teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

Not only is it the Easter holidays, but Ed.D. thesis proposal writing time. The latter is proving trickier than I expected! I’ve come across some great quotations recently about school reform and the impact of ICT which I shall share here. I put stuff relevant to my thesis on my wiki and Ed.D. blog. :)

This is a time of challenge and a time for experiment. It is a time to put existing pedagogies, practices, and educational philosophies in question and to construct new ones. It is a time for new pedagogical experiments to see what works and what doesn’t work. It is a time to reflect on our goals and to discern what we want to achieve with education and how to achieve it.

(Kellner, D.M., ‘Technological Revolution, Multiple Literacies, and the Restructuring of Education’, in I. Snyder (ed.), Silicon Literacies: communication, innovation and education in the electronic age, London, 2002, p.166)

Education must transmit, efficiently and on a massive scale, an increasing amount of constantly evolving knowledge and know-how adapted to a knowledge-driven civilization, because this forms the basis of the skills of the future. At the same time, it must find and mark the reference points that will make it possible, on the one hand, for people not to be overwhelmed by the flows of information, much of it ephemeral, that are invading the public and private domains and, on the other, to keep the development of individuals and communities as its end in view. Education must, as it were, simultaneously provide maps of a complex world in constant turmoil and the compass that will enable people to find their way in it.

(J. Delors, ‘The Four Pillars of Education, in J. Delors (ed.), Learning:The Treasure Within, UNESCO, France, 1996, p.85)

In the traditional sociology of knowledge, knowledge and society were considered to be external to one another, with society acting upon knowledge from outside, bringing interests or values or purposes to bear on it, acting upon knowledge as science might act upon nature, bending it to a superior will. With a better awareness of the reflexivity of knowledge, in both senses, this is harder to sustain. The intrinsic sociality of knowledge, the thoroughly social nature of schemes of classification, not just their vulnerability to outside influence, is what must now be accounted for.

J. Muller, Reclaiming Knowledge: social theory, curriculum and education policy, London, 2000, p.2)

Back in the 50s the United States was somewhat embarrassed by the fact that the fastest transatlantic ocean liners beonged to European countries… So American resources of technology and money were mobilised and led to triumph. They made the fastest boat in the world, the S.S. United States. In the very same year the first commercial jet plan flew and it became totally irrelevant which boat could travel faster across the Atlantic… Are we trying to perfect an obsolete system or are we trying to make an educational jet plane?

(Seymour Papert, quoted in OECD, Learning to Change: ICT in Schools (2001), p.112)

Technology by itself is not the answer to… educational problems. …[T]he power of technology will come from its combination with serious educational reform. Schools must first rethink their mission and structure, starting with the needs of students and a set of instructional principles, before they can understand the ways in which technology can help them.

(Means & Olson (1994), quoted in G.F. Hoban, Teacher Learning for Educational Change: a systems thinking approach, OUP, 2002, p.116)