John Connell: The Blog

There is a con­spic­u­ous and abid­ing fal­lacy resid­ing at the heart of for­mal edu­ca­tion, namely that what is taught is what is learned, that what the teacher teaches is what the stu­dent learns. Edu­ca­tion sys­tems, schools, col­lege and uni­ver­si­ties around the world today rest, as they have done for much of their exis­tences, on an illu­sory foun­da­tion, and I believe that much of what is wrong with for­mal edu­ca­tion today arises from this endur­ing and mis­taken belief.

When we come to the full real­i­sa­tion of the actual rela­tion­ship between teach­ing and learn­ing, we begin to dis­cern the sheer point­less­ness of so much of what passes for edu­ca­tional pol­icy and strat­egy in today’s world. We know that human beings learn through inter­ac­tion with oth­ers, with ideas, with infor­ma­tion, with the world at large, but that ulti­mately they cre­ate and shape their own learn­ing. The inter­ven­tion of the teacher in this process is impor­tant and valu­able, but at no point in the inter­ac­tion of teacher and stu­dent, other than by occa­sional happy acci­dent, does the learner ‘learn’ what the teacher ‘teaches’.

An appre­ci­a­tion of this, the true nature of learn­ing, means that the com­plex edi­fices of cur­ric­ula, ped­a­gogy, assess­ment, accred­i­ta­tion, teacher edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, as well as the over­bear­ing struc­tures of insti­tu­tional man­age­ment and edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tion, start to crum­ble to dust before our eyes.

The knowl­edge nec­es­sary to func­tion suc­cess­fully and fol­low a career was seen to already exist: it could be handed down from experts and lead­ers to learn­ers and work­ers. In the Indus­trial Age, cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment was a mat­ter of select­ing the most impor­tant knowl­edge to trans­mit to stu­dents; experts decided what knowl­edge to mass-prescribe and in which sequence.

Jane Gilbert and Rachel Bol­stad (amongst many oth­ers) ques­tioned the tra­di­tional con­cept of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment in their 2008 book Dis­ci­plin­ing and draft­ing, or 21^st cen­tury learn­ing? Rethink­ing the New Zealand senior sec­ondary cur­ricu­lum for the future. Their words are quoted in a new White Paper, spon­sored by Promethean’s Jim Wynn, and authored by Gavin Dykes, Michael Fur­dyk, Sara Has­san and Jen­nifer Cor­riero for Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward, enti­tled From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Lead­ers (down­load­able PDF).

The authors agree with Gilbert and Bol­stad and state their posi­tion clearly:

…this model of cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment is dif­fi­cult to main­tain given that: it is no longer pos­si­ble to accu­rately pre­dict the type of knowl­edge youth may need as they move through life, the rapid pace at which tech­nol­ogy is chang­ing and new knowl­edge is devel­op­ing, the rate at which career pos­si­bil­i­ties are pro­lif­er­at­ing (ones with which we are famil­iar and ones we have yet to imag­ine), and social, eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges are becom­ing increas­ingly complex.

They ask the question:

How can learner voice help address these uncertainties?

And the seem­ingly sim­ple answer?

By giv­ing learn­ers an authen­tic say in what and how they want to learn.

The White Paper will under­pin dis­cus­sion at the next Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward debate, to take place as part of Edu­ca­tion World Forum in Lon­don at the end of this month. The paper, which will be pre­sented by Sara Has­san, of Tak­ing IT Global, join­ing the debate from Toronto, is an excel­lent sum­mary of the issues sur­round­ing this crit­i­cal ques­tion, and the authors have been able to offer a com­bi­na­tion of sound think­ing, prac­ti­cal advice and a way for­ward for those in edu­ca­tion (still too few, I would say) who believe that cur­ricu­lum design, ped­a­gogy, the role of tech­nol­ogy and national edu­ca­tion policy-making all should be influ­enced and shaped by the voice of the learner.

The event will com­bine a live pres­ence at EWF and a global pres­ence via the magic of Telep­res­ence, An artic­u­late group of young edu­ca­tion lead­ers will debate the issues around ‘From Learner Voice to Emerg­ing Leaders’.

The pri­mary aim is twofold:

And it will all take place across a truly inter­na­tional matrix of con­nec­tions, cross­ing coun­tries, cul­tures, and communities.

The event itself takes place on Mon­day 28^th Jan­u­ary at 11am and you will find the link to the live video broad­cast on the day itself on the Edu­ca­tion Fast For­ward page on Promethean Planet. Promethean’s Chief Edu­ca­tion Offi­cer, Jim Wynn, will be open­ing the EFF6 debate, which will once again be mod­er­ated by inde­pen­dent edu­ca­tion con­sul­tant Gavin Dykes. Dis­cus­sion will be led by Sara Has­san and three stu­dent pre­sen­ters. Clos­ing the debate will be Michelle Selinger, Direc­tor of Edu­ca­tion at Cisco.

Twit­ter users can fol­low the debate itself using the hash­tag #eff6, while there will be some inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion around many of the key issues in the debate using the hash­tag #learn­ing­mat­ters.

Finally, a reminder that you can down­load the White Paper.

Howard Gard­ner, speak­ing in a video on the DML Cen­tral site:

I don’t believe for a moment in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. I believe any tech­nol­ogy can be used benignly and malig­nantly. You can use a pen to write beau­ti­ful poetry. You can also use a pen to poke peo­ples’ eyes out.

