Soft Skills?

“What we’re moving toward,” Horn says, “is the realization that if our expectation is to educate every single child successfully, then we need structures that can individualize and personalize, and there’s no way to do it in the way we have historically approached this.” (Davis)

We need options.  It seems that digital access offers learners the freedom and resources they need to maximize their learning potential.  But, what about those among us for whom the digital age symbolizes a loss of the tactile and a disconnect with the real world around us? 

Aside from the reams of information and entertainment offered by Internet access, the increasingly sedentary lifestyle partly attributable to our global addiction to the screen – what about the learner who just doesn’t connect with computers?  What about the notion of Nature Deficit Disorder?  What about all of the research and writing that went into books like Nabhan and Trimble’s The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, Richard Louv’s Lost Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder or Kahn and Kelhert’s Children and Nature.  Add critiques of our techno dependence like Neil Postman’s Technolopy: The Surrender of Culture to Technology and we are struck with a serious conundrum. 

Should our schools be incorporating more or less digital media? 

Students need digital access and some need more face time and others need time to go home and work in isolation.  This has been well known and applied in a variety of ways since Gardner's multiple intelligences came along thirty years ago.

But what about these other aspects?  MOOC's and e-learning and workstations are fantastic but what happened to that notion of educating the 'whole child', a catchphrase so popular during the 90's?

The NexGen ultimate tour is now complete and it is worth taking another look at their model of expedition education, if only as a reminder of the soft values that the digital age can easily overlook.

Interviewed after their fifteenth and last game, George Stubbs captures the elusive nature of goal-setting.  

 

NexGen vs Sub Zero - Post Game with George Stubbs from NexGen Ultimate on Vimeo.

Clearly education happened, yet the goals from the outset were murky. 

"How is this being paid for? How’s the bus going to work?  What are the details?  At some point I just sort of trusted him, and I think that’s what everyone did."

The NexGen team begain their tour 3 - 6 and finished 8 - 7.  They evolved as a team and through travel, challenging themselves by raising expections, through peer teaching they ended the tour not only better ultimate players, but as Stubbs says, "better people".  

"We’ve made lifelong friends, we’ve all become better ultimate players…we’re all thrilled with it and I think every single person on the tour would say the same thing."

"None of us knew what exactly to expect other than that it was going to be a ton of fun and that’s exactly what it was.  We’re all better people for it."

Stubbs has difficulty articulating his growth over the month.  It can by mystifying to clearly establish the learning goals and assessment of 'personal growth'.  Surely, leadership skills and co-operation were fundamental.  

In many ways NexGen reminds us of the importance of experiences like residential summer camps and outdoor centres.  Camp Wenonah near Bracebridge, Ontario whose mission statement, "Providing opportunities that develop a healthy respect and appreciation for one's self and others and for the natural world", admonishes us not to neglect those soft skills that remain crucial, even within the educational shift brought on by the digital age.