At Lang and at most progressive schools, there is a significant focus on "process," which serves as a foundation to our mission-aligned commitment to experiential learning and purposeful rigor. Purposeful rigor at Lang is intellectually challenging and encourages students to engage deeply with complex concepts, think critically, and apply their knowledge to real-world situations. A deep understanding of concepts, skills, and their interconnections, prepares our students for the ongoing process of higher-level thinking, lifelong learning, and success in a rapidly changing world.
Embedded in this idea of "process" is an expectation that students must regularly reflect on their work and the thinking behind it. We want them to use this reflective stance to help them to see their work from a variety of perspectives. This helps them to see their work as an ongoing endeavor to be revisited, rethought, and reworked. At the same time, there is something important about the product of this work. It crystallizes and brings into focus the effort and energy that defines the process and, in its own way, the product stands as an achievement that has meaning and value. The product exists as an artifact of learning that points simultaneously to the past and the learner’s process and to new pathways for engaged inquiry.
The key is not to linger too long on the product so that it stands in the way of a new process. When the product becomes its own end—consider how often the work in most schools simply becomes the means to a grade to be earned—we lose an important opportunity for new learning. The artist Robert Rauschenberg speaks to this idea in The New Yorker where he commented that "It's always the moment of doing that counts. When a painting is finished it's already something I've done, no longer something I'm doing." It is in that same spirit that we seek to challenge our students to always be "in process" and to see a particular product as an opening to a new process, to always be doing and never content to simply be done.
I am continually struck by the richness of our Lang curriculum and the work that we do to foster and forge connections between process and product, which is a sort of ongoing process in its own right. As the educational philosopher John Dewey observed:
The intellectual harm accruing from divorce of work and play, product and process, is evidenced in the proverb, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” That the obverse is true is perhaps sufficiently signalized in the fact that fooling is so near to foolishness. To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of the mind upon a topic. To give the mind this free play is not to encourage toying with a subject, but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is open-mindedness, faith in the power of thought to preserve its own integrity without external supports and arbitrary restrictions. Hence free mental play involves seriousness, the earnest following of the development of subject-matter. It is incompatible with carelessness or flippancy, for it exacts accurate noting of every result reached in order that every conclusion may be put to further use. What is termed the interest in truth for its own sake is certainly a serious matter, yet this pure interest in truth coincides with love of the free play of thought.
It’s worth noting that through this process—the joining of work and play—our students learn an incredible amount of what we traditionally consider as subject area knowledge. At the same time, inquiry occurs in a thematic and holistic manner and students learn how to use this information to solve authentic problems and to assess this knowledge critically. In this way, the Lang curriculum empowers our students to see connections and to generalize and transfer knowledge to a variety of problem-solving situations and, most importantly, to see themselves at the center of their own learning experience.
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