So I’d never heard of the term “edupunk” until I checked my RSS subscriptions this morning and found Dan Meyer’s parody. I spent some downtime today (sorry, kids, your homework’s coming back a day late) trying to figure out what exactly edupunk is. Stephen Downes’s post helped a little, but not much–I get the concept, but fail to see how it’s different from, say, regular old good teaching while not being a tool of The Man. Downes points to a post by Leslie Madsen Brooks at BlogHer that says

…edupunk is student-centered, resourceful, teacher- or community-created rather than corporate-sourced, and underwritten by a progressive political stance. Barbara Ganley’s philosophy of teaching and digital expression is an elegant manifestation of edupunk. Nina Simon, with her imaginative ways of applying web 2.0 philosophies to museum exhibit design, offers both low- and high-tech edupunk visions.

Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.

So forgive me, edupunkers, but I totally came up with this first. I’m so anticorporate that I won’t even let my students leave my class to plunk down a buck for a bottle of water in our cafeteria. I forgo digital technology pretty often, including today, when we all went outside to work on our class graphic novel. And web 2.0? Shoot, I’ve been forcing my students to use blogs and wikis since autumn 2006.

Anyway, the “punk” part of the word kind of bothers me.  If we’re going to take a suffix from a musical/social movement that promised, but never really delivered, change, why not start the edubeat movement?  Afrobeat, after all, was an expansive, anticorporate, anticolonial, pro-community kind of music that had the added bonus of making anyone within hearing distance shake their collective thangs.

Terminology aside, yes, the whole edupunk thing makes sense, from what I can tell.  Creatively using internet tools and the offline world, including books and pencils and stuff, makes sense.  Suspicion of crappy and expensive panacea software makes sense.  Hands on, project-based learning makes sense.  Letting students use their interests to guide their inquiry makes sense.

This is what we call good teaching.  Now someone tell me why this is new.