. “Researchers have found that allowing individuals to set their goals enhances motivation and self- regulation, perhaps because self-set goals produce higher commitment,” says

Schunk. Eleanor Cheung writes, citing Schunk: “Students are more motivated to

accomplish what they have planned for themselves[,] and they tend to work harder on self-made goals than externally imposed goals.” Furthermore, student

“participation in goal setting can lead to high goal commitment.”

Unfortunately, much research into the question of goal-setting does not nearly handle goal-setting at the scope that the central project of this thesis would recommend. And I would argue that some failures to find helpfulness in “goal- setting” as a classroom institution are directly related to the fact that students recognize the triviality of goals that do not genuinely shape their curriculum, but are only personal and supplementary to the teacher’s agenda for the classroom. “Goals,” in such a context, are trivial; a false nod to autonomy and ownership that rings hollow, with students, and perhaps contributes to research which disagrees with self-regulated learning’s theoretical espousal of goal-setting as a positive motivator.

For instance: Kato, in 2009, in a published study entitled “Student

Preferences: Goal-setting and self-assessment activities in a tertiary education environment” (Kato, 2009) implemented goal-setting and self-assessment systems in a Japanese foreign language class, and then measured student’s perception of the helpfulness of these systems to their learning. The self-assessments include: weekly reflection upon individual learning process, assessment of learning performance, comments or reflections – followed by feedback from the instructor.

The goal-setting exercise, on the other hand, was amorphous and ill-suited to the pedagogical environment of a language-learning classroom. Students were told to set a ‘long-term goal at the beginning of the semester’,’ and then to ‘set a short-term

goal at the beginning of each week.’ I am not surprised at the findings of this study: while the students found the self-assessment process to be helpful, they were largely ambivalent to negative about the usefulness of ‘goal-setting.’ In my opinion, this is because goal-setting in an externally structured class with an externally- structured curriculum is a highly artificial exercise. Not only would the student not feel ownership over the goals, but the goals would feel redundant and repetitive week after week – something like a repeating refrain of “Learn the week’s material.”

The articulation of meaningful goals, then, is a key, important factor for successfully realizing a student-led curriculum. Hypothetically, the knowledge that these goals will truly have an impact on the shape of the student’s studies will organically lead to more thoughtful goals. Nevertheless, guidance as students make goals is an imperative part of this process.

Student goal-inputs and instructor restraints will be the key order-bringing elements of this system. In its ideal use, users would balance “exploratory” learning

(i.e., following their own interests and adding to their learning maps) with goals set after careful examination of patterns demonstrated (and preserved in an easy-to- interpret visual record – the learning map!) in the exploratory phases. These goals might take the form of projects which synthesize or demonstrate previous learning, or a skill or topic which the student seeks to master – among other things. Ideally, these goals, their timelines, and subgoals, would be set between the teacher and the student. They would be archived and managed through the same software system, and perhaps displayed to users as overlays to the learning map – perhaps as ghost

objects (for discrete tasks within pursuits), or ghost branches (for whole projected pursuits).

Goal management through a computer system has many advantages, especially for instructors. If instructors are to care for multiple students, each with their own self-created curriculum, it is important that teachers be able to quickly access each student’s distinct plans. A system which automatically records progress towards goals would allow the teacher to simply check up on a student’s profile and monitor progress. This is clearly preferable to a system in which teachers must keep track, mentally, of individual student trajectories, or maintain elaborate systems of their own devising.

Projected Identities as Meta-Goals with a Narrative Component

The exercise of creating “projected identities” is at the narrative heart of this curriculum. A “projected identity” might be seen as a sort of meta-goal; the organizing principle which orders all others, in a self-created curriculum.

As has been previously discussed, it is a projected narrative identity -- whether social, intellectual, spiritual, or economic – which often motivates personal learning. We learn because we want to be a certain kind of person in the future. The kind of person who can fix a car; the kind of person who can play guitar; the kind of person who can explain to a small kid what a derivative is.

“Projected identities” would be formally incorporated into this curriculum as a periodic reflection exercise, to focus the curriculum.

Ideally, the student would use information from their genealogical learning maps – which gauge empirical evidence of their own trends in interest – as well as knowledge of their own aptitudes, and information about developing trends in their learning focuses to help them reflect upon future learning identities. Speaking with mentors about these “projected identities” would be an excellent exercise.

