RSA Education’s Weblog

I was invited to a fascinating event on Friday, by Tessy Britton FRSA who is always a font of optimism and exciting new contacts, ideas and connections (check out her blog).

The event involved Jerry Stein of the University of Minnesota presenting his Learning Dreams programme to a small group.

Learning Dreams is about changing cultures of truancy and low educational aspiration by getting parents and whole communities involved in learning: finding out what their own learning dreams are and then helping them to realise them. The project is funded on the basis that it reduces truancy and improves attainment levels in schools, but is based on the principle that schools are not the answer to learning in these contexts. The argument goes that they are fighting a losing battle if children are not brought up in homes in which learning is valued and loved for its own sake, but also that learning should be a community wide phenomenon, not something that only happens in schools.

The successes of the programme and the fantastic, innovative and committed community work that goes into it can be read about on the website and elsewhere - I’d highly recommend a look.

The burning question for me as someone who works on innovations within schools, but who has a deep sympathy with the idea of lifewide and life long learning, is what can schools do to complement such community-based learning, and to prevent the kind of alienation from learning displayed in those families and communities in the first place? Is it getting children into school only half the battle if they leave without a love of learning that they can pass down to their own children and prevent the need for further intervention? Or are our attempts at stimulating a love of learning in schools a red herring in the face of the indifference learning of some parents?

I hope you will forgive me another post with ‘Knowledge vs.’ in the title, but the role of knowledge is coming up again and again at the moment. This is partly because, alongside arguments about diversity of provision and behaviour, it has got caught up in the ongoing battle around what makes for social justice in education.

I did some thinking about learner voice in preparation for a talk I gave at Futurelab’s Challenging Learner Voice event. At some stage, I gather the presentation that accompanied that talk will be available on-line and I’ll link to it then, but for now, I wanted to throw out a couple of thoughts which occurred to me.

Michael Young, amongst others, have concerns about moving away from an idea of knowledge which is systematically and heirarchically organised within a subject discipline, and towards an emphasis on personal experience and what makes sense in a local context. He argues that such a shift has the potential to trap young people where they are by over-valuing knowledge which, while more immediately engaging, is only really useful in their context. If true, this would be a particular problem for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds (check out the interview I did with Michael for a quick overview of the argument).

However, those engaged in the development of learner voice will counter that traditional subject content, which tends to didactically taught, is a bigger problem as it teaches young people to be passive, that their perspective counts for little, and presents them with the knowledge powerful people think is important but which students can practically do little with (a perspective which of course Michael has some sympathy with, having started much of this debate running in the past). Many disengage with learning presented in that way, especially those that lack powerful external social pressures/incentives to do so. Worst of all, they argue, it teaches acquiescence to authority and fails to offer the kind of active, democratic engagement in a school community which will help us shape the citizens of the future. In this analysis, traditional teaching impoverishes the already disadvantaged by inhibiting their ability to criticalyl engage in and change their social context.

Both point to real problems. All agree that no young person deserves a second-rate offering on the basis of their background. But what should that mean in practice? All young people need both to understand the point of learning and to feel like knowledge is powerful in their lives, but also need the discipline and resilience to grapple with difficult concepts or the more tedious aspects of learning where its relevance is less immediately obvious.

In conversation with some people I met at the Geography Association, they talked about the value of subject integration in engaging young people, but made the point that it needed to be ’strong inter-disciplinarity’. What this means needs further exploration, but intuitively I feel Opening Minds can offer part of the answer.

Teachers planning projects in an Opening Minds school will usually be subject specialists, working with others to incorporate the important content from their disciplines. They know and care about their subjects, and will work hard to ensure students a strong grounding that enables them to specialise later on if they choose to. However, the projects, led by the competences and usually having a practical outcome, will let young people use the knowledge they acquire for a purpose. And, within the parameters of project, they will let students explore the territory more freely than in a traditional classroom. This combination of purpose, freedom and support is both more engaging and empowering for young people, and results in better relationships between teachers and students.

We have a lot of work to do to understand what ’strong-interdisciplinarity’ might mean, but it is important that we do. I hope the RSA with Opening Minds schools can play a useful role in developing our thinking.

