A New Pedagogy?

On My Mind 15 Feb 2011 08:36 am
The Urgency for Change
As schools, we are going to have to “forfeit some control,” as we well should as the learning opportunities outside the classroom become more ubiquitous and effective. But we have to make sure that those opportunities are equitable and open as much as we can. That’s the real urgency of the debate right now, how do we use these new (and old) technologies to lift everyone up instead of just a few.
From my limited vantage point, it seems community colleges are reaching out for partnerships with businesses more and more as funding dries up (whether its reductions at the state level, an unwillingness to raise taxes or up tuition rates). When you combine resources with business you get a lot of opportunities to merge learning objectives with real world applications, but you “are going to bed” with a corporate mind-set bent on one thing-to teach students what they need to know to achieve performance goals in order to raise shareholder equity. How much control educational institutions give up may not be based on the ability to determine curriculum at all; perhaps its become a numbers game. The possible downside to having to rely increasingly on partnerships and grants is that this complicates the ability to reach everyone, since funding will continue to be scare for some time to come with targeted program offerings receiving the larger share of the institution’s instructional budget.
On My Mind & The Shifts 01 Feb 2011 09:09 am
When’s Our Egypt Moment?
This weekend I kept thinking, when will we have our Egypt moment? When will we get to the point where enough people feel dissatisfied with the whole school thing and want change badly enough to rise up and say “That’s it! We’re not going to do this anymore!”
While watching what was taking place in Egypt, I heard the phrase “Revolution eats its own children.” QUOTATION: Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children. ATTRIBUTION:Georg Büchner (1813–1837), German dramatist, revolutionary. Trans. by Gerhard P. Knapp (1995). Danton’s Death, act I (1835).
The question has always been if you don’t like the current system, what are you going to put in its place? And, will it be any better than the old way? I hope while we are all trying to figure out how to make education better, we also look around the world and draw in parts of other systems that may seem alien to us, but that could be blended into a better process. I think we need to be asking this question globally and trying to sort out what might work for all children growing up in the decades ahead.
The scary part, as with what is going on in Egypt now, is whether the changes we put in place will stand the test of time and whether we can build into this system flexibility to accommodate changes in our world that we cannot even imagine. I liken it to discussions concerning our own Constitution,…do we follow it as if it was written in stone or do we interpret its statements and try to find an equitable way to go forward using an educational framework that won’t self-destruct?