Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

I read a few blogs, and some are written by teachers. One is a semi-anonymous blog written by a high school teacher in Liverpool. Bloom’s “tells it how it is” style meets the approval of his audience by the look of the comments. His latest posting entitled, “Things To Do During INSETs When You’re Dead (Bored)” gives an insight into the non-productive InSET session sure enough, and of course he’s right. Teachers like anybody put in a learning situation need to be stimulated. However, unlike other learners they are often more difficult to please than others, and in some circumstances adopt the style and attitude of the most recalcitrants of students. This manifests itself in a number of ways, some examples are: dismissing the underlying assumptions of the session; avoiding getting down to work by prolonging questions; refusing to engage with your attempts to draw out examples from their own experiences … to being down-right rude and dismissive. It is often the case that they feel threatened by being put in the situation of ‘learners’ rather than ‘teachers’, and when it comes to ICT, this can be doubly threatening. Seymour Papert, in his 1993 book, “The children’s machine: Rethinking schools in the age of the computer” spoke of this when describing a group of teachers he was working with:

“…participants thought of themselves as teachers-in-training rather than as learners. Their awareness of being teachers was preventing them from giving themselves over fully to experiencing what they were doing as intellectually exciting and joyful in its own right, for what it could bring them as private individuals. The major obstacle in the way of teachers becoming learners is inhibition about learning.”

Papert’s view that only when children and teachers become learners together can both develop their potential. He puts this down to the constraint on our ideas about education; in which our social construct is to base education on what is already known. The result is a hierarchical system that depends on the passing of knowledge down by an ‘expert’ from one generation to the next. In this way we never, “get out of the bind that what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do in school”. Here’s what he says:
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If you accept Thomas Friedman’s view of globalisation in the 21st Century, it is education as a hierarchical process that is quickly becoming irrelevant and needs changing. Only now are the solutions of Papert justified by the analysis of Friedman. In the ‘flat world’ we need to create ‘flat classrooms’ in which young learners learn from experienced learners known as ‘teachers’.

Image credit: Ewan McIntosh
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