You’ll have to indulge me a little in this week’s roundup. I’m going to include two quotations from the same person, one of which is rather hefty (but nevertheless worth quoting in its entirity). I’m still trucking on in the personalization of learning vein, this time coupling it with how to construct a curriculum and learning environment for the 21st century… :p

I’m trying to grab as much time as I can to work on preparation for my Ed.D. thesis proposal assignment. I work best in the early morning (5am onwards) so I can only really work on it at weekends. Yesterday morning I was reading Making Sense of Education: an introduction to the philosophy and theory of education and teaching by David Carr in which the author considered what exactly is meant by a ‘balanced curriculum’. As I’m thinking about how secondary schools can be altered to reflect the changing nature of knowledge outlined, for example, in George Siemens’ excellent Knowing Knowledge, the distinction Carr made in this passage struck a chord:

To some extent, the idea of constructing the school curriculum around forms of knowledge seems to have been precisely designed to address the potential problem of too many subjects in the curriculum. In this respect, of course, it is important not to confuse forms of knowledge with school subjects. (p.139)

Whilst it is important to open the eyes of learners to the many different forms of knowledge available and the multitude of ways they can be expressed, doing so through a rigid timetable of rather artificial ’subject areas’ is not necessarily the best way to go about this. At school I consciously attempted to become as ’rounded’ a person as possible, taking a diverse range of GCSEs and at ‘A’ Level opting for English and History, as well as Maths with Mechanics and Physics (oh, and General Studies ‘AS’ Level). I did this because I didn’t want to specialize as I didn’t feel I knew enough in general to be able to make an informed decision. In fact, I only found what I was looking for by studying Philosophy at university. But I digress…

My point, and the one that I think that Carr is making is that saying that students study a wide range of subjects and therefore come into contact with a wide range of forms of knowledge is not true for the majority of schools I’ve experienced. Changing this, Carr believes, would lead to cries of students no longer following a ‘balanced curriculum’. But as Carr states, what exactly is a balanced curriculum anyway?

The problems of the so-called breadth criterion of curriculum provision are related to, and to some degree an extension of, those of balance. On a fairly naive view of the matter, it might be held that the knowledge, understanding and/or skill of an educated person is just more extensive than that of the uneducated person: that, indeed, the more widely a person’s knowledge and understanding ranges, the better educated he or she is. Moreover, the point here need not be the crudely quantificational one that educated persons are better informed than uneducated ones (though this may well be so): it could be rather that the educated have a better rational grasp of the logical diversity of forms of human knowledge and understanding than the less well educated. (p.138)

The author goes on to say that the dominant model in postwar western education has been the ‘forms of knowledge thesis’ which states that someone cannot call themselves educated unless they have received some initiation into each token of a specified range of types of knowledge and understanding – e.g. scientific, socio-cultural, religious. This led to the curriculum we know and loathe today where students are shepherded between subjects at neatly appointed times of the school day at the behest of the school bell. There has been little mention made of social, personal, practical and other needs until recently – and even the delivery of these skills is attempted through a subject (PSHCE/Citizenship/whatever it’s called in your school).

All of which is a rather grand prelude to a number of blog posts I’ve found interesting this week centering around the 21st century skills we should be teaching our students. The trouble is that one educator by themselves cannot really achieve much. Granted, they may happen upon a winning formula and way to move the rather staid education system ever-so-slightly closer to some kind of School 2.0. What really works, as mentioned by Chris Sessums in Action Research and Social Software: an approach for adopting technology in schools, is when teachers take part in some kind of action research, however small-scale. In effect, as Chris continues in the comments section, integrating any kind of technology for the first time involves action research. The important thing is sharing this with others. This is where the edublogging community comes in! We should be sharing with each others new ways to do existing things with technology to increase motivation, engagement and attentiveness, but also new ways to do new things, developing rigorous pedagogies and models along the way for others to follow. A bit like digital mountain men really… ;)

As Dave Warlick insinuates in About Building Digital Communication Skills…, whether or not our programmes of study require us to teach our students 21st century communication skills, we should be doing it anyway. I completely agree with David Thornberg, who Dave quotes in his post:

The main thing that’s holding technology back is … a fear–a well-placed fear, I might add–that if technology becomes ubiquitous, it will totally transform the practice of education. There are a lot of people who don’t want the practice of education transformed, because they’re very comfortable with it.

Someone who’s doing just what Dave and Chris are talking about is Clarence Fisher, who in Classroom Studio sets out his vision for the future of his classroom. Like me, Clarence uses metaphors and similies to get at things which havne’t been actualized are still being grasped at. He, quite rightly, wants his classroom to be like a studio:

Studios are places that are intense, both product and process oriented, and in many ways, are driven forward by the people who are working in them. Many projects are self – selected, or organic, growing out of experience and idea. Assessment comes from both external and internal sources. Assessments looks at both the products and the process that were involved in production.

…

Classrooms as studios would hopefully be more attractive visually then our usual concrete boxes, but the biggest change would come in the pedagogy. More self selected projects, students working in longer blocks of concentrated time, changes made to assessment practices. Studios are busy places. Not noisy, out of control, anti – education and learning spaces, but busy, productive spaces with different activities going on; something that we often aren’t used to in classrooms.

Studios are usually flexible time wise, with activities ebbing and flowing. Studios are not spaces which are constantly interrupted with streams of bells and announcements. Studios are places where the work is interesting and involved, where we get into ideas of flow, and where time moves by naturally.

This is exactly what I want from any school my own children go to. I don’t want them to be stifled and held back by arcane rituals such as bells signifying the end of 50 minute blocks of time in a subject that has been artificially carved out of a form of knowledge. I shall be watching Clarence’s blog closely to see what he comes up with. I’m certainly going to start tinkering about with the layout of my classroom… ;)

(Photo credits: Rainbow Dice 2 and School Bell Metaphor at Flickr)