To some limited extent, the learning management system’s recommender could also recommend possible “identities” (mostly in the form of future careers or pursuits) based on data from the student’s learning trajectories.

The principle hope, however, is that formally reflecting upon “projected identities” would help guide students in the framing of their “narrative” or “focused” learning maps. “Projected identities” imply natural goals and focuses, and can bring satisfying answers to this realm of “what to focus on? What to work on?”

The hope is, that a periodic focus on what one hopes ones learning will make one, will effectively project a narrative back upon ones learning – and with that narrative, meaning,, purpose, significance will all fall into place, and act as motivating and cohering factors, in one’s education.

It must be noted here – as it has been hinted before – that not all “projected identities” are professional or career-oriented. Certainly not all projected identities regard a person’s anticipated future economic participation.

We all know many people who define themselves not by how they make a living, but by their characters, or their hobbies, their art, or their community service

– who readily illustrate this point.

We ought to consider the case of the girl who wishes to be a “stay-at-home mom,” for instance. There is a strong narrative identity built up around mothering, particularly in certain culturally conservative bubbles. One reads of girls, in a certain conservative milieu, “training” for their future identities as (usually

Christian) wives and mothers. The tasks and skills associated with this role can be highly specialized. They might study household management, early childhood development, home finances, home organization and other similar subjects – either formally as homeschoolers or in their own time – in the service of this ambition.

It is not a professional identity that the girls of this example have in mind.

And yet it is a strong, coherent picture of a productive social role. It is suffused, often, with religious purpose. And it can structure real, engaged learning about socially important skills. Such a projected identity might cause an instructor to pause. But if the student can also demonstrate a reasonably employable skill while they wait to fulfill their ultimate aspiration of wifehood and motherhood, it seems to me wise to allow the student to pursue this identity, and to use it as a means to encourage serious study of househuld management and early childhood education.

Similarly, students are likely to foreground “impractical” pursuits such as theater or music, in their “projected identities.” In a future section about “ethical instructor intervention” I talk further about the ethical responsibility of instructors to ensure that a student can reasonably participate productively in society, without becoming a burden to said society. Quashing a student’s artistic identity – if that is what they have chosen to foreground in their life story – is not ethical. Ideally, the

student’s chosen artistic identity would be embraced, and used as a vector to foster personal discipline and emotional maturity. Supplementary economic skills for supplementary income might be suggested in an inoffensive, pragmatic manner to the student -- if the student’s artistic identity is otherwise affirmed.

In short, “projected identities” come in many shapes and sizes. More on the ethical considerations of this later.

Mechanisms for Ensuring Rigor

The difficulty of evaluation, and of ensuring rigor, in a student-led system such as the one proposed in this thesis surely occurs to readers. I will here offer some principles which could help guide the evaluation of such a curriculum.

The imposition of external standards – at least as we currently think of standards – does not accord with the heart of this thesis. To accord with the values previously espoused in this thesis, the value of a student’s curriculum must not be checked against external standards; but against its own internal logic. If a student claims that the “projected identity” which governs the creation of his curriculum is that of a good, Christian businessman, then his learning and his activities must demonstrate serious, focused pursuit of this goal. If he totally neglected business- related subjects in favor of theological subjects, his curriculum would not live up to its own internal standard.

The essence of evaluation in a student-led system is this: student ought to defend the worth of their learning from the inside, against internal criteria, based on their goals.

The evaluation method that harmonizes best with the vision of the curriculum espoused in this thesis is, I believe, portfolio assessment. Part of the

“authentic assessment” movement, portfolio assessment has long been a favored method of assessment in the arts and humanities (Janesick, 2006). Portfolios are simply collections of student work which are judged against some outside requirement or standard to evaluate for student mastery. Some portfolios contain

only a student’s “best” work; others are complete historical profiles of a student’s work. While portfolios are often fairly primitive in design and presentation, the essential idea of portfolio assessment – that is, demonstrating growth over time, has a great deal of influence on the proposed technologies in this thesis.

Instead of having all students prove proficiency in the same manner, through some sort of standardized test, a portfolio method of assessment instead calls for students to make the case – to demonstrate – the value of their learning; to prove how their work meets an external standard.

This idea of a student “making their case” for achievement of a standard through the presentation of a portfolio of projects, has clear tie-ins with narrative. A portfolio – and a student’s presentation of their portfolio -- can very naturally be reframed as a “narrative.”

