The Classroom Without Walls and Lifelong Learning

This is the view that greets me on fine day on my way to work.

Yet as I arrive at school, I know that the landscape of education has changed forever since I began teaching eleven years ago this week.

Sure, I heard the early harbingers such as radical education revolutionary John Holt who wrote the still powerful 'How Children Fail' (1982), to the more mainstream commentators like Alvin Toffler  in "Future Shock" (1970) and "The Third Wave" (1980),  as he eloquently explained how the technological information age would redefine what we had come to know as 'power. '

Later, education luminaries like Sir Ken Robinson (2010) urged us to consider that the outdated industrial education model was literally choking the opportunities of learners to be active participants in a society that increasingly values product over process much to the detriment of our very existence, very much like John Holt had expressed half a century before him in the initial 1964 edition of his book.

As educators we are at the intersection between an old paradigm, the emergent modalities that have a persistent common thread: make learning dynamic, multidisciplinary and contextual, and the vast future that stretches before us and warns us that there is no certainty, no guarantees and precious little to guide us save our - hopefully sturdy- shared moral compass and determination to improve educational opportunities for our future generations.

Here I am a decade on, and how is the view from where I stand at this intersection? Observing the influences that create the palpable tensions within our educational models, it is important to note them and place them within a context that, for me, is at the very core of where the struggle to create change lies.

Education as cultural reproduction

The most personally felt influence has been to see how education continues, to this day, to marginalise learners arbitrarily and against educational research. Much is written about 'the tail end' of learners yet we persist to limit students' opportunities by sorting them, through standardised grading systems, that bear absolutely no relation to their learning potential. This system has been most prevalently active since colonial times (some would argue earlier), where a section of population is given opportunities according to where they are ranked by arbitrary social rules dictated by the dominant cultural group (Harker, 1992). 

To shake off these colonial influences that have denied so many, through institutionalised educational policies and practices, the ability to access key 'opportunities to learn' (Boler, 2016) and advance in educational outcomes is inextricably, beautifully, linked to how we as educators must approach the changes before us.

I remember distinctly the day the penny dropped for me. It was Ulearn 2006 in Christchurch, when one of the keynote speakers declared: "This is the first generation of children who knows more about technology than their parents.'' That one sentence fluttered like the wings of a butterfly and focused a picture into perspective. Hundreds of thousands of years of cultural replication, that we'd known as education through generational transmission, were over. Done. No more 'chosen' adults being the main holders of vast amounts of indispensable knowledge and learning opportunities. The power shift was real and the need to adapt urgent, for if educators could not truly grasp the rising tide of this communication revolution we would surely become like the system we worked in: irrelevant.

Thankfully, there are many different new learning disciplines emerging that are based on the same principle. Call it design thinking, or inquiry, or project-based learning, gamification and so on. The principle is the same: students are knowledge making through a personal context that pulls learning during an open-ended and dynamic learning process, where the teacher is no longer the holder of power as information.

Slowly, gingerly, with great trepidation, I see education letting go of the confirmation biased notion that we need to exert control over students' learning for it to be effective. Those thousands of years of dominant cultural reproduction modes won't release their grip over night but it cannot be avoided. The cultural leviathan that is education is changing course. I notice it in the eyes of parents when I explain our new digital reporting systems or a new exciting app that the children are using to create learning. I see it in the idea that children need not be ability grouped to achieve high educational outcomes. I even saw it in the transformation that one simple action had in the way I affirmed what I believed about classrooms and their structures for learning.

The digital tools and frameworks at our disposal mean that classroom walls have come down in the same way that the industrial educational model is being dismantled. Learning is now anytime, anywhere. The walls are disappearing for learners and for educators. We can connect like never before at a speed that is as terrifying as it is exciting. There is a feeling of faster, bigger, better in our race to try to be one step ahead from technological change that is slowly engulfing every aspect of our lives.  How many people have to share an image of their holiday and be simultaneously away but present regardless? The same with educators. I find my down time consumed by exciting professional opportunities and possibilities because there is someone, somewhere with something new that can help me grow, and I can honestly say I don't begrudge it one little bit. I am unlearning what I've learned and learning so much more, just as the children I teach are developing the skills to become lifelong learners. I am, as they are, a 21st century learner.

Image from Connected Alliance

The divide between learning at school and outside of school has become paper thin thanks to the availability and opportunity to engage with content anywhere and anytime. In fact, even within our classroom walls we are connecting with an even bigger learning community and so blurring the geography of our educational institutions. Our class will be joining #NZreadaloud, extending the frontiers of our classroom into the world wide digital space. We will go on Expeditions and use digital interfaces to communicate and construct knowledge from sources outside our immediate physical domain. How many students connect now through digital means with the outside world for learning while within their classroom walls? Youtube, Skype, Twitter, the list goes on.

Today I watch the space probe Juno begin to orbit Jupiter, our gas giant mythologically revered as the king of gods Zeus, who dethroned his less famous father Chronos, the god of time, to stop him devouring future generations. As we extend our reach towards the cosmos to chart with first hand experience what is out there, I, as part of the educational community, face the uncharted waters of our digital future where the only tools at my disposal are the ability to adapt and the commitment to raise to the challenge to create, however that may be, a future for those that come after us. The bows sending the arrows forth like Juno towards a future we cannot even dream of.

On Children by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) from The Prophet, 1923

Readings:

Boaler, J. (2015). Mathematical mindsets: Unleashing students' potential through creative math, inspiring messages and innovative teaching. John Wiley & Sons.

Harker, R. (1992). Cultural capital, education and power in New Zealand: An agenda for research. New Zealand Sociology, 7(1), 1-19.

Holt, J. C. (1982). How children fail. Da Capo Press.

Robinson, K. (2006). How schools kill creativity. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en

Toffler, A., & Alvin, T. (1981). The third wave (pp. 32-33). New York: Bantam books.

Toffler, A. (1990). Future shock. Bantam.