The world’s most influential education think-tank, the Paris-based OECD, has just published another of its papers on “reimagining” schooling. https://lnkd.in/edkv-8Tz In fact it’s less to do with “re-imagining” than modernising, updating, improving. That’s absolutely needed and long overdue in many schools and systems, but it’s not the school re-imagined. The OECD’s school is still a place where students go to watch adults work, as Dylan Wiliam put it so crisply. Getting ‘reimagining’ right means beginning from the students’ work, not from teachers’ work or the work of the school. “Michelle Obama recalls her mother insisting that we’re not bringing up children in this family, we’re bringing up adults.” (This is from my Unbeaching the Whale: Can Australia’s schooling be reformed?) “So too school. By the time those labelled as “students” reach their twelfth year in schooling’s workforce they could and should be doing responsible, adult work in the maintenance and administration of the school and, first and foremost, in the organisation and conduct of the work of producing learning, an expansion and reorganisation of the grammar that could be made explicit and thereby guided and rewarded by progressions [or ‘developmental continua’]. This is more than ‘giving’ students ‘agency,’ or getting them to ‘engage’ with what’s put in front of them, or ‘putting them in control of their own learning,’ or ‘making them good citizens of the school community,’ laudable as such ambitions are; it is setting out to make the school more productive of development and growth as well as of learning, to take the school from being a place where children and young people go to watch adults work to one in which they become responsible members of the workforce engaged in the production of themselves, of each other, and of knowledge, understanding and capability.”
Definately not reimagining
Owner, Eddie Deen and Company
7moPedagogy is not the way to go, ever, unless you are a robot! Pedagogy has within it, tension that constantly brings two perspectives, either you wear boots and spurs at the expense of those lesser than you, those who are wearing the saddles, bridles, and bits or, you are stuck, you are not worthy of ever wearing the boots and spurs, thus you are destined to die wearing the saddles, bridles, and bits. To those, who finally made it to the top of the hierarchy, where the boots and spurs makes them feel all powerful, where they can exist at the top of the hierarchy’s rankings, they ain’t going to allow heutagogical thinking to unfold. Pedagogy’s dynamic approach to education is built around this tension, you either own the factory, the boss or, you are the factory worker! Either way, they both are robotic extensions of machines! Look at kindergarten, students existing to make sure that their boss, the teacher, must be happy! Here, the student’s happiness, the ventral striatum and the nucleus accumbens are being programmed to be ready able, to one day, look extrinsically for someone to tell you what to think, and when to think it, thus your happiness is found in believing that someone else must call your plays in life!