SabuSense

This Sabusense website is a product of the mind of Seymour Sarason who died on January 28th this year. His way-of-thinking and his “Martian” metaphor frames and generated the knowledge it now embeds.

In “The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change’’ (1971) Sarason spoke through a Martian hovering 20,000 feet above a school who couldn’t understand what the creatures below him were saying, and therefore tried to understand what was going on just by observing their regular actions. It’s purpose: to raise questions for the reader about why people would do things like that… and then regularly continue to do them?

If you’ve explored the What, Why, and How on this site’s home page you know that it documents the story of the continuing transformation of a major US school district observed through a similar 20,000 foot lens that also served to raise important “Why” questions, and then focuses in on how they were being effectively answered in ways that outside observers sometimes called “miracles,” but couldn’t quite understand.

• Now, as I reflect on the almost 4 decades since reading his book, and my subsequent interactions with him (back on the ground), it confirms the major role that Sarason played as mental-model or paradigm-shifter for me. He offered a way to see and think about the world in which I wanted to make a difference. This different way-of-making sense made it possible for me to ask different questions and see the possibilities their answers revealed.

And I wasn’t alone. In October 2000, at a Washington DC conference, Rod Paige, then Houston superintendent and soon to become Secretary of Education, told me that Sarason’s “The Culture of the School…” and its Martian also had been one of his seminal learning experiences.

Then, as I read an EdWeek Commentary (February 24, 2010), Celebrating Seymour Sarason, by Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, & Ann Lieberman describing his influence on their lives, I realized why their ideas and writings have appealed to me over the years.  Thanks to Sarason, we had an embedded “map” and were looking at the “same world.”

• Reflecting on his influence this week, I dug through our correspondence and notes from our meetings over the past 11 years, (which I’ll soon store on this site as “Seymour Sarason and our Martian Chronicles” on the chance that a grad student someday might find something research-worthy.)

Among the memories they’ve helped me re-live:

– Finding a foundation that would have the understanding to support his presentation to the 1999 AASA convention about his prescient perception that Charter schools were, and still are, “another failed (systemic) reform.”

– His reaction when I told him about the role I had taken on as Martian in the major school system whose experiences this site explores.

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“8/17/2000

Dear “Martian”

If your experience meant much to you, so does your letter to me. It’s good to know that I am not alone in outer space!

A book of mine is coming out next spring fro TC Press – Title: American Psychology and Schools – A Critique. In it are two long chapters on Columbine High School as viewed by a Martian. Obviously, you and I this past year were fellow Martians.

I truly got a kick and an uplift from your letter. I am doing O.K. The educational scene still depresses me, which is why I so appreciated your letter. If you ever write up your experience, please send me a copy.

Warmest regards,’

Sy”

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—    And frequently we shared frustrations generated by the reality of a “depressing” educational scene that from “20,000 Feet” didn’t make sense.

Later, I would characterize this frustration as a perceptual “curse”– (See Copernicus’ Curse and Galileo’s Pain. This is what it feels like when you see the “reality” that generates a “theory”… and regardless of what others say about that theory… you unfortunately no longer can “unsee” it.

My own example, expressed in a 1999 note about the “enemy” created by “The Common Sense of Common Practice,” ended with:

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… “I could go on, Seymour… but I won’t. This much has provided an outlet for some of my frustration and I appreciate your reading it. I realize however that I’m being driven not just by the frustration of Copernicus, who only provided a different worldview map, but of a NASA that realizes we have sufficient knowledge, people, and technologies to actually get where we want to go. But without the “map” of reality, people can’t see how it “makes sense.”

….“My recent experiences with the Charter Schools Scaffolding process strategy I developed has only increased this frustration. [I think I sent you an early draft – Scaffolding Sustained School System Change.]

Maybe R.D. Laing better captured my “problem” and in fewer words when he wrote:

Noticing

The range of what we think and do

is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice

that we fail to notice

there is little we can do

to change

until we notice

how failing to notice

shapes our thoughts and deeds.

… Where’s your damn Martian, now that I need him?”

****

—   Now, 11 years later because of the time I’ve spent on the ground using that Martian’s lens to illuminate the practical truths made visible by his ways-of-thinking, my frustration has compounded.

This is evident in this site’s last posting which explored the question of why the Harvard Business School, and not it’s Graduate School of Education, studied the school district this site focuses on, and then published a book that led the Washington Post in a front page article to claim that
it “… presents … Montgomery as a model for other school districts to follow.”

(In the Tangled Jungle of School Reform Harvard… and Sabu
Find a “Classroom” Teaching Different Lessons)

Again, Seymour had suggested why. Ten years earlier he had noted that while psychological and educational theorists focused on individual behavior, business schools address “organizational behavior that dealt with structure and dynamics (when, why changes do or do not occur and with what consequences.”  They were “asking the right questions,” he felt, “important questions with significances, theoretical and practical,” for education and psychology.”

But without a way of understanding the complementarity of organizational and individual behavior, (see The Quantum Paradox) he noted there was an ”unverbalized assumption that schools had no organizational-behavioral similarities to corporations or any other complicated, non-educational institutions. (but he maintained accurately)…Schools are not unique organizations.”

•    So Sy…. thanks (as Fullan, Hargreaves and Lieberman also concluded) for “opening our minds, emboldened our actions, and challenged our souls…”

BUT, I repeat…

….Where’s your damn Martian, now that WE ALL need him?”

Lew