Portfolio presentations and evaluations would be a key part of any system incorporating student-created curriculum. The already-compiled records of a student’s activities, gathered through the system, will provide excellent evidence for their case. Together with strong guidance from mentors as students set goals and projects for themselves, such a mechanism in the institution could help ensure the rigor of the curriculum, while remaining true to the values of “ownership” espoused by the same curriculum. An open-ended call to “demonstrate” proficiency in certain standards, with help from mentors to create work which meets those standards, is, in the opinion of this author, a more organic, authentic system, in which students still feel ownership and control over their learning.

Ethical Teacher Intervention

Instructors function, within this system, as guides; helping (along with recommendation algorithms) to recommend directions and materials to students along the creation of their curricula.

However, there are some ethical concerns a teacher might have about a student’s developing directions.

What if a teacher disapproves of a student’s future vision of himself?

Invalidating a student’s projected narrative identity, if it is deeply rooted in that student, is an ethically fraught action. First of all, there is the premise of this thesis that student autonomy to set goals as he or she sees fit, is of paramount ethical importance. To heavily impose on a student’s curriculum would be to violate this principle.

Furthermore, pragmatically, (and, incidentally, a justification for the principle of student autonomy), to invalidate the projected narrative identity which currently sustains and coheres a student’s pursuits, is to risk disillusioning the student.

Thus caution must be exercised. However, sometimes intervention could be necessary. For instance, if a student’s projected identity is something entirely unacceptable – a vigilante abortion clinic bomber or something – then instructors and other adults must surely intervene.

Most cases, of course, will be significantly less clear cut than that, and will have to do with an instructor’s concern that the student’s interests are not serious

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or realistic enough to come to fruition, and that the student will be unable to be a productive, supported, participating member of society. These worries are – for their ambiguity – the more difficult to administrate.

Outside of ethical concerns, instructors are apt to find a student’s ambitions unsuitable when they either:

a) Are founded on principles or philosophies which the instructor

finds objectionable for reasons that the instructor’s can reasonably

articulate (i.e., a secular feminist teacher might find a student’s

avowed desire to be a stay-at-home-mother so objectionable,) or,

b) Do not seem, to the instructor, adequate to support or sustain the

student as an independent or self-sufficient member of society.

c) And finally, the least noble of these reasons: does not conform to

the teacher’s unconscious or more inarticulable prejudices (i.e.,

the teacher cannot reasonably explain why this aim or goal is

objectionable, other than that it “is not done.”)

Clearly the latter reason for raising an objection is not acceptable. However, I

provide it as a contrast to (a). The main difference between (a) and (c) is

whether the instructor can make a reasonable case. Obviously whether or

not an instructor can make a reasonable case does not determine the

ultimate prudence of a student’s decision to invest in a particular direction.

However, it ought to guide whether or not an instructor vocalizes concern to

that student. Objections of this nature, if not easily worked out between

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student and teacher, might be referred to some kind of an institutional process. Institutional processes do not assure ethical outcomes. However, they signal that the institution takes the ethics of the decision therein decided very seriously. And meddling in a student’s curriculum based on moral disagreements is decidedly an ethically fraught action.

The second objection (b) is likely to be the more frequent sort of problem. While this thesis supports a reasonable amount of student freedom, it also seems clear that there is an ethical responsibility, on the part of a student’s educational system, to assure that the student is reasonably likely to be able to live as valued and productive citizens in the world, in their future lives. This seems the bare minimum of a school’s responsibility to its students.

What do we do with this individual? Or the individual whose chief

“projected identity” is something rather wild: perhaps they envision themselves as a spiritual guide and surfer, or something similarly frown- making amongst high school guidance counselors.

If an advisor sees that a student’s interests are so forming that they cannot sustain the student economically, and, furthermore, that the student has no plan to cultivate a sustaining skill set alongside this dominant curricular focus, then the advisor must, ethically, intervene.

Ethical intervention on this point, however, would constitute, in general, recommendations to supplement the student’s dominant interests

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with economically pragmatic skills; or recommendations of ways to turn the dominant interest into something economically pragmatic.

