Page 149 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

The transition from passive workers and community members whose stereotypical roles were defined by society, have now been remodelled completely to where we, as adults, have far greater autonomy and freedoms to be who we are, rather than who society wanted us to be. These transitions make the stalled revolution of 1960’s look like a rehearsal for the real thing that is now firmly in place and unlikely to regress backwards anytime in the near future.
Involving Parents/Caregivers and Communities
The curriculum that guides the learning in schools needs to reflect the transitions outlined above. If we ask parents/caregivers, “what do you think the most important capabilities and skills that young people need to be successful in today’s world?” they will immediately start listing them for you. They will list the competencies first, then the effect of technology on their children’s world, relationship building and then they may mention literacy and mathematics next. Parents and caregivers know this order of importance but they may not have articulated these thoughts and reflected on the significance of those thoughts.
Before schools begin this journey, they need to establish clarity around the purpose of school is in this century. This is not a straightforward process as you may expect, especially in our secondary schools. Preschool, primary and tertiary education systems are mostly quite clear about what an effective curriculum looks like. Secondary education systems are less clear about the necessary transitions and this reticence has its roots in how secondary educators see their role.
Secondary educators have historically taught subjects, whereas if you asked the other three groups of educators, they would say they taught children/adults. How we see ourselves as secondary educators has a significant effect on how we see the way forward and how we react to the changes that are taking place now in many preschool, primary schools and tertiary institutions.
As secondary school educators, we tend to think that these transitions are fine for the early years of school but young people need to be engaged in rigorous learning experiences that provide a baseline of knowledge and understanding within essential curriculum domains. This mindset is correct, to a degree, and getting the tension between these two requirements the need for subject ‘rigour’ and the need for learners to take increased agency over their learning via them applying the Learning Process and the competencies, will require significant discussion and debate in our communities!
The secondary subject domains that have existed for the last two hundred years or less, were convenient delineations allowing specialists to focus on discrete subjects. However, in the actual world we inhabit, these subjects never exist on their own, as they are all integrated into different degrees of entanglement. One of the first transitions secondary schools are looking at, is to look at how we can better reflect the integration of subjects and their relationships with each other.
Beginning this process in the junior school will allow secondary educators to experiment with learning experiences that involve concepts that span more than one of our traditional learning domains. By integrating learning domains at this level learners start to view the grandeur and the complexity of the world that they are part of. Integrating the mathematics and the pure sciences is a good place to begin this journey, followed by the integration of the social sciences and English/indigenous languages.
Rethinking a school’s curricula and the purpose of school must be done in consultation with the local community and changes on this scale must be a consultative process scheduled over several years with ample exchange of ideas and beliefs surrounding how we can best engage our young people in their time within the school system. With this in mind, let us revert to first principles and reflect on the purpose of school.
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