The Local–National–Global Nexus of Education Change Niall MacKinnon Plockton Primary School, Scotland, UK ICSEI Congress, January 2014 Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia
Plockton Primary School and village
Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia
The globalisation of communications, travel, commodities, products, finance and business organisation is leading to another form of globalisation, that of ideas. It is unproblematic to note that across the globe societies are paying special attention to their education systems. What is problematic is how they are doing it. What is even more problematic is consideration of why they are doing it. Is it just to become ‘better’? For what? How determined?
The first email account I was given in a work context in school was in this post when I started in 2001. Prior to 2001 I did not have email contact as a teacher. That is how much has changed in a relatively short time. Since then my practice as school leader and with colleagues here has taken this school into the forefront of e-learning, exploring a large range of technologies and the potentials of pedagogy embedded in those.
Animation ‘cloud’ based Virtual Learning Environments computer coding using a dedicated programming language for young children e-safety children making websites Computer art Computer microscopes Internet linked books (media bridging) collaborative projects connecting across the globe via new technologies in new media New interactive tools opening up new pedagogical approaches
The forms of interaction engendered new forms of writing, and in other media – graphics, sound etc. They also engendered new forms of math, science, art, and‌
Pupil constructed animation
Mixed media and cross-curricular – school website
At the same time we also were changing our curriculum in regard to some of the ‘old’ stuff. Thus we have very active engagement with the arts of all kinds but that opens up new potentials
Models became computer controlled
All this is to dispose the mind to think in new ways, to open up new potential through new technological potentialities, but what is really new is the thinking. Are we enabling that thinking? Deep institutional mindsets have set in place an educational metaformation which itself comprises a theory but which is not made explicit.
Inter-school collaboration, online, lots! From 2002: 21st century skills Commissioned and published as a case study by The Oracle Foundation
Suppose that teaching rarely ‘produces’ learning’ or that most real learning (capability to act) is in fact collaborative. Perhaps there are such deeply ingrained figments of social reality that the possibility of other modes of thinking and doing are extinguished.
The missing ingredient is motive and purpose, seeing the potentiality in media and reconstructing our consciousness to utilise the potentiality of the media. There is also the permissive environment, especially that of the wider system.
A specialist meaning rezones awareness and transmits its additional mental functionality to new situational applications, even beyond IT. As per the proverbial opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. The changes from when I began teaching thirty years ago render that another world, far further apart than that between Java and Scotland now.
But what joins us? It is change. But more fundamentally it is change of the same things, not of different things.
Thus I state here that the change is the nexus. Thus where once there would have been lateral difference, and still is, it is lesser. The fundamental change joining us is vertical, embedded in change. Those are the changes which join us – a conjoined change.
The forms of learning for educators, which now need to guide and steer change cannot be specifications and judgement. There is no ‘How good is…?’ because there is no ‘What good is…?’ either from school to school, or student to student. There are norms, and zones of coherence, and incoherence, but appearances are very deceptive. On first impression I thought these avenues and thoroughfares in Yogyakarta were chaotic. They are not. They embody flow, very efficiently. My classroom has so often been far more like a Yogyakarta street than some production line delivery channel. Efficiency is in flow.
The essence of the new ‘four capacities’ Scotland’s curriculum reform since 2004 was saying reach out and explore the potential in our students. Basically we created orders of meaning. To make this happen we had to think and collaborate. There was no plan. But neither was it incoherent or spasmodic. The real plans we were mandated to produce, at length, had little relevance to this This was something different – a metaplan, framed around purpose and thus indistinct and fuzzy.
There is no mythical excellence, only an optimal fit between current action, current purpose and a loosely configured future, and for each individual. That fit will be essentially the same, as new awarenesses, new contexts, new purposes, adapted from those which preceded them, as the future itself orders, demand a new fit. Withstand that and attempt to hold it up or chain it down at your peril.
We live by intention, not targets. As we realise intention we assemble or access knowledge or skills. A student who may seem demotivated in a sea of learning targets can become energised in a sea of purpose, intention, ambition, desires, motivation and goals, once owned. To be owned they have to be co-owned. They have to want to do this. For me that is the trick of teaching, which is actually not teaching at all, but connecting.
The essence of children’s development in the knowledge age is confidence, responsibility and contribution. learning has to fit those as an equal partner, in essence serving those high ideals. That could still yet be a major reconfiguration of schooling, not driven by learning but being. That is what is transformational about Scotland’s new approach, which has been spawned by 21 st century technological and communicational potentialities.
New pedagogies may philosophically be closer to those who inspired the Buddhist temple here at Borubudur than to the industrial production line assumptions framing earlier delivery-oriented curricula in Scotland But I fear this process of change has not been grasped
Develop the self-awareness of how to mediate change. Do this by doing it. Grasp the nexus. The Local-National-Global Nexus of Education Change.
The children are doing it anyway (Classrooms – Malawi & Plockton)