Legacy reply -- first of tw
Brian Drayton (Brian_Drayton@terc.edu <Brian_Drayton@terc.edu>)
1 Feb 1996 09:35:41 -0400
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TEECH "LEAVING A LEGACY: Sustaining a Project After the Funding Ends"
Sent by: "Brian Drayton" <Brian_Drayton@TERC.EDU <Brian_Drayton@TERC.EDU>>
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Legacy reply -- first of two parts
Thoughts on "what happens after the project ends"
I have two kinds of questions for this topic, and I will therefore send a
two-piece message. Here is the strategic message; the other one will be
much more down-to-earth and tactical:
There are several different kinds of projects represented in this discussion
group, and small, locally-based projects differ in some important ways from
projects designed to work on a larger scale. The projects I have worked on
from TERC have mostly been of the second type, so that is the general context
from which I come. When I say "we" in what follows, put the shoe on if it
fits!
As I have said before in the "after the workshop ends" disussion, much TE
work has been done within a paradigm that assumes that TE work is to be
`outsourced' to experts or at least facilitators of some kind. These
benevolent people perform a complex action, which includes diagnosis,
analysis, and prescription, including sometimes follow-on nursing or
convalescent care, as the teachers who have been enhanced do the work of
incorporating their enhancement into their work. At some point, the contact
with the original program is sufficiently attenuated that the project and its
aftermaths are "over" leaving behind a residue of (literally) incalculable
size and quality.
It seem to me that if we continue in that paradigm, we cannot help but have
the kinds of problems about "what to do when the project ends." This problem
causes different kinds of discomfort for the enhancers than for the enhanced.
For the enhancers, in addition to any attachment we may have to the concepts
or participants in our projects, there is the nagging sense (articulated so
very well by people like Seymour Sarason) that we are not even holding our
own against a real but ill-defined enemy, which is not _people_ but _the way
people are interacting systematically in relation to education_.
I do not want to ramble on. I believe that the hundreds of excellent people
doing TE have found many ingenious responses to the question "What happens
after the project ends," and I am learning a lot from reading about them
over the past few months. Still, I want to ask now, what other paradigms can
we propagate among TE people themselves which might avoid this problem which
to me feels like an artifact of the system?
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