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Technologies to Facilitate Guidance, Instruction, and Collaboration in the Context of a Radically Individualized Curriculum

This thesis has already established itself in opposition to false ideals of self- creation which would privilege a hermetically-sealed autodidacticism. The use of the designator “self” in “self-creation” is meant to foreground the agency of the self in setting goals for learning. However, the “self” is emphatically not to be without help or stimulation from others. “Selves” are also social entities, as we’ve discussed in relation to Dewey.

As has been previously discussed, despite the focus on student agency in this vision of the curriculum, timely and individually-tailored guidance is also a crucial element to the same vision. Problems would surely ensue should students simply be left to their own devices to make goals, and to find and incorporate appropriate learning objects into their personal curricula. And one might wonder about the isolation of a radically individualized curriculum. In what ways would a student interact with mentors, teachers, and peers, in such a system?

In this section, I will briefly (and, due to certain limitations, shallowly) touch on some ways in which data mining technologies might be applied to the radically individualized curriculum, towards the purpose of matching students with uniquely appropriate guidance, instruction, and opportunities for collaboration.

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A Tension

At this point, there may appear to be a tension in this thesis between the radical individualisms previously discussed, and the simultaneously professed value of automated ‘guidance,’ and the very notion of ‘institutionalizing’ or ‘systematizing’ a curriculum at all, no matter how ‘adaptable.’

It is true that systematization or institutionalization necessarily creates the limits and the boundaries which Foucault notes are the enemy of a “pure” freedom.

The more complete freedom of a Summerhill or Sudbury School – or, better yet, a freewheeling autodidacticism – would clearly better serve the romantic, radical individualism previously discussed.

This proposed system, however, is not necessarily meant to be the ideal tool to serve such a radical individualism. Those souls who would seek the hardscrabble road to a romantic individualism, along the contours of that venerable romantic narrative, are necessarily ‘unhelpable’ – by the logic of that same narrative.

Rather, the proposed system has more pragmatic ends. It simply seeks to lower the threshold of effort necessary for individuals to exert meaningful and detailed control over the day-to-day conduction of their own educations, thus allowing more students to achieve, overall, a greater sense of agency and creative authority over their own educations, with less marginal effort.

Rarely have educational systems been totally impermeable to the motivated student with a goal in mind; but seldom have educational systems actually carved out institutional spaces for such extensive exertions of student self-direction. The

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barriers to exerting agency at such an atomic level in school now are quite high; therefore, only a few students of exceptionable motivation or self-awareness pursue education with such purpose and agency. However, with lowered barriers, and with actual institutionalized space for students to exert their own agency over their discrete learning experiences, a greater number of students could enjoy the psychological and practical benefits of increased agency and atomic choice in their own educations.

The aim of this system, then, is to democratize desirable aspects of the romantic individualism heretofore discussed.

I argue that the chief virtue of romantic individualism is secondary to the actual content of the concept – i.e., the actual inherent value of self-creation of a novel mode-of-life or character or what-have-you. I argue that the chief value of romantic individualism is, rather, aesthetic in nature. That is: that the narrative of having “created” or “struggled” or “exerted agency” brings a sense of narrative meaning or significance to the subject.

This is the psychological argument for institutionalizing “self-creation” in education: I hypothesize that it will increase the psychological benefits of a strongly articulated narrative self-concept across a broader portion of the population. The democratic extension of this reasonably hypothesized psychological benefit seems compassionate and ethically desirable.

The practical arguments in favor of the same are closely related to the psychological arguments. There is, first of all, the practical benefit of a population who are better matched to, and who have higher subjective attachment, to their self-

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chosen economic activities. The common wisdom is that people who are happier in their economic position or who more highly identify with their economic position would be more productive in that position.

A marginally more subjectively satisfied population is also, as the common wisdom goes, healthier and more peaceful – both objects which are ethically and pragmatically desirable.

Possibilities of Data Mining

The authors of a 2007 article lay out the scope of learning problems – in the field of education – to which data mining techniques have been applied (Castro,

Vellido, Nebot, & Mugica, 2007). They are:

 Students’ classification based on their learning performance  Detection of irregular learning behaviors  E-learning system navigation and interaction optimization  Clustering according to similar e-learning system usage  System’s adaptability to students’’ requirements and capacities

The growing ability to apply data mining techniques to educational problems is profoundly rich with opportunity. Work has been started; but much work has yet to be done.

I believe that a technology such as the one described in this thesis has unique possibilities for data mining.

