The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy.
By design this model emphasizes the role of play, diverse digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence between communities and schools.
The attempted personalization of learning occurs through new actuators and new notions of local and global citizenship. An Inside-Out School returns the learners, learning, and ‘accountability’ away from academia and back to communities. No longer do schools teach. Rather, they act as curators of resources and learning tools and promote the shift of the ‘burden’ of learning back to a more balanced perspective of stakeholders and participants.
Here, families, business leaders, humanities-based organizations, neighbors, mentors, and higher-education institutions all converging to witness, revere, respond to and support the learning of its own community members.
The micro-effect here is increased intellectual intimacy, while the macro-effect is healthier communities and citizenship that extends beyond mere participation, to ideas of thinking, scale, legacy, and growth.
Products, simulation performance, self-knowledge delegate academia to a new role of refinement of thought
8. Thought & Abstraction
In this model, struggle and abstraction are expected outcomes of increasing complexity & real-world uncertainty
This uncertainty is honored, and complexity and cognitive patience are constantly modeled and revered
Abstraction honors not just art, philosophy, and other humanities, but the uncertain, incomplete, and subjective nature of knowledge
9. Expanding Literacies
Analyzes, evaluates, and synthesizes credible information
Critical survey of the interdependence of media and thought
Consumption of constantly evolving media forms
Media design for authentic purposes
Self-monitored sources of digital & non-digital data
Artistic and useful content curation patterns
The Inside-Out Learning Model Central Learning Theories & Artifacts: Situational Learning Theory (Lave), Discovery Learning (Bruner), Communal Constructivism (Holmes), Zone of Proximal Development & More Knowledgeable Other (Vygotsky), Learning Cycle (Kolb), Transfer (Thorndike, Perkins, Wiggins), Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick), Paulo Freire, and the complete body of work by Wendell Berry