Climate Change: Impacts and Responses
New Learning
e-Learning Ecologies Case Studies
Design Principles and Practices
Information, Medium, and Society
Karthik Krishnan
William Cope
Jason Berg.png "Rita van Haren")
Rita van Haren
Abc20 XyzReda Sadki’s Updates
What does cutting-edge education have to do with parenting, anyway?
When I first saw Professor Cope's photos of a 1983 elementary school classroom, I scoffed. It was so obvious that the "communications and knowledge architecture" was one-way, focused on rote learning and rewarding good behavior which involved staying safely "inside the box". How easy to critique, deconstructing all of the ways in which this particular "banking" form of education was unlikely to intentionally "deposit" anything that might actually be useful to the future lives of these school children. How awful, I thought, and how at odds with everything I try to put into practice with respect to my own professional role. Today's MOOCs and flipped classrooms, with their objectives of making active knowledge-making ubiquitous, make 1983 look like the Dark Ages of education.
And yet. And yet this classroom very closely resembles the ones in which I grew up, with 5th grade in 1980 as a reference point. And I was one of the kids for whom it was an enjoyable experience. I thrived in that environment. I wanted to sponge up the facts and figures, and was proud to raise my hand, hoping the teacher would pick me. Group work simply wasn't as much fun or rewarding as the individual recognition and praise from the teacher. It's only when I jog my 42-year-old brain to recall what made me enjoy school so much that I realize it was the interaction, the creativity, and the serendipity. But the scaffolding was sturdy and reassuring precisely because it was so rigid and didactic.
The same with university. In my professional life, I proclaim my belief that the time for "post-campus education" has arrived. Speaking to a group of young interns, I explained recently that they could expect that their life-long learning had only just begun, and that by abandoning the oh-so-twentieth-century sequence in which you complete your degree and then go to work, they could more actively shape their future careers.
And yet. I was a first-generation college student, going to a university in the U.S. when both my parents never made it past elementary school. My father was put into an orphanage. My mother was denied the education she strived for when her school was closed by the French colonial forces when the Algerian Revolution started. The university campus was for me the site of life-changing experiences.
Today I am also the father of three boys. Nassim, my six-year-old, learned reading, writing and arithmetic this year. When it comes to his education, my approach is far-removed from cutting-edge education. I make him read and re-read texts, do and redo addition and subtraction exercises, drilling it in and checking constantly to see if it's sunk in yet. Rewards are limited or non-existent with me. Sometimes he resists, complaining about the repetition or that it's "too hard". But he also seems to genuinely enjoy completing the exercises. I do this because I'm concerned that his public school teacher is going to be too "slack", because he goes to school in a poor neighborhood in Paris where many of the kids face tough life circumstances, have parents who do not know how to read and write, and are considered by many (including teachers) to be destined for vocational training leading straight to unemployment. Especially if they are of Arab or African descent.
So, what to do with such blatant contradictions between my professed interest in "new learning" and my personal experience? I believe this contradiction can be productive, meaning that I try to mobilize it to understand why colleagues and other interlocutors express skepticism about innovation in learning, whether explicitly or implicitly. And, yes, I'm also trying to rethink how I work with my sons after school. The world is changing. If we want learning to be supportive, participatory, inspiring, motivating, flexible... it's not (only) because that will make learning a more pleasurable experience. It is because this is how our children (or those of others, for those to whom parents have delegated mass public education) will get the chance to develop the knowledge and skills they will need to not only survive but thrive -- in the online classrooms before they learn the hard way, IRL.
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Hi Read,
I am grateful to you for sharing your experience about education and parenting. I am an elementary teacher. By having more contact with parents, teachers learn more about the students they come in contact with. However, some parents make the initial extra push to be involved in their children's school activities and also, volunteer in their children's classrooms. Because of parents' involvement, I have seen a more positive view of teaching which, I believe improved teacher morale. I love all the ins and outs that you have shared.
Continue to shine.
Dear Reda,
Thank you for sharing this thought provoking experience. And I perfectly shares in this plight because I found myself in a similar situation. It looks like you are describing the Ghanaian educational system of today. The robotic way of learning, the traditional banking style of impacting knowledge where only the teacher know all and the student is an empty barrel ready to be filled. What an experience? it is so pathetic to see professors forcing on University students today very old theories that were propounded some years back and have outlived their scientific values. And any student who is unable to memorized and quote verbatim these theories is considered not intelligent.
God bless you sharing
Dear Reda ,
Thanks for sharing your experience, I am convinced that people are naturally self-taught , this educational re-evolution is no accident . The multiplicity of ways in which people learn, lead us to seek new learning paradigms . The crisis of education from my very personal point of view is when something is about to die and something's not born yet , is the generational transition .
I have clear examples around me of e-learning and self-taught and skeptical adults on the other hand , my son Ian who is 15 years old , learns new skills daily through videos and documents located on the Internet and make moments that I never imagined, for Instead my father in law who is 60 years old , can not conceive that a young person can learn without a classroom and when I speak of these learning models call me crazy . :)
I´m of the ham generation, I'm right in the middle of both generations , not born with computers I knew them after many years and I adapted myself very well, I think we need to be flexifles to change and have a good vision of the future to understand what is coming.
I'm very excited to meet and participate in this tool.
Wish you success with this, because it will be to the benefit of many people.
You make very interesting points. My daughter had her first birthday just a few days ago, so we have not crossed that road of 1980's education, but I to grew up during that time period, and can only relate to that type of foundation building. How do we change and bring new concepts to work with our most prized possessions, our children? I keep focusing on the idea of creating communities of learners in our own homes. We must model learning for the sake of our children, but also for ourselves. What a challenging issue. My daughter keeps grabbing for my mobile phone. She likes holding it and carrying it with her as she plays in her room, moving from toy to toy, corner to corner, always bringing it with her. I finally gave her an old phone, so she would not break mine. I worry about what this means and how she will learn, how she will think. It will be so different from us. A hundred years from now how will we judge intelligence? When you find the answers to helping your son, please let me know, you could sell that knowledge on the open market and never work again :)
Reda -
Thank you so much for sharing your personal experience. I agree that as a parent we have to look toward the future and discover what our children will need to function in the changing world of education. As a parent myself, when my daughter started high school, I scoffed at her need for a laptop just to do the basics. I didn't even get a laptop until I started my masters degree, and I never carried one into a classroom! However, we went ahead and bought one and found out if we had not made the purchase she probably would have been far behind. So many of her assignments are computer based, there is no way she could have kept up if she was limited to only after school access or having to use public computers at the library. My son is now a sophmore, and though he doesn't have a laptop he has multiple devices which he can get online and access just about anything he needs. All of this information still makes my head spin but in order to make sure our children keep up, we can't just bury our heads in the sand and pretend technology doesn't exist. We have to learn along with them, and many times before them so we can help them with their upcoming assignments. I know I have a lot of times that my daughter has to help my son with assignments because I don't have the knowledge to help him. It is a new and scary world for parents, even more so for you I would assume because of your parents limited abilities to help you when you were in school. Good luck in the future with your boys!