The labelling game

Last week I arrived at London Heathrow's Terminal 5, dragging my luggage behind me. It was early morning. I paused to look up and check the flight board. Yep. My British Airways flight to Madrid was listed - with the available check-in desks right next to it. It's always reassuring to see your flight listed on the board. Then you know you've arrived at the correct terminal.

So I ambled across the great Terminal 5 concourse to the check-in desk and presented my passport to the clerk. She looked me up and down, checked my passport, looked at me again... and then printed out a label, peeled back the sticky part and slapped it onto my bag. I looked at it. It said 'MAD'. I looked at her. I felt mildly offended. How does she know me? I thought.

I'm a psychologist you see. They say you're either mad before you start a degree in psychology, or absolutely insane by the time you finish. But how did she know? Perhaps it was just co-incidence, I said to myself. Then she stuck another 'MAD' label on my other piece of luggage.

Damn it, I thought - it's no mistake. This is a trend. She really thinks I'm mad. In a moment she's going to stick one on me too.

And then it dawned on me ... Airlines have a propensity to make the first three letters of your destination city into abbreviations and use them as labels on your baggage. Now I know this, I feel better. In fact I'm very much looking forward to travelling to Singapore later in the year. If I get into trouble with the authorities there, I'll simply point to my baggage labels and claim that the airline company gave me explicit instructions. What could possibly go wrong?

How often do we label our students? He's very bright, she's brilliant.... he's not such a hard worker, and that one over there is a real trouble maker.... Often we spend just a short amount of time with our students before we build an impression of their characters. Then we begin to label them. And then we think we know them. Our attitudes towards each student begins to harden and we think we can predict what they will do next. I hate hearing from other teachers what my new group of students is like. I would rather find out for myself what they can do, without any preconceived expectations or prejudices.

An interesting psychological study by Rosenthal and Jacobson back in the 1960s showed the problems and benefits that can occur in education when we label children. The Pygmalion effect, as it's known can be beneficial. If teachers ascribe great expectations onto their students, those students tend to perform better as a result. Perhaps this is because when teachers believe students are bright or hard working, they tend to lavish a little more time on supporting them than they do students who they believe to be less able or less hard working. And there's the rub. The reverse (or the Golem effect) can also occur. When teachers see students as time wasters, and expect less from them, those students tend to under perform. This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy has been shown time and again to emerge because of the way teachers perceive the potential of various students. I know personally that this can happen. Some of my previously failing students have come to me (several of whom have been thrown out of other courses) and have asked me to support them, to give them a second chance. I have seen these 'failing' students transformed into people who love learning, and who will go that extra mile or two, simply because someone has believed in them. They have ended up becoming great successes.

So next time you start off with a new group of students, don't jump to any quick conclusions. Don't label your students. Believe in them all. Treat each one as if they have the potential to succeed. Because if you believe they do, and you tell them, they are likely to believe it too. ... and they will be relying on you to support them.

Photo by Eddie Codel on Flickr


The labelling game by Steve Wheeler was written in Istanbul, Turkey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Mind the gap!

Teachers should listen to children more. When children ask questions, they are seeking understanding, but sometimes the teacher can be too busy to listen to the meaning behind the question. They fail to 'read between the lines'. I have several horror stories I could tell about how asking questions in class ended up in ridicule for the child and a subsequent 'switching off' from learning - but I won't go down that road today. Read my blog post 'Pay attention at the front!' and you'll get the general idea. Instead, let me say that the 'listening but not hearing' problem is just one of the 'gaps' teachers and students experience just about every day in education - chasms and transactional distances that can open up between intentions of one person and misrepresentations of another.

It's a serious problem. It can lead to war.

In online/digital learning environments, my own research has shown that the gap can be amplified or reduced, depending on a) the skill of the teacher b) their attitude and c) how the technology is being used. Sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but it's actually a lot more complex and nuanced than that. There are gaps in perception about the purpose of education, gaps in how we interpret the problems we encounter each day as educators, digital divides between the haves and the have nots, the cans and the cannots, even the wills and the will nots... We could be here all day discussing these perceptual gulfs in our understanding. A song written by Beatle George Harrison contains the lines 'I was thinking about the space between us all, and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion...' (Within You, Without You). He was right. There is a psychological space between each of us, and although it is impossible to bridge completely, we need to do our best as educators to know and understand our students as well as we can.

