Future Proofing: A transformative educational agenda for changed and changing times

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Future ProofingA transformative educational
agenda for changed and changing times

• Dr Leonie Rowan
• Educational Futures and Innovation
• Deakin University Geelong Victoria
• lrowan_at_deakin.edu.au

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The context

• New times
• new technologies, social arrangements,
  communication patterns
• New understandings of identity
• changes to what it means to be an Australian, a
  worker, a student, a learner, a teacher, an
  educator--an outdoor educator--a child etc
• High levels of stress and anxiety about the
  nature of youth and ways we should protect them
  from the world and from themselves

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The context

• New-ish interrogations of relationships between
  adults and kids the purposes of school and its
  curriculum--the search for the new basics and
  essential learnings --and also some calls to
  get back to old basics
• In a quick fix era, we see some adoptions of
  new frameworks that hope for a quick solution
  to complex problems

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The other context

• Old patterns of educational success and failure
• Despite the changes around us, despite years of
  equity-based educational reform, some groups of
  people continue to have more positive experiences
  of education than others

Buffy Hey, DawnHow was school today? Dawn
The usual. A big square building filled with
boredom and despair Buffy Just how I remember
it.
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Those most at risk

• Lower SES
• Indigenous
• Rural and Regional
• Any kid not matching up to the mythical norms
  for various subjects

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The consequences

• Educational alienation/failure exacerbates risk
  of
• Low self esteem, poor mental health
• Depression, obesity
• Poor health, increased hospitalisation
• Early school leaving
• Lower employment
• Higher rates of welfare
• High risk behaviours
• Teenage parenting
• Reduced access to information and services etc
  etc etc

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• The future is here. Its just unevenly
  distributed.
• William Gibson

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This is a challenging context
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Educated Hope

• This dual context requires more than tinkering
  around the edges we need a dynamic, responsive
  education system with educators driven by
  Educated Hope (Giroux 2004) folk who believe
  that
• The new world can be meaningfully, positively
  responded to and patterns of educational success
  and failure can be transformed
• All discipline areas and educational activities
  can play a role in developing education that
  works to future proof all students (without
  wrapping them in cotton wool)

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About Future Proofing

• Future proofed graduates are prepared by their
  education to make a positive contribution to
  changing professional, social, industrial,
  scientific and domestic environments at all
  stages of their life, regardless of their
  background and identities
• Future proofing is a vision statement, not a
  vaccination campaign

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Future Proofed learners have

• Strong literacy and numeracy skills
• Excellent multi-literacy skills including high
  level capacities in the new basics of ICT
• operational, cultural, critical literacy
• An understanding of what a changed and changing
  social and economic environment means for their
  present and their future (career, relationships,
  family and health)

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Future Proofed learners have

• The ability to live harmoniously in a community
  characterised by social and cultural diversity
• The potential to contribute to the social,
  emotional, intellectual and financial future of
  the nation
• A strong sense of self, and a positive attitude
  towards change and life long/life wide learning

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• The illiterate of the 21st century will not be
  those who cannot read and write, but those who
  cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
• Alvin Toffler

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A role for everyone

• Future proofing as a vision is about developing
  attitudes and dispositions not just about
  specific skills
• It develops new kinds of positive relationships
  between kids and
• Change
• Uncertainty
• School
• Teachers
• The community
• The world

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A role for everyone

• Focusing on the need for new educational
  strategies to respond meaningfully to new times
  and new youth, the Future Proofing philosophy
  draws upon research in broad fields of sociology
  and psychology to help us rethink the three
  message systems of schooling curriculum,
  assessment, pedagogy

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Research Background

• Authentic Instruction/Pedagogy
• Fred Newman Gary Wehlage in US
• intellectual accomplishments that are
  worthwhile, significant, and meaningful, such as
  those undertaken by successful adults (Newman,
  1996 p. 23).
• Knowledge Producing Schools
• Chris Bigum et al. Deakin
• http//www.deakin.edu.au/education/lit/kps
• Working with local community, doing research
  that is valued by and valuable to local
  interests, the knowledge producing school takes
  seriously the task of preparing students for a
  world in which knowledge and its production are
  increasingly important. (Bigum, 2006)

