Passion-based Learning and School Culture

Change the culture and user experience of schools. Culture doesn’t come from a box. It’s not proprietary and rented from a corporation. Culture doesn’t have someone else’s trademark on it. Culture isn’t posters and word images.  Culture must be made from within with grassroots involvement.

Create a culture of neurodiverse teams of passion-based learners using technology to communicate, collaborate, iterate, and launch to authentic audiences of fellow humans. Tech won’t find its place in education until self-directed, passion-based inclusion replaces the lecture and deficit models.

Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are powerful artifacts of the disruptive rise of software. They are life and industry changing. When informed with neurodiversity and the social model of disability in an open by default culture, they are a future for education and work where we collaborate and iterate our way through massive software-driven change. We will navigate disruption with compassion, finding opportunity and inspiration in the diversity of our shared humanity. We are humans making things for and with other humans, helping each other cope with sentience and senescence on our pale blue dot. Communicate, collaborate, iterate, launch. With these tools we’ll make it through.

There is thoughtlessness all around us, in all human systems. In this thoughtlessness is opportunity. Engage learners in designing for real life. Start by designing a shared, grassroots culture together with students.

Culture can be the foundation for all future innovation, or it can be the single biggest resistance to innovation. Don’t fuck up culture.

A great fallacy born from the failure to study culture is the assumption that you can take a practice from one culture and simply jam it into another and expect similar results. Much of what bad managers do is assume their job is simply to find new things to jam and new places to jam them into, without ever believing they need to understand how the system—the system of people known as culture—works.

Source: Why Culture Always Wins

Culture always wins over tools and technologies, but most of the business world is tone deaf to understanding culture.

Source: FAQ about The Year Without Pants (with satisfying answers)

Source: 2016 Year Review