Gard­ner doesn’t ‘believe’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, in the same way that some­one might choose not to believe in a deity or the exis­tence of Santa Claus. Fair enough. How­ever, the exam­ple he gives to sup­port his unbe­lief is not only mis­lead­ingly sim­plis­tic but also spe­cious. A pen used to poke an eye out is not being used as a pen and is there­fore not a pen at that moment in time. It is merely a pointy stick. If he had said that the same pen can be used to write beau­ti­ful poetry and also to sign the death war­rant of an inno­cent per­son, his argu­ment would have been a lit­tle more cogent, but still only within the some­what nar­row lim­its to which he chooses to restrict his notion of tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. We expect bet­ter from a Har­vard professor.

This much we can agree on: tech­nol­ogy is only tech­nol­ogy when it is being put to use. Oth­er­wise, it is merely pas­sive arte­fact. At the level of the instru­ment (such as the pen), tech­nol­ogy can be used for good or ill. But that is not a con­di­tion unique to tech­nol­ogy; it can be posited for vir­tu­ally every prod­uct of the human hand or mind. Richard Feyn­man put it suc­cinctly when he quoted a bud­dhist proverb:

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

I made that point in a post back in 2006 when I com­pared cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics shared by edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­ogy: they are both instru­ments that can be put to good and bad uses; they are both instru­ments that can be truly trans­for­ma­tive or deeply destruc­tive. Given those shared attrib­utes, I used that post to appeal for care in how we choose to bring about their con­junc­tion. But these are attrib­utes that bear no rela­tion to whether or not tech­nol­ogy is deter­min­is­tic; hence the prob­lem with Gardner’s position.

If we want to see how truly deter­min­is­tic tech­nol­ogy can be, and is, we must ele­vate our point of view so that we can see beyond the indi­vid­ual instru­ment and allow our­selves to com­pre­hend the broad vista of the tech­nol­ogy land­scape within which that sin­gle instru­ment is utilised. Whether a pen can write beau­ti­ful poetry or con­sign a per­son to their death really tells us noth­ing about how, at a much broader level, sys­temic shifts in the under­ly­ing nature of tech­nol­ogy undoubt­edly do influ­ence soci­etal inter­ac­tions and, quite sim­ply, how we do cer­tain things, amongst them, edu­ca­tion. To try to pre­tend, for instance, as Gard­ner must inevitably do with his ‘unbe­lief’ in tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism, that the way we learn — or for that mat­ter, the way we teach — can remain the same in the dig­i­tal era as it has been for cen­turies of print is just naive.

Karl Marx, writ­ing in The Poverty of Phi­los­o­phy in 1847, under­stood that bet­ter than the good pro­fes­sor obvi­ously does today.

The hand-mill gives you soci­ety with the feu­dal lord; the steam-mill, soci­ety with the indus­trial capitalist.

The dig­i­tal era — the com­puter, the net­work, the Inter­net, the Web, social tech­nol­ogy, uni­ver­sal search, and so much more — changes rad­i­cally all of the rela­tion­ships that are crit­i­cal to how we learn and how we teach: the rela­tion­ship between teacher and learner; the rela­tion­ship between the learner and infor­ma­tion; the rela­tion­ship we all have with the con­cept of learned author­ity; and the social rela­tion­ships between our­selves and the rest of the human race. It is of course a hugely com­plex process of deter­mi­na­tion, with nuance lay­ered on nuance, but it is undoubt­edly true that broad global shifts in tech­nol­ogy, such as that between print and dig­i­tal, deter­mine how learn­ing can hap­pen and there­fore should (and inevitably will) deter­mine what it means to teach.

Like war, for­mal edu­ca­tion is a con­tin­u­a­tion of pol­i­tics by other means — less direct, less con­trolled, less con­trol­lable, but no less pow­er­ful in its long term effects.

I wrote the above on this blog three years ago in a post that lamented the sheer cack-handedness of most Gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in edu­ca­tion (they call it policy-making) in Eng­land over the past 30 years. I should have empha­sised the uncon­trol­lable effects of this ‘policy-making’ much more than I did — a long suc­ces­sion of edu­ca­tion min­is­ters in West­min­ster over the past 3 decades have attempted to inflict their own vari­ants on social engi­neer­ing, and all of them have failed spec­tac­u­larly. Unfor­tu­nately, each inevitable fail­ure leaves a legacy of yet more dis­ar­ray behind it.

Simon Jenk­ins, writ­ing in today’s Guardian, agrees:

Account­abil­ity for England’s schools is now a total mess.

Jenk­ins takes aim at the lat­est ridicu­lous ‘league table’ to be imposed on England’s schools by Michael Gove. As he writes:

The crav­ing for uni­for­mity in pub­lic ser­vices has become a frenzy.…The belief that the crooked tim­ber of mankind can be beaten straight on a White­hall work­table is the great­est of all min­is­te­r­ial fallacies.

It reminds me of Campbell’s Law, first stated by Don­ald T. Camp­bell, the psy­chol­o­gist who pio­neered the study of human creativity:

The more any quan­ti­ta­tive social indi­ca­tor is used for social decision-making, the more sub­ject it will be to cor­rup­tion pres­sures and the more apt it will be to dis­tort and cor­rupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Michael Gove might well be push­ing for a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of his­tory to be imposed on England’s schools, but he is obvi­ously less than keen to learn history’s lessons himself.

Typog­ra­phy from Ron­nie Bruce on Vimeo.

“.…you’ve got to speak with it too.”

Tay­lor Mali, poet.

Won­der­ful, and of course true!