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General Principles

• Students need to be involved in the production of
  knowledge about particular topics (not just
  consumption or reproduction of knowledge) this
  involves higher order thinking
• This occurs through work on authentic tasks in
  the real world with real audiences
• Students are thus active (not passive)
• Managing this involves substantive
  conversation/collaboration, by teachers and
  students, with experts in a field as it exists
  outside of school
• (Bigum 2005 2004 2003 Newman 1996)

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General Principles

• Authentic projects are inherently unpredictable
  and risky where risk is defined as human
  interaction with uncertainty (Cline, 2005
  Cline, 2004)

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A word about risk

• Risk is a big topic in education
• the world isn't "safe" any more because taking
  risks has become the rule, not the exception. If
  you can't innovate effectively (which means
  innovating about how to make a life for yourself
  and your own) you're dead meat cos the painting
  by numbers linear life course is dead in the
  water
• Colin Lankshear

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Does risk improve learning?

• Risk is educationally value neutral neither
  automatically good, nor automatically bad (Cline,
  2005)
• Its potential value depends upon the way in which
  (and reasons why) it is incorporated into a
  learning environment

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Does risk improve learning?

• We know from research that
• Authentic Tasks Improved Learning
• Authentic Tasks Uncertainty
• Uncertainty Risk taking
• QED
• Authentic Tasks Uncertainty Risk Improved
  Learning Outcomes (especially from
  historically disengaged)

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To Sum Up

• Future proofing initiatives
• Promote deep learning and encourage higher order
  thinking through the production of knowledge
• Engage with the real world in the completion
  of authentic tasks/products (and thereby contain
  a element of uncertainty and risk)
• We therefore stop making science students, and
  develop scientists not english students, but
  novelists or poets or script writers

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One final key ingredient

• Working in this way--on authentic tasks,
  developing real world projects--requires access
  to expertise in the particular real world field
  of activity (to provide intellectual rigour and
  authentic feedback)

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Different Contexts

• Different educators in different areas have
  differing degrees of expertise in the real
  world of their discipline
• Some disciplines have more experience of
  authentic tasks
• These tend to have a more robust understanding of
  risk and experimentation

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Whatever the context

• A key challenge
• To match the activities to the needs of a diverse
  group including disengaged kids
• To explore any ways the discipline itself may
  exclude or devalue particular kinds of learners
  (in reality or in its image)
• No setting, no props, no activity automatically
  functions to future proof the key is the
  relationships it fosters

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Some examples

• Playful Preps Warraburra Primary
• with thanks to Trudy Graham
• School Task
• Study of built, natural, social environments
• Authentic Task
• What do we need in a new playground?
• Make it a student responsibility
• Active pursuit of knowledge expertise
• Actual Product
• Authentic Feedback

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Great Museum Caper

• Year 4/5 Warraburra Mt Morgan
• School Task
• Studying local history and geography
• Technological literacy
• Authentic Task
• Museum seeking historical texts
• Student responsibility
• Active pursuit of knowledge expertise
• History, difference, technology
• Actual Product
• Authentic Feedback

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Wining and Dining

• Year 10 ScienceStawell SS
• With thanks to Peter Durance et al
• School Task science elective
• Authentic task Wine Making
• Growing grapes, picking, fermenting, bottling,
  selling wine
• Accessing expertise
• Actual product
• Authentic feedback
• High risk!!

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Wining and Dining
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Ultimately Future Proofing is about

• Changing relationships
• Kids and learning
• Kids and knowledge
• Kids and peers
• Kids and teachers
• Kids and community
• Kids and themselves.

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This is not a quick fix

• Whatever we focus on, wherever we are located,
  changing the way schools work is hard, on-going
  work
• It requires from educators
• Deep knowledge of a field
• Authentic experience/activity in a field
• Engagement with world beyond school
• Non-stupid risk taking

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Final Thoughts

• The important thing is not so much that every
  child should be taught, as that every child-and
  every adult-should be given the wish to learn.
• John Lubbock
• ..

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• Thanks for listening!
• lrowan_at_deakin.edu.au
• http//www.deakin.edu.au/education/lit/kps

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• Newmann, F.M. (1996). Authentic Achievement
  Restructuring schools for intellectual quality.
  San Francisco, CA Jossey-Bas
• Bigum, C. (2006) Knowledge Producing Schools.
  http//www.deakin.edu.au/education/lit/kps