Below is a slideshow I presented at last year's Future of Technology in Education Conference (FOTE 2014), at the University of London. The video that accompanies the keynote speech is also available below with the abstract.

Images from various sources


Mind the gap! by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Visions and values #EEVV351

One of my students @sophiefownes developing an essay response

Someone, somewhere in the mists of time - possibly a genius (so it couldn't possibly have been me) - wrote a final year teacher education module called Visions and Values. It's genius, because it focuses on the purpose of education, and with deceptively simple essay questions such as 'who should define the curriculum?' it exposes students to the delicious complexities of pedagogy and schooling. It's a timely module that taxes their intellect and academic skills like no other module, just at the point they are about to leave to take up their first teacher posts in the big bad world outside. The module is designed to get them thinking more deeply and critically than they have ever done previously, and it helps them to develop their academic writing and arguing skills to a very high level. It also encourages them to revisit their own motivations for becoming a teacher, and challenges them reappraise their personal and professional beliefs, values and attitudes. I believe it's the toughest thing many of them have had to face in all of their time at the Plymouth Institute of Education. I'm very fortunate to be the module leader of this presentation, and although it was initially a daunting prospect to manage a final year module for 200 students and an excellent team of around 15 lecturers and seminar leaders, I'm really warming to the task.

This past few months we have seen several lectures and seminars that have explored the nuances, implications and impacts of a variety of curricula, philosophies, ideologies and cultures. The students have been highly engaged, and have paid the price, often leaving the sessions saying 'my head hurts' or 'I'm really confused now', and other hearty expressions of deep learning we lecturers just love to hear. This week we also had a BBC Question Time style panel, where several courageous lecturers from the team sat on a panel and took questions from all angles, around politics, the media, cultural and historical issues, philosophy (both personal and general), societal and psychological perspectives, teacher roles, and a whole host of other, unpredictable questions that are hard to answer and even harder to articulate in short sentences (it's the supplementary question that's the killer!) Questions came from both inside and outside the lecture hall, as educators around the globe joined in and eavesdropped on the conversation through the module Twitter hashtag #EEVV351. I have been pleasantly surprised and gratified by the level of participation of those from outside the group, but of course, with tools like Twitter, the community of learners can be widened significantly beyond traditional boundaries. So much so, I believe, that the live webstreaming next year's delivery of the module (including the lectures and discussions) is an absolute must. More on the plans for this in a later communication.

Student mind map

Debates around the tension between traditionalist and progressive education methods, the political implications of education, comparisons between international education systems, and the influence of media, industry and local communities on children's education raged continuously throughout the module. My students now have to unpick all of this. They need to make sense of it. They will struggle, and they will agonise about what to put in their 5000 word assignments, and what to leave out. They have already learnt a lot. But their biggest lesson will come when they attempt to follow one particular line of reasoning, only to realise that there are multiple layers of explanation, a whole host of lines of reasoning and an entire spectrum of ways of understanding the business of learning. I wish them every success and hope their heads hurt just a little bit more as they try to make sense of all this.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Visions and values #EEVV351 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The interview

I've been doing a lot of interviews recently, live at conferences, by text, and on video and audio. Interviews are great ways to get ideas across, and the more informal they are the better. Generally, I prefer to be unaware of what questions will be asked, so I can speak freely and not be concerned about preparation beforehand (frankly I don't have the time).

I recently had the pleasure to be interviewed by Bonnie Stachowiack for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast series. It was wide ranging. We talked about the latest developments in technology supported education and discussed the contents of my new book. We shared some useful resources, talked about our favourite blogs and books, and discussed the concept of 'e-learning 3.0', the digital natives and immigrants theory (don't miss that bit!), reasons why I use Twitter, and why teachers should adopt blogging as a professional practice. We also tackled the thorny issue of privacy in the digital age. The interview in full is available by clicking here (sorry, the embed function isn't working for this one).

