Everything is Derivative

Beg, Borrow & Steal

I’m confident that most teachers have heard this phrase in university or the beginning stage of their careers. There is so much to do and so much to plan that it’s just not possible to do it all on your own. You need to do whatever it takes to get your hands on additional resources.

As an educational facilitator, I am blessed to be able to spend time working with amazing educators in 9 different schools. I spend time in different classrooms from pre-K to grade 12, and it has been some of the best PD I have had. I regularly find myself asking, “Can I take this idea and share it? I’ll give you the credit!” and every single time, it’s met with a yes.

Teachers don’t sign up for this job because they want to make a lot of money. Teaching is a vocation: it fulfills a desire to help others. This is why, for the most part, teachers are always happy to help and open to sharing. We take an idea, adapt it to work for our classroom and situation, and pass it along. The goal is not to create the greatest content ever but to create content that will help our students learn and experience success.

In the documentary Everything is a Remix, the idea is brought forth that everything around us is a remix. Everything has been adapted and changed to work in a different way. I’ve never thought of this before, but my eyes were opened. I’ve always enjoyed teaching morphemes to students in ELA and talking about where our words come from, but I never truly looked at it as remixing before. Even the evolution of living things is a sort of remixing. 

So, what is the benefit to remixing? Questlove posted this statement on X on March 3, 2023: “look I know we all wanna think all ideas are truly original. but I promise you: everything is derivative. there is art in restructuring & also in recreating” If everything is derivative, then aren’t we bound to take ideas from others at times?

The documentary goes on to say that remixing “… might seem like copying but it’s so much more. It empowers us to be creative” (Everything is a Remix – 2023). 

This leads me to think that when we borrow ideas from others and adapt them, we are only improving them.

As someone who enjoys sharing my creations with others, I always ask those who use them to send back any great changes or to add as they see fit. There are always things that we can learn from each other, and in my opinion, educators should be happy to share their hard work if it will be beneficial for our students.

What about copyright? What’s the difference between copying and remixing? I think we should look at remixing like sampling other’s work in music. It seems fair to give credit when things are adapted by including the name of the person who gave it to you.

To sum it up…

I think that we are in the business of helping students learn in the best way possible and that we should support one another as educators by openly sharing resources to do that. I also think that it’s fair to give credit where credit is due and share resources back so they can continue to remix and improve.

I’m curious about your thoughts…

What is your stance on sharing things that you create as an educator? Do you like to get something back in return? What is the best way to go about sharing resources so we can remix them to help our students?

Thanks for reading!