- Ian McGimpsey

AC Grayling gave a wonderful talk (not a lecture, as he pointed out, because he wasn’t reading from anything) at the RSA about reading: what is unique about reading, how intensive and attentive reading can be an emancipatory process, and how reading promotes tolerance and empathy by allowing us to explore world beyond ‘our finite self’.

The talk is available to download from the RSA website so I won’t reiterate it at length here. I just wanted to remark upon the striking similarity between Professor Grayling’s exhortation to the education system to turn out young people who are ready and anxious to read whatever and whenever they can, and the leading point in the RSA’s education charter which states “it is the primary role of education to instill a love of learning in young people and give them the ability and desire to carry on learning throughout life”.

We’ll be asking Professor Grayling if he wants to join the growing movement of people signing up to the charter - in the meantime any thoughts would be more than welcome about how to give more young people the kind of spine tingling love of reading that he spoke of last week.

Yesterday was the launch of the RSA Academy. Open since September, the day was a chance to meet the staff and students, and to get some coverage for what is a remarkable school (a BBC News video here, and some press reports here and here).

The school has been entirely planned around Opening Minds from the design of the curriculum, to the planning of the building, to staffing structures this is an Opening Minds school in every sense of the word.

The highlights of the day for me were two conversations I had, one with two heads of house (the school has three houses). They were talking about the three-hour lessons. Yes, they were hard at first, but quickly they found themselves adapting and planning in a different way. Varying the pace of the lesson, the types of activity, not teaching so much from the front - the classrooms were becoming radically different.  And because lessons were 3 hours, not 50 minutes, there was room for far more complex and creative tasks. In that time teachers can introduce, carry out, and close pieces of work they would never have attempted otherwise. That means less simple lecturing from the front and more activity for students.

The other conversation I really enjoyed was with a small group of media students, preparing for an hour’s filming at the local airport for a documentary they were making. Their ownership of their learning and their enjoyment was obvious. They had one hour, and one chance to get it right. Their planning was meticulous, and it clearly meant a huge amount to them to get it right. What was the big difference, I asked? ‘It’s so much more active‘.

Active was a word I heard again and again from staff and students, and it summed up the buzzy atmosphere perfectly.

It was an emotional day for many at the Academy and the RSA, who are beginning to see the fruits of many hours of labour pay off. The staff and students at the RSA Academy in Tipton have created a new dynamism about learning.

Long may it continue.

- Ian McGimpsey

I’ve just got back from Stephen Heppel’s annual Be Very Afraid event at the BAFTA building in Picadilly.

The event allows students and teachers from schools, colleges and universities to showcase their innovative uses of IT in and out of the classroom to an audience of policy makers and media.

There were several really exciting projects, but one in particular caught my attention as one of those really simple ideas that has huge potential in all sorts of ways.

Students at Lampton School in Hounslow have created a website that shows profiles of people aged from one to one hundred, with simple facts about them, comments and lifestyle information . To create the site, students at the school had to go out into the local area and interview lots of people - asking what they had for breakfast and where they were born.

What was so brilliant about the project was how many ways it had had a positive on the young people and the community at large. The Year 7 students presenting the project today said they found out loads of things like how the ethnic make up of the area differed by age and how older people they thought were scary were actually nice to talk to. They feel more a part of their local area and told me that there was a greater respect between students at the school and other people in the community.

One of the students told me how he used to get shouted at by one local resident who didn’t like him and his friends playing football so near his house. The students all thought he was scary until they interviewed him for the project. Now they voluntarily try to keep their football game away from his house and no longer get shouted at.

The same project is being carried out in Goa and the students at Lampton are communicating with their Indian counterparts about the challenges they experience and comparing the profiles from the two countries.

The students’ teacher told me that they would like nothing better than to have other schools email them to ask for an account on the website and to start adding their own local profiles of people of all ages. In an era of an ageing population and increasingly rapid technological and cultural change, we all have something to learn from anything that begins to reverse the trend of alienation between generations.

- Louise Thomas

Matthew Taylor’s recent post about the impact of the recent economic downturn on our national character had me reflecting again upon the relationship between teachers and consumerism. Matthew’s point is partly that a failure of our political leadership to push us to reflect on our part in creating the current crisis will have negative consequences in the long run - pointing out that greed was not the monopoly of a group of bankers but shared amongst a whole class of people.