Data collected regarding the ways in which students incorporate elements into their own, self-managed learning maps or pathways (through a fancy concept- map like user input they can access through an online portal or a desktop program)

– on a grand scale, across thousands of users – would be an invaluable resource for

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researchers in education. Themes and patterns that emerge could not only inform learning theory, but – even before they are fully understood – could help form the basis of a universal educational recommendation system.

A great deal of education involves continuous exposure to a range of materials that a student might “find congruence” in. Such exposures are always in search of those one or two subjects which might ultimately gather critical mass and grow into the focuses – the great big branches -- of their particular “narratives” or

“learning pathways.”

A universal learning-object recommendation system with the critical number of users would be infinitely experienced and “wise”. Not even the most artful of teachers could recommend just the “right” learning object at just the “right” time as well as an infinitely experienced virtual recommender, which acts on the double strength of: a) data accumulated about the interest trajectories of more learners than any single teacher could ever interact with in a career, and on b) nearly universal ‘knowledge’ of all extant learning objects and learning resources, and of the ways in which they have been fruitfully combined or sequenced.

Profiling and Advising Students Based on Data

Learner profiles are increasingly discussed in the instructional design community. Many learning profiles, at the moment, predominantly deal with targeting specific students with complementary pedagogical methods. This is a very interesting innovation with many interesting applications. However, once again, this thesis is interested in harnessing technologies not towards pedagogical aims, 108

but towards the greater involvement of students in setting their own educational aims, towards a greater sense of ownership and an empowering narrative framing education as “self-creation.”

Learner profiles within this system, then, would strive to be reflections of student’s self-projected identities. As a students’ learning map, chosen materials, and self-articulated goals and projected identities evolve in any given direction, so will the learner profile.

Again, the novel suggestion embedded in this vision of a learner profile is that we look beyond what tests and batteries tell us about students who are passively subjected to them -- although these are the usual informers of current learner profiles. This vision of the learner profile suggests that we give serious weight to student-generated self-reflection (input into a learning map is certainly a highly reflective enterprise) and student-generated projected goals and identities – in keeping with the philosophy undergirding this thesis.

An electronically managed learner profile has many distinct advantages. For a teacher or tutor or guidance counselor to minutely monitor the evolving interests and activities of a classroom of students would be nearly impossible. Yet an electronic learner profile created through mining student input could easily and continuously incorporate huge amounts of data about a student’s path of interest – making it expertly informed and highly perceptive of new developments.

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Learner profiles which are profoundly informed by evolving student self- narratives can lead to a system of educational guidance which accords with a philosophy of education that frames education as self-creation.

Matching Students with Learning Objects of Various Kinds

The most potent and relevant application of the web to this thesis’s project is that it enables us to build greatly searchable, highly complex, and widely accessible databases. The two most important types of databases for realizing this project are: a database of information about students, and a database of carefully categorized curricular resources for incorporation into individual learning maps. Together, these to sets of data form the beginnings of a powerfully personal automated guidance or recommendation system.

I will now speak a little bit about how data accumulated on student behavior within the system (materials interacted with, how materials were incorporated into the student’s learning map by the student, and goals), can help form the basis of a recommender system.

The first category of items a guidance system informed by learner profiles might recommend is the most obvious, and has also been previously discussed.

Traditional “learning objects” such as texts, recorded lectures, and learning environments might be cataloged online and retrieved for use by a student independently, at any time.

As Hodgins recommends, learning objects would be categorized on a variety of dimensions, including subject matter, difficulty, and “approach” or “philosophy.”

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Importantly, further metadata per learning object would be defined not from the outset, but through data mining – that is, through “observing” the demonstrated ways in which the system observes users incorporating these learning objects into their own learning maps/learning pathways.

Learners would be matched with suggestions for potential learning objects to incorporate into their learning maps by means of an algorithm with multiple inputs including the following:

 Incorporation of the object by other learners with similar learning profiles to the user  Assigned membership of a learning object to a category set by a knowledgeable domain specialist

A danger of this function would be “ghettoizing” a student to one particular type of subject matter. Ideally, such a “recommending” function would have elements of calculated risk taking, in which it would recommend a student a new, diverse material, for the sake of exposure. And then, of course, it would gauge student responsiveness.

