#ECOOcampON 2020 Virtual Conference Reflections

ECOOcamp Ontario happened in Peterborough last year and was the usual mix of keen people getting together to improve their technical skills and launch another year of teaching in an avant garde style. Had you asked anyone there what the summer of 2020’s ECOOcamp would look like, a virtual online conference during a pandemic wouldn’t have been the obvious guess, but ECOO managed to pull off #ECOOcampON, a virtual conference using tech most people hadn’t used before, with astonishing fidelity.

As you’d expect there were technical issues, but what ECOO does a good job of spreading is the idea that teachers can become digitally fluent enough to resolve these problems themselves. Early on link issues stopped the conference in its tracks, but the tech-savvy educators running the event iterated at high speed through troubleshooting and within twenty minutes everything was back on track again.

Digital fluency has been cast in a stark light this year with Ontario’s sudden move to emergency remote learning, so you’d think that more educators have technical proficiency at front of mind as the first school year in a century kicks off in an ongoing pandemic. ECOOcampON managed over 500 registrations this summer, which goes to show you just how resilient some Ontario educators can be in trying to get literate teaching in a still new(ish) digital medium, though only 0.3% of teachers attended in Ontario and I’d guess that 70% of them need it. In a better world this conference would have drawn over one hundred thousand educators looking to raise their digital fluency in order to prepare for the inevitable next round of remote teaching.

What follows are some personal reflections prompted by the event.

Krista Sarginson and I presented on CyberTitan, the Canadian Student Cybersecurity Competition on the first day of the conference. Krista’s CyberLions rocked a 2nd place finish in the middle school division in her first year coaching in 2019. I’d been looking for a brave teacher to leap into this and help me advocate for it. Krista is fierce and fearless and did a great job encouraging other elementary panelists to consider giving it a try.

Secondary teachers tend to be more reticent about participating in things they can’t show intellectual dominance in. I’m hoping that Krista’s influence engages more elementary Ontario teachers in participating in this competition. It’s a great way to raise awareness around information security and opens up an entire industry to students who might otherwise have no idea it exists. It’s a tough year to encourage extracurriculars, but something like CyberTitan could become the basis for a cybersecurity course, which is something Ontario is way behind the curve on. Here’s our presentation if you’re curious:

The round table discussion that night talked about resilience and how we frame challenges. This past year seems like almost infinite challenges. From a vindictive government intent on attacking our profession and diminishing public education to a worldwide pandemic, it’s been a burning dumpster fire of a year for educators in Ontario, with no end in site. The new mix is the vindictive government using the pandemic to physically threaten staff and students. It’s not understatement to say that I’ve never seen colleagues so scared and uncertain about teaching in a few weeks. How can we be in poorly ventilated classrooms that ignore the rules we’ve been told to follow for the past six months and feel safe? Our doughty premier is frustrated at the response (usually framed as an attack on unions), but no other front line workers are being forced to ignore public health rules in their workplaces.

In this context I found the roundtable discussion difficult to navigate, though they gave it a good try. One of the speakers was a big fan of nature, but it was a romanticized view of nature where people should just find themselves at their ease in natural surroundings. That park-setting idea of nature is very much dependent on a manicured and managed environment. I love being out in nature, but I enjoy it because it’s relentless in its expectations of competence. Being happy in nature is as simple as not being hungry or cold, or avoiding being eaten. Few people have been face to face with that kind of nature.

Disney’s romanticized version of nature,
in reality this is a great way to get rabies.

Austin Vince has a documentary on riding into the Sahara Desert called Mondo Sahara. In it he talks to an off-road expert who has spent a lot of time in the deep desert. He makes a clear distinction on what your focus should be: always make sure you’re dictating what is happening because the moment the desert is in charge things fall apart quickly.

Survival training was like that too, especially the winter stuff. Our instructors were insistent on the exhausting job of managing cold and wet to ward off the ever present fear of hypothermia. Nature isn’t only beautiful, it’s also so immersive and demanding that you can quite easily drown in it. Most people have never been in a survival situation like that. Society does everything it can to ensure you don’t have to keep yourself alive in nature, it’ll do it for you – usually while killing nature in the process. If most people got driven into the wilderness and dropped off they’d be dead in a week. That is terribly beautiful, but that isn’t how nature was presented. Being demanding is what makes nature teach resilience, but we try and weed harsh lessons like that out of education wherever we can.

I’ve recently had trouble with how our return to face to face classrooms was being framed. We were initially told that relationships are all that matter and that we shouldn’t even worry about curriculum. There is a place where that is the case, it’s a daycare centre, but I didn’t go through the long and difficult task of becoming a teacher so I could provide daycare. Yet in the greatest social crisis we’ve seen in recent years, instead of focusing on being resilient and holding everyone to higher standards, the reflex is to do whatever it takes to make people more comfortable. You can learn a lot by being uncomfortable. A good place to realize that is in nature.