Consumerism and the market have infused so much of our lives, and to such a degree, that if a time of new austerity does come we will have to question the basis of many of our aspirations and our identities. To the degree that wisdom implies long-term thinking over short-termism, and being other-regarding rather than self-centred, education could have a particular role to play in helping our culture adapt.

First, however, there is some soul-searching to do about the influence of the market within education.

Anna Craft reflects on the nature of teaching creativity in Britain in her recent book of essays, Creativity, Wisdom and Trusteeship which she co-edits with Howard Gardner and Guy Claxton. In her essay she concentrates on how our view of creativity in schools is so often infused with Western consumerism - creativity which serves the market. She argues that when we talk of creativity we place our emphasis on novelty, the individual perspective and the individual vision, and the creation of cultural products. This has its advantages (promotion of freedom of expression being one), but also important limitations.

What, Anna asks, is the role for creativity away from innovation and change for its own sake. Where is the room created for example, for collective expression of existing cultural values. In a time where we live with the real prospect of scarce resources, what about the ‘perspective which says “make-do-and-mend”‘. And what is education’s role in fostering wisdom?

I’m no expert on creativity but it struck me as a timely warning, and one that resonates throughout education.

In the UK where absolute poverty is very much an exception, wealth does not equate to happiness, though relative poverty tends towards profound unhappiness (check out the presentation from Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page at the recent ‘Can we learn our way to happiness’ event at the Campaign for Learning). Yet we know that young people are increasingly instrumental about education. Children tend to read not for the joy of reading, but to gain ‘level 4′; more young people learn in order gain qualifications to get a job.  This is a perspective at least acquiesced to, and even encouraged by, schools.

SATs have just gone for 14 year olds. There is doubtless zero connection between that decision and the widespread crisis in the markets. Still, will this global crisis be the reference point which forces us into a real re-consideration of what school is for, and how it fosters wise citizens not good consumers?

Ian McGimpsey

A quick note after attending two events recently where both speaker and audience attitudes towards children and technology struck me as worth a comment. A compelling presentation by Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, at the Campaign for Learning’s ‘Can we learn our way to happiness?’ conference, and a panel debate on youth and social exclusion here at the RSA both addressed the demise of outdoor play and the adverse affect of changes to childhood on children’s development.

We know that the space allowed to children - both literally and figuratively - to play and to learn by themselves is severely curtailed. Children are less active, they learn less about risk taking, socialising and independence. There are innumerable reasons why the loss of outdoor play and the freedom of children to explore unsupervised is to be mourned, and anyone that knows me would tell you that I would be the first to advocate the great outdoors - for children and for the rest of us.

That said, it seemed to me that many of the delegates and speakers at both of the events I went to seemed to accept an unproblematised characterisation of outdoors = good, computer games = bad. This was to the extent that I felt such a judgment was an emotive one based on a certain amount of nostalgia for more traditional idea of childhood, and an uncertainty about new technologies and their impact on children.

Such nostalgia could get us stuck, when what will benefit children are pragmatic and progressive approaches.

We need to be pragmatic and accept that unsupervised wholesome, educational outdoor play is not going to be a reality of for many children now and in the near future for many reasons, including poverty, home location, parental fears and changes in childhood culture. And, we need to deal with the reality that interaction through ‘virtual’ interfaces is often more a reality for some children than building a den in a wood ever will be. While it is important to maximise the potential of the real life worlds of these children, we must not in doing so deny the validity of virtual interactions because of their failure to live up to adult nostalgia for  idyllic childhoods of the past.

Secondly, we need to be progressive in our attitudes towards children and technology, and recognise the opportunities. A number of organisations (see Consolarium for example) are looking at the educational potential of video games in developing risk taking, strategy and even citizenship. BECTA have done work on the advanced communication skills picked up by children who are interacting daily with hundreds of others through online networking sites and interactive online games. It is important that the potential opportunities offered to many children by the internet and other new technologies are embraced, understood, and maximised, because we all want today’s children to have the skills and knowledge that they will need to thrive in the rapidly changing 21st century.

If adults don’t engage in a balanced manner then we run the risk of allowing our fears about obesity, internet predators, unwholesome content and the rest limit the potential positive impact of technology on the lives and development of many children; just as fears about traffic, abduction, paedophilia and accidents have led to a reduction in otherwise fêted outdoor activity.