Mapping the disconnect: School life vs. Real life
I would often say to my students it’s a shame that your school life and your after school life look very different. My students would smile and always nod in agreement. They totally agreed. They taught me to keep coming back to… Why are we doing this? To help them to think about the relevance. I would say to them, Bare with me, we have to play school a little bit, and then we can get back to the fun stuff. And the fun stuff was connecting the learning to the lives students live outside of school. The things they care about the most! In S1:E2 of the Podcast, Heather Michael speaks to this.
I think Heather is a superstar. I was fortunate to attend her session at an big education conference in Toronto, Canada that was tethered to her dissertation work on spaces and student experiences. She instructed us to draw a map of the spaces where we spend time on a piece of paper. When we discussed our maps, as educators, school often appeared on our paper, many of us centralizing it.
And then she shared this:
This exercise was brilliant in shattering that assumption of school for kids. But it made perfect sense. How many times had I heard students explain school as boring, unnecessary, repetitive and uninspiring? We, as educators, need to recognize and honor their absence of school and think about how we can make school more inclusive (and central!) for students on their spatial map.
This reiterates my statement of the disconnect between school life and after school life. Does every teacher understand and think about this for their students? As a former International Baccalaureate (IB) Theory of Knowledge (ToK) teacher and Career-related Programme (CP) coordinator, I am reminded of the ways in which I tried to meld school life and after-school life —nudging school to be on the student’s map.
Our ToK classes looked at media, read articles dealing with their generation, held discussions in which students explored topics pertinent to and chosen by them. In a class like ToK, I was fortunate to have a curriculum that was flexible enough to follow the lead students of the student inquiry. Yet, I also taught French and found that as I was progressing in my ToK journey, I was stealing or transferring those pertinent and relevant nuggets and weaving them into any prescribed curriculum context. And the students came to life in my French class in ways that were really exciting.
As a CP coordinator, I noticed even more opportunities to help students to centralize school for themselves since in this program, those who had a love for a career interest—culinary arts, engineering, computer science—were able to find their place. The CP allowed students to meld their school life with their after school life in that they were doing academic and practical (!) work that was anchored in their career interest. Thus, tethering to Heather’s thoughts on where people learn.
They value education that happens in other places. And I don’t think that’s a less than, I think it’s a different.
It’s the type of education that honors difference through at it’s core: community engagement, personal and professional skills development, an appreciation for language and culture and capstone projects that push students to think about the ethical dilemmas that they are likely to encounter in industry. We need students to find their own way to link the components of their education. The advantage of career and technical education is that these components are steeped in the career-related studies students in which students are interested and the ethics that surround them. In short, it helps put school back on the map for many students.
Ultimately, in whatever you teach, Heather’s exercise encourages educators to think outside of the prescribed curriculum box. The possibilities are endless as I witnessed over decades of developing my teaching style and perceptions about the role of school in students lives. Led by my students, we explored gaming as an educational tool, the concept of beauty through media, religious differences, and male and female anorexia just to name a few. Our discussions were rich, unsettling and cohesive. Unsettling in the sense that students had to work through conflict and challenge their own assumptions.
Fun fact: eight of my former students became classroom teachers in my school! In their very first days on the job, they would approach me with appreciation. And the stuff they would tell me about how they experienced school… As I worked alongside them over the last decade of my career, they would recall things I had forgotten about or even overlooked. They would tell me, everything we did in your class made school more relevant to my life, the things I did in college, and now as a professional educator. I know it’s rare to get this kind of feedback. But it just makes me think about how important it is for students to find their place in our classrooms. It makes my heart happy to know I made this kind of difference.
Teachers have a tendency to teach how we were taught, making educational spaces feel constrictive, traditional and transactional. We need to venture beyond those spaces and to honor the student as a human being, untangling their stories and valuing their lived experiences within those particular stories. It is only then that students can be seen as part of the educational spaces. I too took my school life and melded it with my after school life. I too, had to escape the traditions of schooling that had been engrained.
If your identity, like mine, is wrapped up in the work, small steps can unlock new experiences. I believe it is possible for any teacher to experience this type of mind shift. And the key is putting school back on the map for students.
Further reading: Pedagogical Strategies to Help Students Find A Connection To School
Caron, C. (2025, April 30). Young People Are Not As Happy As They Used to Be, Study Finds. The New York Times. A New York Times article focusing on the happiness of young people around the world.
Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Introduction)an introduction to understanding Henri Lefebvre's Spatial Theory
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world | TED Talk student interaction with gaming and how we can relate it to schooling
Stixrud, W., & Johnson, N. (2018). The Self-Driven Child. Penguin. understanding students within the family dynamic
Gabe Zichermann: How games make kids smarter | TED Talk the importance of playing games and all the benefits they offer children
