Is Hybrid Education a New School Paradigm?

John Goodlad in A Place Called School observed that “Schools differ; schooling everywhere is very much the same” (p. 264). There are probably many reasons to account for that observation, but one reason is likely that we have a massive, dominant understanding of what school is supposed to look like. At the risk of oversimplifying the idea, that dominant way of thinking could be called a paradigm, a word Thomas Kuhn used in 1962 to describe why certain scientific theories hold sway and how they are replaced. Think astronomy before Galileo or physics before Newton. or weather forecasting before satellites. Paradigms are powerful because they almost force us to make sense in predictable ways of things we see. Paradigms determine what we are allowed to ask and what the answers can be. We would not think, for example, that a thunderstorm was the result of someone melting beeswax, which is what the Andaman Islanders reasonably thought given the weather paradigm through which they viewed the world. You can try this yourself the next time you are in a school for the first time. You can also test this idea by telling someone about CVCS, for the surprise you hear refers to the paradigm used to make sense of what school should be.

Another paradigm we use to make sense of schooling is home schooling, which has been around since the beginning of education in the US (see, for example, Edward McClellan’s Moral Education in America) The Illinois Supreme officially sanctioned home schooling in the 1950 case People v. Levisen, which held that the “object [of compulsory attendance laws] is that all shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular manner or place” and thereby established home school as a private school in the eyes of the law. Setting the legal equivalence aside, in the US, children are school in school or at home.

It is difficult to create a new paradigm of education. No Child Left Behind has made a significant impact on schooling, but it has not created a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense of the term. Computers and technology have changed many aspects of our lives, but even schools that are technology rich are for the most part paradigmatically the same as they were when chalkboards were the great technological advance. When you tell someone about CVCS, the two major paradigms of education, the brick and mortar school and home school, shape how people make sense of what you are saying. I have even heard people in the CVCS community struggle to describe how we do school. That’s because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to step outside a paradigm to see the world differently.

According to Kuhn, the impetus for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs when science, or what is accepted as true science, cannot account for all the facts scientists encounter. Likewise if less dramatically, the two paradigms of brick and mortar schooling and home schooling cannot account for all aspects of hybrid education. We are not a brick and mortar school, yet students attend a school building and encounter a school-based curriculum and teachers who teach and assess. We are not a home school, but there are certain aspects of what we do that can be found in home schooling, namely the involvement of parents in students’ education. Is a new paradigm of education emerging? Maybe. If hybrid education is part of one paradigm and part of another, does that provide sufficient cause to make it a new paradigm? No, but the question of paradigm shift remains.

As a faculty, we have been wrestling with this paradigm issue, but not as a question of paradigm shift. Nor are we approaching it by asking what educational practices constitute a hybrid education. Any hybrid school will have a collection of educational practices that separate it from a brick and mortar school or home school, but defining what a hybrid school does is more than writing down a collection of educational practices. Moreover, approaching the question that way would require us to start within the two current paradigms of education, which means hybrid school would simply be a mixture of those two and not something different. Rather, we are approaching the question of hybrid education by asking what virtues such an education promotes. I mean virtues in the Aristotelian sense, where the purpose of anything is a matter of determining the virtues that thing fosters, rewards, and honors. For Aristotle, before understanding what the ideal constitution for a polis should be, one had to know what purpose the polis served, and the only way to understand purpose is to understand the kind of citizens the polis wanted to create. In our case, we seek to articulate not only what kind of students we want to graduate from CVCS but what kind of faculty we want to become, for it the question of virtue includes both students and faculty.

We are having dialogue all across CVCS about what the purpose of hybrid education and the values we think it should represent. Teachers are working in their departments, led by their teacher representatives, to articulate our shared hybrid education values. Teachers also have the opportunity to contribute directly to the conversation through posts to administration. Administration will meet with teacher representatives to discuss what the dialogue tells us, and then we will take that to the whole faculty and staff to give final shape to hybrid schooling values and the academic, social, and civic virtues we want to promote in ourselves and in our students. Then I will present to the CVCS Board the instructional design that will best allow those values to flourish.

I invite you to become part of this dialog.