The other side of the roundtable focused on happiness, which is much more complicated because we’re more than happy to destroy nature just to ensure our own short-term comfort, future generations be damned. If we want to consider nature it’s as a form of entertainment. Living in nature is nasty, brutish and short, to paraphrase Hobbes, and too much like hard work unless you think nature is pulling your RV into a campground. Look no further than our response to COVID19 (which is nature at work). We’ve actually slew footed our own self-serving, cancerous economic system just to keep as many humans alive as we can, yet even during a world wide health emergency we’re still adding the populations of Guelph AND North Bay to the planet every single day, while stopping economies to keep everyone alive for as long as we can. Everything we do with technology, economics and society are contrary to nature, so holding it up as a solution seems a bit disingenuous. It doesn’t matter though, nature will sort things out soon enough. If we’re too stupid and selfish to be on the right side of that it won’t matter because ultimately what we think doesn’t matter.

The happiness side of the discussion was enlightening. The question of what is happiness is a surprisingly complicated one. I was chasing it in an online psych course from Yale earlier this year called The Science of Well Being. For many people happiness is doing as little as possible, but I’m all about agency (your ability to act). When that is cut away from me I become very frustrated. The best leaders I’ve had recognise that I’m a self starter who wants to act and provide a framework that directs me into doing what they need to get done. The vast majority of leaders I’ve had are frustrated by my inability to stand in line waiting to be handed the same work as someone who doesn’t want to do anything at all. During the pandemic this everyone-do-less approach has been strangling me. Most of the managers I’ve had in Ontario education are of the lesser variety who want to cookie cutter everyone into undifferentiated jobs. I’d hoped being a professional in a recognized field would bypass that, but Ontario education is remarkably juvenile in how it directs its employees.

If you’ve ever seen Saving Private Ryan, I’m a Tom Hanks kinda guy: I don’t care if the work’s difficult, but I need the people in charge to recognize that with a bit of latitude I can get things done that others cannot. Most organizations’ inability to differentiate their duties for employees is why I often have problems with organizational structure. The people who maintain that structure very much identify their own self worth through it, and I frequently come into conflict with them as a result. Give me a big, difficult job and the latitude to attack it and that’s happiness for me. It’s why I’ve never been on a cruise or to an all-inclusive resort, it’s my idea of hell. That understanding was a great metacognitive reflection that ECOOcampON provided for me at the end of day one.

I attended a number of sessions ranging from equity to media literacy around the credibility of sources, and found them rich and helpful in framing this year’s difficulties, but it was the closing keynote that closed the circle for me. Daniel Lewis is a successful entrepreneur who struggled in the education system and overcame a number of personal hardships to find success. He is inspirational by nature, and I enjoyed his relentless positivity, though I’m often cautious with optimism because it can be used to overly simplify a difficult situation. When someone says, “you got this” in terms of going back to school it feels an attempt to ignore the difficulties.

Daniel didn’t take that approach though. He emphasized the power of your own thinking; self determination was the underlying message. Even if you’re in a broken, leaderless system staggering under absurd political machinations, you are still free to think what you want to think. There is power in that kind of stoicism, especially in tough times.

There was a lot of talk about getting out of the box in terms of thinking without being restricted by the people and systems around you, which aligned well with the keynote’s theme (though it contrasted with the resiliency and happiness roundtable from the beginning).

I’m always cautious around entrepreneurial pep talks. Business has a way of turning that optimism and relentless enthusiasm into sales. In this case it was the idea that once you free yourself of the boxes other people have put your thinking in, YOU then get to make the boxes. I took that to mean for other people. Why would you want to make a box to limit your own thinking?

Perhaps I’m odd in that I educate to empower, so breaking out of the box aligns with that, but the last thing I’d want people to do with that freedom is start boxing in other people, but that’s society. I was troubled by the idea that the moment we free our minds we look to use that freedom to enslave others, but maybe that’s just how people work. Freeing people doesn’t guarantee happiness in any case.

Boxes aside, it was an engaging and uplifting closing keynote to a remarkably resonant ECOO Conference. We are free in our own minds regardless of how tightly our struggling school system ties us, and there is comfort in that. If you’re able to free your mind from the fear and uncertainty you can grasp your own agency and get things done. The pandemic has deeply wounded everyone’s agency, so Daniel’s stoic message resonated well, though I’m still troubled by the reflexive need to box people.

If you bounce over to the ECOOcampON webpage, you’ll find links to all the presentations. I think they’re also wrangling the recordings of all the presentations together so you can view what you might have missed. I’ve always found ECOO’s model of teachers directing their own PD to be both engaging and effective. When I compare it to professional development that’s mandated and thrown at me, this feels much more valuable, but that’s probably because I use my own agency to create and participate in it. There is a distinctinction in there somewhere around passive and active learning that anyone interested in pedagogy should be considering, especially in a world where a passive-do-nothing approach is now a governmental demand.

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I”ve been reading a lot of Tao Te Ching this week. It offers me some perspective when the walls feel like they’re closing in.

Tao is empty (like a bowl). It may be used but its capacity is never exhausted

It is bottomless, perhaps the ancestor of all things.

It blunts its sharpness. It unties its tangles. It softens its light. It becomes one with the dusty world.

Deep and still, it appears to exist forever.

I do not know whose son it is. It seems to have existed before the Lord.

Heaven is eternal and Earth everlasting.

They can be eternal and everlasting because they do not exist for themselves, And for this reason can exist forever.

Therefore the sage places himself in the background but finds himself in the foreground.

He puts himself away, and yet he always remains.

Is it not because he has no personal interests? This is the reason why his personal interests are fulfilled.