Unwarranted assumptions, slow pedagogies, and shop front learning

I am enjoying some new thinking provided by a small enthnographic study titled Questioning Assumptions About Students' Expectations for Technology in College Classrooms by Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer.  The study explores how “liberal arts college students use technology to make meaning of their college experience in both academic and non-academic spaces on campus.”

The authors identify three assumptions worth challenging when we are thinking about how we should meet educational needs of the 21st Century learner.

Assumption 1: Groups choose to integrate technology in the same ways in different contexts. 

Just because a group choose to integrate technology into their social lives (eg NetGen) they do not necessarily choose to integrate technology in the same ways into their formal learning lives in school.

Assumption 2: 21st Century learners are all alike - they will respond in the same way (positively) to opportunities to integrate technology into their learning experiences.

Students “hold different beliefs about teaching and learning, as well as the role of technology in that experience, which may in turn shape what they consider to be a good student in their institutional context.”

Assumption 3: Research methodologies based on questionnaires/ survey responses give insight into student’s technology practices. 

“The situated nature of students' experiences and their needs related to technology mean (questionnaire) approaches provide only limited insights into the influence of context – insider practice.

For example, in this study students in the liberal arts college saw the laptop "as a barrier to creating and maintaining the classroom community.” It seems that when it came to learning in the classroom the students preferred (and expected) the opportunity to learn through F2F discussion with people. 

“This notion of a classroom community, fostered by small class sizes, a particular model of teaching based on real-time human contact, and frequent interaction with faculty members outside the classroom, was essential to how these students defined liberal education.”

Challenging hidden assumptions in how we think is both difficult to do – (how do you undermine your own thinking?) and potentially dangerous – (in that it can jeopardise existing social structures and relationships, and lead to disequilibrium).

Challenging the hidden assumptions in how we do school is an even bigger "Gedanken experiment" than challenging assumptions about the preferred learning styles of the 21st century learner.

I am loving listening to The Knowledge Tree E Journal issue featuring Geetha Narayanan’s  take on just this idea and its real time and space result - Project Vision

So what is the dangerous idea I have been exploring and why do many people across the world consider it powerful? The dangerous idea is that school reform, in India in particular, but across the world too, is impossible.

Changing education, at the systemic level or at the institutional or school level, or educating teachers and school leaders in change can be classified as largely first order change - that of school improvement, which involves doing more of the same but doing it better (where the focus is on efficiency) and that of school re-structuring, which involves re-organising components and responsibilities (where the focus is on effectiveness).

The power behind the dangerous idea is the realisation that if one cannot reform education by improving the system or by re-structuring the schools, then the way forward must be through design. The need seemed to be to re-envision and to design a new system - one that supports both personal and social transformation creating 21st century learning.

Geetha’s thought experiment in challenging hidden assumptions about how we do school resulted in something very practical and grounded - Project Vision – a slow pedagogy created from shop front type learning experiences for marginalised children in the “rapidly growing slums” of Bangladore, India.

Project vision is not about creating small sized schools – it is about fragmenting the one place one space school into “four distinct, distributed, interactive and inter-related components that work in coordination with one another.”  I have been kept amused all week imagining how these components could be introduced into the Auckland suburb's we work in.

1. The Community Learning Centres (Spokes-located within each slum community)
2. The Idea-Media Centres (Hubs or Workshops-which serve different purposes and are common and shared spaces)
3. The Expedition (Using the complexity of the real and the natural as sites for introspection, contemplation and active, participatory learning)
4. The Network (Wired/wireless- links that integrate the Drishya Community members with each other and with the outside world)

These components share a pedagogy that is “consciously embracing the core value of slowness – both as way of being and as a way of learning” – layered through looking and listening - exploring and thinking and making and being.

"Pedagogies of slowness" - now that requires a different way of imagining learning.

And for all the fandom of ICTs in education, Geetha has this to offer

Technological fluency is critical to any growth and development today. But technological fluency should not be confused with technological determinism. The thoughtless and widespread use of technology as the universal solution to the rising need for fast knowledge is wrong and must be questioned.

Technological fluency - now that is something I could tilt at in an ictpd cluster.  I just love the way Geetha goes on to identify the false driver in those various “outsourcing means your children will be left behind unless you give them access to blisteringly fast ICTs and teach them how to be creative” TeacherTube videos doing the rounds of teacher meetings in New Zealand this month.  They all ignore the reality that if the ordinary task is able to be outsourced more cheaply overseas so will the extraordinary or creative task.  Creative and original thinkers are a global resource as are call centre thinkers and accountants.  I am still waiting for someone in the audience to challenge the essentially xenophobic and marketing message of these videos as succinctly as Geetha does. 

Further, this pressure is resulting in a disconnect between the means and ends of education. The larger democratic ideals of social justice, of interdependence and of co-evolution through cooperation and collaboration are being increasingly marginalised in favour of greater accountability through testing, the drive towards nationalised curriculum, which suffers from a ‘one size fits all’ mindset, and the need to develop competitive advantages in a networked world that has a globalised economic structure.

What Geetha Narayanan has identified as important for her kids in Bangladore is not unlike what Lohnes and Kinzer’s liberal arts college students identified as important for their learning.

Learning is all about people being with people - small groups, real time human contact, and frequent interaction with teachers in settings outside the classroom.