"Wide Boundary" Learning and Schooling
Provocation #23: Because the "answer" or the "solution" aren't the most important thing right now.
Hey there,
Welcome to Provocation #23. Playing with the words can sometimes lead to new ways of thinking.
Just as a reminder, all of the posts on this site are now free. But a paid subscription will help keep my energy up for this work (7/10 today; some really great conversations with educational leaders yesterday and last night have me energized for the fight.) AND will support folks in need, as all proceeds from paid memberships will go to my local food pantry this year.
To note: This post is a collaborative effort between me and Aiden Cinnamon Tea, a ChatGPT chatbot developed by the good folks at GTSD. Stay tuned for info on a “Metarelational.ai” playdate that I’ll be running in a couple of weeks.
As always, thanks for reading. ~W
Yesterday, I got a chance to work with about 25 educational leaders from a high-performing school district in New York state. Not unsurprisingly, the topic was how we might “Confront Education” in this increasingly complex and uncertain moment. At the outset, I tried to make it clear that the difficult discussions to come were not about “problems to be solved,” that the hope was that we would be all willing just to “sit with the shit” of this time and reflect, feel, and inquire.
Early on, I introduced and glossed Vanessa Andreotti’s four denials of modernity: our complicity in harm, the unsustainability of our systems, our entanglement with the rest of nature, and the scale of crisis we are in. And then I asked a simple question: “What question do these denials stir in you?”
Four people offered to share. Each one—without realizing it—framed their question as a solution. “How do we incorporate more of the Sustainable Development Goals?” “How do we integrate this without alarming the parents?” “How do we prepare students to take action?” “How do we…?”
Their tone was earnest and caring. But also, reflexive. Each question assumed a fix was needed. Each one bypassed the complexity, the grief, the uncertainty—trying instead to steer us toward resolution.
“With sincere respect,” I said, “you do realize that all of your questions are seeking a solution, right? You’re jumping right to the fix.”
There was a long silence and, I think, a bit of an important insight. It surfaced something that lives in many of us, especially in educators. That we are trained to soothe, to organize, to intervene. To diagnose, treat, and resolve.
The challenge is that this impulse to fix is also what blinds us to what needs to be felt. What if our solutions are so immediate, so narrow in scope, that they miss the wider second or third or fourth-order impact of our choices?
Isolation, Speed, Clarity
Most of our schooling—both what we’ve received and what we deliver—is steeped in what might be called “narrow-boundary learning.” It teaches us to see problems in isolation, rewards speed over depth, and celebrates clarity over complexity. Knowledge becomes something to be accumulated and applied quickly, not questioned or contextualized. Rarely do we pause to ask where our knowledge comes from, who it serves, or what it omits.
The result? We produce students who can ace a test but struggle to sit with uncertainty. Who can analyze a data set but not reflect on their own role in shaping the systems that the data comes from. Who are praised for quick action but rarely taught to pause, reflect, and ask deeper questions. Who are divorced from and ignorant of the contexts and histories of people, technologies, and systems that surround them.
To think about “wide-boundary learning” is to consider something else entirely. It asks us to slow down. To consider the ripple effects of our actions. To look at problems not just in isolation, but in context—social, ecological, historical. It pushes us to ask: Who else is impacted by this? What else might be going on here? What does this tell us about the systems we’re part of?
How many students—especially those growing up with access to the latest technologies—have ever been invited to trace the full story of their iPhone? The associated violence on people and the planet, the mental health impacts, the “planned obsolescence” that is designed into it, and its after-life environmental impacts. Few would have any sense of any of that. And yet that “wider” contextual understanding would provide an important and much-needed orientation for navigating a world in collapse.
Repeating the Problem
Here’s the hard part: when we move too quickly to solve a problem—before we’ve really sat with it, asked where it comes from, how we might be involved in it, and what it does to our relationships—we often end up repeating the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place.
We use the same tools, the same logic, just with new labels. But the pattern stays the same. And so do the consequences.
