Phil Busse invited me to lead a class at the Northwest Institute for Social Change yesterday, and I began by asking the budding film and audio documentarians to introduce themselves from a perspective of 5 years from now, and to tell us what they've been working on.
It was powerful to listen to these young people narrate their own stories from the future, to use imagination and play to envision their own growth and development.
"My name is Eli," one of the students began, "and I graduated from college, and then I got my graduate degree, and my dissertation on the state of the American Educational System got noticed by the Obama administration, and they hired me to work for them.
"For his second administration. Because he was re-elected, of course."
"What did they notice about your dissertation?" I asked. "What insights of yours made an impression on them?"
"That we'll never develop one model of success for education. That all students learn differently, and therefore we need to develop different models."
Powerful exercise. I had no trouble imagining that the students would accomplish everything they described, and then some. If you try it, let me know how it goes.