Graphic courtesy of Bonnie Stachowiack


The interview by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism

'Students should be at the centre of learning', declared Stephen Downes, 'because there is no other place they could possibly be.' Downes was speaking at the ELI 4th International Conference on e-Learning and Distance Education held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was one of several sound bites that exemplified the theme of his speech, Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment.

Although it's a fundamental principle of progressive education, keeping the student at the centre seems to be something that not many schools, colleges and universities are good at. Rows of seats still persist in the classrooms of many schools, and direct instruction still holds sway. Standardised tests are administered by schools who ignore the fact that all students are different, and bells continually punctuate the timetable, dividing the school day up into an unconnected parade of subjects, each delivered in content heavy lessons. One size never did fit everyone.

Stephen Downes was adamant in his view that personal learning is the way forward for all forms of education. He argued that in the new learning ecology, where technology can connect students to any others, and any content, any where in the world, is one in which content must change. Content, he said, should not be delivered by experts to passive recipients, but in a connected world where personal learning environments are controlled by the learners, content is actually a signal between one student and another.

We learn through collaboration, interaction and sharing he said, citing the formula for connectivist learning approaches he said: Aggregate, remix, repurpose and feed forward. Generally, this aligns to that held by many educators who subscribe to connectivist theory - that students not only consume content, they now have the capability, through their personal learning environments (PLEs), to mash it up with any other content, to create new content, extend it, remix it and share it across their network of friends and other connections. The learning comes not by memorising it, said Downes, but by using it, applying it. And this was exactly the guiding principle of the earliest MOOCs.

Downes bemoaned the fact that the original Massive Open Online Courses, run in free and flexible, student led ways and owned by students, had been sadly misappropriated by the large consortia, and now hardly resembled at all the first MOOCs of the last decade. The cMOOCs, connectivist (or some would argue Canadian) courses had been overtaken by the xMOOCs, and were now unrecognisable from their first form. cMOOCs still exist of course, but the popular format is now that of the mega-courses run by the likes of consortia such as Coursera and EdX. When asked by a member of the audience to comment on the huge non-completion rates of MOOCs, Downes said that most people do MOOCs because they are interested in the content and the interactions rather than gaining a qualification.

Photo from JISC Website


PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism by Steve Wheeler was posted from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Constructionism 3.0

Listening to MIT's Vijay Kumar speaking is always informative. Kumar has vast experience in research in online and digital learning environments, and he conveys his knowledge in an accessible style. He was keen to argue that the future of education has two fundamental characteristics - open and digital. His previously published book Opening Up Education explains the first in plenty of detail, but the second, digital, was uppermost in his keynote presentation at ELI 2015, the Saudi Arabian premier e-learning event. He said that it is at the intersection of digital and open that learning innovation occurs, and that education will be transformed if attention is paid to them both. He showed through several examples of his own work with online learning how visualisation and animation are vitally important for students. Visualisation takes the abstract, and makes it concrete he explained. Kumar went on to discuss the role of assessment in online learning. He maintained that assessment should be embedded within the digital learning environment, and should be frequent, because it provides constant feedback to students on how well they are doing. He showed that the completion rates of MIT online programmes has improved dramatically because of these features in their provision.

The most intriguing aspect of his keynote were his remarks about constructionism 3.0. Contructionism is a theory of learning by making. I asked him how this could be defined as 3.0, and how it might be different to 2.0 or even 1.0. Alluding to the early work in educational programming by Seymour Papert (LOGO), Kumar suggested that this equated to constructionism 1.0 because it was largely a solo led form of learning, with students interacting directly with the machine. Constructionism 2.0, was learning by making using tools such as Scratch, which became quite a social form of learning. Constructionism 3.0 he explained, was where this form of learning by making was distributed widely, and could be witnessed in social movements such as Fab Labs, 3D printers and makerspaces. Constructionism of this form does not necessarily require a space, but often does, where makers meet and learn from their problem solving endeavours and through challenge based approaches to fixing, hacking, modding and a whole host of other forms of adjusting existing structures and tools.

