Schools, schooling and educational influences

Ms Marie Huxtable APEX (Able Pupils Extending Opportunities) Project England, United Kingdom

Schools, schooling – words and more words – so frequently used but so little understood, and in 2006 the appreciation and acceptance of other forms of communication beyond linear formal text was only just becoming accepted by the establishment.

I look back to those far distant days 50 years ago, when schools were buildings in which formal instruction was delivered to a captive audience of children and young people. Knowledge was something to be imparted rather than created, and the efficiency of the transmission was judged through traditional measurement devices in the form of test scores reported on an ordinal ratio scale. Nothing much seemed to have changed from the 19th century (Gipps, 2004). But – and it is a big but – this is only one of the stories that could be written about what was happening. A flavour of another story can be caught in the titles of some of the official documents in England and the currency of some of the language being used – ‘Excellence and Enjoyment’, ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education’, ‘Every Child Matters’, personalising learning, educators, communities of enquiry, educational theories and values, lifelong learning, inclusion and so on.

‘You don’t have to knock down walls to change a classroom’Educators were travelling round the globe to talk, to see, to communicate, and they were beginning to follow the example of their pupils and explore and travel the virtual world through email, online chats, conversations and collaborations and even the odd video conference. The growths of connections, the seeds of change, were being nourished. As a French educator said to me on an Arion visit, ‘You don’t have to knock down walls to change a classroom’.

So, the walls of schools were becoming less rigid, more permeable, and there were some moves from simply ‘schooling’ children towards working with the far more subtle concept of education as can be seen in the work of Jack Whitehead on living educational theories and living values at: www.actionresearch.net. ‘I use the idea of influence to stress the intentional, rather than causal, nature of educational relationships. Because I accept some responsibility for my educational influences in my own learning, I do say that I am educating myself, in the sense that I am responsible for my educational influences in my own learning. I resist making claims that I have educated anyone else, in a direct, causal sense of, “because I did this, then the other learnt that”. For me to recognize my educational influence in the learning of another I must see that what I have done has been mediated by the valuing or creative experiencing of the other, in their own learning.’ (Whitehead, 2006)

Learning as a social activity was being recognised and developed by teachers working with the ideas of educators, as Guy Claxton expressed in his book, Building learning power: ‘Good learners balance their relationships with other people. Being willing to be interdependent, without becoming either too dependent on others for support or feedback, or too aloof and unwilling to take criticism or to work as part of a team’. (Claxton, 2002)

Educators were beginning to work creatively with their pupils as researchers, as can be seen in the work of Belle Wallace (2004) with TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context, see: www.londongt.org) and from the online video clips by Branko Bognar in 2005, where children can be seen creating their own living educational theory accounts.

‘I worked for two days and two nights to translate and title video recordings where you could see live example of our effort to apply action research in our educational practice.’

On second and third videos (www.jackwhitehead.com and at www.jackwhitehead.com, respectively) ‘we could find that children should not be treated only as participants in action research of adults (teachers) but also as co-researcher or stand-alone researchers. Marica Zovko, class-teacher was mentor to her students and I was mentor to her. Her students evidenced that they understand process of action research and know how to apply them to improve their living practice’.

How do we improve our learning? What are the roles of the educator? These are questions in 2056 that are no longer appropriated by age. We recognise that we are all learning, unlearning and relearning all the time, and while we accept particular responsibilities as adults to the young, we are able to value the contribution each of us can make to the learning of us all. In 2006, learning outcomes were beginning to be understood in terms of the creation of knowledge by learners in collaboration with educators, as you can see from this beautiful story Eye and the fellow-traveller, by Jane Spiro (2006). See: www.jackwhitehead.com.

This new appreciation of learning required the creation of new forms of standards of judgement and evidence that educators could use to understand and improve their research, but these ideas had yet to become mainstream and transform the way educators were held accountable. The development in technology since then has helped considerably and, whereas video, images, nonlinear accounts were being introduced, in 2056 we now take for granted that the products of learning will be multimodal and through these artefacts we seek to convey the subtleties of the process and skills of knowledge creation.

… the most important seed that was sown by the year 2006 was the thought that educational practice is a values-laden activity …I have tried to give a taste of some of the quiet challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies that have enabled us to embrace the challenges of the 21st century as opportunities. The technology has become faster and more mobile, and has allowed us to connect and collaborate more effectively with learners and educators around the globe. The focus on content and the simple retrieval of information to produce in competitive tests has shifted to processes and the co-creation of knowledge as the valued products of schools. But perhaps the most important seed that was sown by the year 2006 was the thought that educational practice is a values-laden activity that involves people of all ages connecting and co-creating valued knowledge to the benefit of themselves and society.

I am aware that if I continue to ask the same question, then I will continue to find the same answer. So I wonder whether by 2056 I will still be asking about schools and schooling, or whether I will be able to ask questions of a different order, such as ‘How can I contribute to the improvement of educational contexts and cultures, which enable children and young people to gain increasing sophistication as learners, as they contribute to the community of enquiry and knowledge creation?’ or ‘How can I learn to ask productive questions most effectively with the younger learners in the educational community?’ or ‘How do I know I am improving my practice as an educator?’ or …

References

Claxton G. Building learning power. 2002. Bristol: TLO Ltd.
Gipps C. Beyond testing: towards a theory of educational assessment. 1994. Abingdon: Routledge Falmer
Wallace B, Maker J, Cave D, Chandler S. Thinking skills and problem-solving: an inclusive approach. 2004. London: David Fulton Pub.
Whitehead J. Action research living theory. 2006. London: Sage.