Otto Scharmer understands this as well:
But consider this: when we jump from challenge to action without pausing, what are we doing? Reacting. Usually by doing more of the same. And that is precisely what we see playing out in institutions today — leaders are stuck in the patterns of the past. A pattern can take the form of analysis paralysis (overthinking without acting) or mindless action (using a ‘chainsaw’ without attending to and learning from the impact it creates)…The capacity to value stillness (non-action) is and remains the primary gateway to all deep creativity.
And this from Daniel Schmachtenberger in a piece titled “Development in Progress” is also on point:
“The vast majority of the most consequential and difficult problems we face—climate change, nuclear war, species extinction—are the unintended outcomes of humans attempting to solve other problems. For many of our greatest problems, at some point in the past we designed technical solutions to address them, and in the time since the solutions have had other effects that we either did not predict or did not mitigate sufficiently in advance. The problems the world faces today are not caused by our inability to achieve our goals—they are a direct result of our success. They are a result of how destructive we are in the pursuit of our goals.”
Think on that for a second…
I don’t have a tidy list of strategies to make this shift. That would just be another form of fixing. But I do have a few questions we might start asking, both in our classrooms and in ourselves:
What do I tend to fix too quickly?
What questions make me uncomfortable, and why?
Who or what is affected by the way I define this problem?
What stories am I repeating without realizing it?
These aren’t questions for one lesson plan or one staff meeting. They’re the kind of questions that open up a different way of being with learning—slower, deeper, more connected to the world around us.
At the end of my session yesterday, when the group was reflecting on the day, one of the leaders lamented that there was no time for these conversations, that every day seemed filled with decisions to be made, initiatives to be implemented, and fires to be put out. Some of that is impossible to avoid, I know, but I wondered out loud “What if you took a year off from making big decisions and just committed to “sitting with the shit” and asking questions? Many chuckled and shook their heads. But I think some of them realized I wasn’t kidding.
In this moment, we need to notice the impulse to solve, that one that in many cases we honed in school. And then ask: What else might be happening here?
That pause might be the most important lesson of all.
Thoughts?
As always, thanks for reading.
Will
This is excellent thinking, Will. The responses of the NY teachers are not surprising, but based on the parameters you articulated in advance, they illustrate just how stuck we are in the treadmill of quick fixes.
That cultural treadmill is baked into the corporate world. It is the basis of evaluation, the source of status, and the pathway to the executive suite. Recall Malcolm Gladwell's book, "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Those who did not require analysis or debate but could make decisions on the fly without a moment for reflection were praised as talented executives.
The results you observed with educators are harder to understand. Our field touts itself as one focused on process rather than outcomes, but that narrative may be a myth. Or the narrative has been reduced to defining process through the lens of social efficiency, which would effectively shortcut the kind of reflection you are advocating for.
In the social efficiency world, we grab lesson plans from publishers like Pearson or McGraw-Hill, and more recently, we may ask ChatGPT to deliver them. There is a certain efficiency in having others do the work for us and then using their well-crafted materials, but it doesn't facilitate thinking deeply about the goals of the lesson, the course, and the education environment in which our kids live.
There are educators out there who are emulating what you are suggesting. They create their own lessons, course content, and adaptable pedagogies because their goal is to meet the needs of their students, regardless of what they are being asked to do. They throw social efficiency down the crapper, despite the toll it may take on them personally, because they want to get at the root of the forces that are shaping today's world and their students.
Sadly, as we have discussed, their techniques are not scalable because they are tailored to incorporating the personal narratives of the teachers with young minds. Perhaps scalability is not what we are looking for. Perhaps it is simply another flavor of social efficiency. It may be that every one of us has to go through the process of seeking ultimate explanations rather than proximate ones. As you say, it will require slowing down, and that will require giving social efficiency its last rites. It also means the team of you, Vanessa Andreotti, Otto Scharmer, Daniel Schmactenberger, and others will have to work with one small group of educators at a time, as you did in NY.