Open Society

“Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos // We want a world where many worlds fit.” – Zapatista of Chiapas

Perhaps this is because we have embraced a culture of belonging that comes from compliance and conformity rather than divergence and diversity. Both lead to a sense of belonging but the difference is the cost. This is the paradox of belonging. Perhaps this is the challenge to address in schools. Perhaps this is a challenge best addressed at the intersection of imagination and design for the future of schools.

“Any system produces what it was designed to produce.”                                                                       – The National Equity Project

Liberatory design is an emergent process that adds two notable modes to design thinking: notice and reflect. As components of consciousness, intentional work in which educators notice and reflect will result in schools that are more fully human because the faculty is more self-aware in its instructional practices and curriculum design. This suggests the real value of liberatory design, its ability to counter the tendencies in modern life that underlie systemic injustice.

The diversity racket is this: thinking that this is an intellectual exercise in being magnanimous, not a matter of survival.

We hypothesized that time spent in less-structured activities would give children opportunities to practice self-directed executive functioning, and lead to benefits. To investigate this possibility, we collected information from parents about their 6–7 year-old children's daily, annual, and typical schedules. We categorized children's activities as “structured” or “less-structured” based on categorization schemes from prior studies on child leisure time use. We assessed children's self-directed executive functioning using a well-established verbal fluency task, in which children generate members of a category and can decide on their own when to switch from one subcategory to another. The more time that children spent in less-structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning. The opposite was true of structured activities, which predicted poorer self-directed executive functioning. These relationships were robust (holding across increasingly strict classifications of structured and less-structured time) and specific (time use did not predict externally-driven executive functioning). We discuss implications, caveats, and ways in which potential interpretations can be distinguished in future work, to advance an understanding of this fundamental aspect of growing up.

Our findings offer support for a relationship between the time children spend in less-structured and structured activities and the development of self-directed executive function. When considering our entire participant sample, children who spent more time in less-structured activities displayed better self-directed control, even after controlling for age, verbal ability, and household income. By contrast, children who spent more time in structured activities exhibited poorer self-directed EF, controlling for the same factors. The observed relationships between time use and EF ability were specific to self-directed EF, as neither structured nor less-structured time related to performance on externally-driven EF measures. These findings represent the first demonstration that time spent in a broad range of less-structured activities outside of formal schooling predicts goal-directed behaviors not explicitly specified by an adult, and that more time spent in structured activities predicts poorer such goal-directed behavior. Consistent with Vygotskian developmental theory and programs that build on that theory, such as Tools of the Mind, less-structured time may uniquely support the development of self-directed control by affording children with additional practice in carrying out goal-directed actions using internal cues and reminders. That is, less-structured activities may give children more self-directed opportunities. From this perspective, structured time could slow the development of self-directed control, since adults in such scenarios can provide external cues and reminders about what should happen, and when.