Matching Students with Instructors

Again, “self-creation” does not mean an absence of community or guidance – or else a learning management system intended to aid in “self-creation” would indeed be at odds with its own philosophy. However, there is likely such a thing as guidance and instruction which optimizes a students’ “self-creation.”

Well-matched tutors or advisors are an important part of this equation.

Anecdotally, we can all think of some teachers who were more effective, in our

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educations, than others – due to such externalities as how complementary were our personalities, or how similar our outlooks or approaches or goals in life.

Tutors are, broadly construed, a kind of “learning object.” A tutor might be in or out of a learner’s life as soon as the valuable interaction or pedagogy is received from them. Being highly skilled and knowledgeable about a certain subject matter is likely more important from the standpoint of matching a student to their ideal tutor for any given subject.

Mentors and advisors are perhaps rather more than learning objects. They are less interchangeable, and less briefly involved in a student’s life. A mentor or advisor, in such a system as proposed in this thesis, would be responsible for reviewing a student’s record of evolving curriculum, analyzing it prudently, and encouraging student’s towards specific goals or to continue investing in certain pursuits over others.

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Learning Groups and Matching with Similarly-Minded Peers

Several problems – quickly reframed as opportunities! – arise from a system of education in which individual interest and individual learning pathways or trajectories are foregrounded. The aspect of community in learning – and the important elements of collaboration and social identity on self-creation – might seem difficult to salvage, in such a system. However, on the contrary, the same technologies which make profoundly individualized curricula such as these possible, also create opportunities for new visions of student socialization and collaboration within educational settings.

Instead of a learner paradigm where students of entirely disparate interests and learner trajectories are perpetually grouped together based on geographic necessity, and schooled simultaneously for convenience, an education such as the one in this system could allow for more “spontaneous” and “freely arising” associations of students. Imagine – in a system of thousands of learners – that for a moment in time, several students from disparate geographic locations converge upon similar goals or similar learning materials. These students comprise a

“natural” learning community – a group of learners all organically interested in the same thing at the same time. Their paths to and from this spot might either be convergent or divergent; but in that moment, they are a “natural” learning community. With a technology such as this, these students could all serendipitously be informed of each other’s shared interest, and have the potential to voluntarily form a temporary learning community, founded on common interest or common

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aim. For a moment, their separate programs of “self-creation” converge, and they can all help each other. Already we see these kinds of learning communities in the form of special-interest forums and chat-boards on the internet. However, managed by a central system as this, even more specific and more timely associations could spontaneously arise, simply by virtue of informing students of the existence of others concurrently interested in the same learning object or pursuing similar goals to themselves.

The web has famously enabled communities of hobbyists and groups of people with special interests to converge and discuss. Highly specific pursuits that once might alienate a person can now connect them with the few other people in the world who share their unique interests.

This opportunity of voluntary, instant associations with students of similar goals or interests, as a complementary element in a program of “self-creation, brings

Dewey’s “ethical postulate” once again to mind:

In the realization of individuality there is found also the needed realization of some community of persons of which the individual is a member; and conversely, the agent who duly satisfies the community in which he shares, by that same conduct satisfies himself (Dewey, 1891, quoted in Garrison, 1998).

Dewey’s “new individualism” is situated within collaborative environments or communities.

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Conclusion

In this thesis, I have discussed the motivating narrative of “self-creation,” and its potential application to education.

I also hypothesized that by lowering the barriers for individuals to participate in education as an act of “self-creation” – that is, by institutionalizing student choice and student goal-setting in the curriculum, through various technologies previously described – we might allow more students to participate in the powerful narrative of “self-creation.” Furthermore, it was claimed that conceiving of the curriculum as a narrative satisfies some important constructivist principles for learning: continuity of experience, and also purpose for learning within a context.

On top of these things, I suggested that tracking, recording, and measuring the evolution of an education, with the aid of a tool to map accordingly, would be enormously beneficial towards student guidance. A record of a student’s evolving interests and goals might provide invaluable information -- both for the student and mentor/teacher of a student. Such a rich intellectual history can yield greater self- knowledge and wields some predictive power over future likely methods and areas for success.

Viewing education as the process of exploring and authoring identities – social identity, economic identity, intellectual identity – frames learning powerfully within a narrative of “self-creation”, and brings purpose and meaning to the enterprise of education. Introducing a tool and a system which allows students to

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feel this sense of education-as-authorship could bring these benefits to a broader audience than ever before.

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