Are textbooks a threatened bastion of schooling?
 Alan McCluskey |
In our discussion of dissolving boundaries in education, before the Summer break, we were looking at the textbook. The textbook is a one-size-fits-all teaching aid where teaching is understood to be the moving of students in small, manageable increments along a well-traced path towards a set of predetermined goals fixed by external experts in the form of a curriculum.
The notion of the textbook, like most aspects of schooling, is founded on a set of unspoken premises that has been called the hidden curriculum. See: Nine lessons of schooling … or why school isn't what you think it is. My hypothesis is that most if not all of those underlying premises have come to hinder rather rather than favour learning.
In my earlier post I asked about possible structures to aid and encourage learning without those structures getting in the way of learning. Maybe the question could initially be formulated more usefully as: on what premises should learning be built? |
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Alan McCluskey |
Power to the imagination Continuing our exploration of new paradigms for education, let's turn to other sources. In a parallel discussion in French about the role of teachers in 30 years, Jean-François Jobin points to a talk by Sir Ken Robinson, the original English version of which is here: http:/ Sir Ken says many things which are pertinent for us here in our search for new paradigms for education. Why should we seek new paradigms? He argues that people running education are "trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past and on the way are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school." He puts considerable emphasis on imagination which he defines as: "the process of having original ideas that have value." He insists that divergent thinking - the capacity to see questions from various perspectives and to perceive multiple different answers - is essential to imagination. In his talk he argues that the current drive for conformity and standardisation in education destroys such divergent thinking. He sees the future to lie in an organic learning metaphor in which the learner is valued for him or herself. Here are a number of premises about future education that can be drawn from his talk:
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Alan McCluskey |
Hanna wrote on the Future Learning group on Facebook: Lieber Alan Dein Resümee ist sehr lesenswert und hat mir eine Reihe neuer Fragen ausgelöst. Werden Schulbücher wirkliche verschwinden? Wohl kaum, aber es braucht heute andere Lehrmittel als früher. Vermutlich wird ein hybrides Lehrmittel die Zukunft prägen: Die Lerninhalte, online zur Verfügung gestellt, ermöglichen ein interaktives Lernen. Zum Basiswissen, welches auch noch in Buchform oder auf Arbeitsblättern abgegeben wird, eröffnet die Online-Ausgabe mit zahlreichen Links das Tor zu aktuellen Texten, Bildern, Graphiken und Statistiken aus Presse und Medien. Dies ermöglicht ein Lernen in Gruppen oder auch individualisiert. Besondere Begabungen, Neigungen und Interessen können sich entwickeln. Ist die Schule wirklich eine Art „künstlicher Schonraum“, in welchem die Komplexität des Lebens unzulässig vereinfacht wird? Nicht für die Schule, für das Leben lernen wir: Dieser Kernsatz ist sehr alt und immer noch nicht eingelöst. Er ist eben schwierig umzusetzen. Führen Standardisierung und Schulevaluation weg vom Bildungsideal des Lernens für das Leben? Zweifellos haben verstärkte Regulierungen und Kontrollen immer auch den Effekt der „Verschulung“, aber sie fördern in einer globalisierten Bildungslandschaft wünschbare Vergleichbarkeiten. Es ist eben alles etwas komplexer. Meine ganz konkrete Frage: Was verändert sich in Schule und Unterricht, wenn immer mehr Kinder und Jugendliche über ein iPhone verfügen, weil die Eltern die stets neue Generation anschaffen und die alten, funktionstüchtigen ihren Kindern abgeben? Zuerst reagierten die Schulen mit dem Handy-Verbot – und heute? Wer kann hier aus der persönlichen Erfahrung berichten? Hanna |
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Alan McCluskey |
Questioning the self-evident Thanks for your comments and suggestions, Hanna. (Answer first posted on the Facebook group: Future Learning - http:/ When I read what you write about textbooks I realise that, however wide or small it might be, there is a paradigm gap between us. Your starting point is that which exists and from there you seek to evolve towards what you see as a desirable future. I argue that the existing structures (as characterised by what is called the hidden curriculum) necessarily mislead us. Some starting points make reaching our destination impossible. I believe this is the case of schooling. In other words, you cannot build future learning on the textbook because it incorporates beliefs and constraints that make that learning impossible. Of course, saying so raises the question of what we mean by learning and how that learning enables people to function in a complex, fast changing world. Answering that question is necessarily our starting point. You mention the catch phrase: learning, not for school but for life. It is a seductive affirmation. You say it is difficult to achieve. That difficulty is largely due to our attachment to aspects of a system that make achieving it impossible: schooling. Arguing that the underlying premises of current schooling hinder most meaningful learning, the challenge I am trying to work on in the discussion of dissolving boundaries on L4D is: what structures can favour the kind of learning we need for the modern world? But before getting to that, we need to discuss the premises underlying the learning we seek to encourage. Let's take your slogan: 'learning, not for school but for life' and ask what that would imply in terms of a structure designed to foster and aid learning. The phrase says something about the motivation for learning: it is life and our activities in the world that should drive our will to learn and make it meaningful not the artificial incentives like marks and grades and diplomas invented by school. It says something about the failing of schooling as being, as it were, outside life, separate from the world and as such not meaningful to life (except in the artificial structures built as an extension to schooling like the dubious need for certain grades or school-delivered diplomas to get a job). It also says that the learning taking place in schools is not what we need. It does not serve us well in life. This example shows that if we interrogate our ideas about education and learning, not taking them for granted as self-evident, we begin to see more clearly where we need to go and what we might do to get there. Join the disucssion on Facebook: http:/ |
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