Photo by Paul Keheler on Wikimedia Commons


Constructionism 3.0 by Steve Wheeler was posted from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Talking tech

My latest interview appears in this month's edition of Teach Secondary magazine in conjunction with a review of my new book. Here it is:

Everlasting love #lovelearning

'The only way to do great work is to love what you do.' said Steve Jobs, and here's another great quote: 'A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.' - Bob Dylan.

I haven't actually done a day's work for several years. Sounds bad, I know, but the truth is - I'm incredibly lucky to be in a job that I really love, and the bonus is that I get paid to do it. I previously wrote about this in a post called live to learn. Teaching is what I'm paid to do, but it leads to further reward for me because I learn a lot while I'm teaching. What I'm really in love with is learning. It's a love I have developed for my work that has gradually built over the last 20 or so years, and it shows no sign of waning. Any teacher will tell you that education is no bed of roses, but even through all the less positive aspects of the job, I still get a buzz out of helping others to learn, and seeing students achieve their full potential.


The Greek word for this kind of love is pragma. It describes an enduring, long lasting love that can survive the trials and tribulations of life. It's a love that has the resilience required to stand the test of time, but it also allows you to reflect back on the good times and not so good times, and appraise their value. Pragma is a love borne out of a realistic and rational consideration of the object of one's love. It's a love that lasts.

When applied to relationships, pragma represents a fair exchange, a symbiosis that benefits both parties. Those who are in pragmatic relationships often connected because of practical considerations, rather than physical attraction. This is the kind of love observed in older married couples, who have stuck to their vows and been faithful to each other throughout the years. This explains a lot to me about why I fell in love with teaching. It's because I can see the rewards I gain from the effort I put in to preparing, teaching and marking student assignments.

Teachers need pragma - to develop an 'everlasting love' - if they are to survive in a highly pressurised environment. Are you in love with learning?

Photo by eek the cat on Flickr


Everlasting love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The power of love #lovelearning

In my two most recent posts I considered the role love plays in education. This mini series on love was inspired by a lecture from a colleague entitled 'What's love got to do with it?' delivered to my final year primary education students. The key take away from his lecture was that all good relationships have a basis of love and good teaching needs good relationships. He bemoaned the fact that we only have one word to describe a large spectrum of loves, whereas the ancient Greeks had many. Using the word 'love' in many contexts does not necessarily connote romantic involvement or sexual intent, but can mean any number of other affections, but it is so often miscontrued, simply because we are forced to use the same word for many different kinds of love. An exploration of the words used in ancient Greece is therefore a useful exercise.

In my last two posts I outlined the place of agape in education. Agape is a self sacrificing love that causes people to do extraordinarily acts of kindness and altruism. I argued that many teachers have this kind of love, and this is what drives them to be so dedicated to their students. I also wrote about phileo - a brotherly kind of love that relishes in social connection and mutual experiences. It is this kind of love that we experience working in a great team, or involving ourselves in a club or association, and it is an essential ingredient in effective collaborative learning.

Another relevant kind of love in education is storge - often described as similar to parental love. It is the unconditional love parents have for their children, no matter what those children might do or say. Some would say this is a kind of love that is blind to imperfections, only seeing the best in our children and never holding a grudge. How does this apply in education? The educational theorist and psychoanalyst Carl Rogers once referred to 'unconditional positive regard' which is an acceptance of any student, regardless of their previous misdemeanors or track record. He argued that such acceptance of students promoted a better, more equitable form of education, because it presupposed nothing, and any achievement became possible. Students did not feel marginalised, nor did they feel the need to play up to a stereotype. Rogers' kind of unconditional pedagogy was person centred, where individual responsibility was placed upon each student.

Sometimes, teachers label certain students as 'trouble makers', or 'low in intelligence' or 'lazy', often on the word of other teachers, or rumours. This is a human attribute, and it is difficult to break free from this kind of bias. Also, as Rosenthal and Jacobson once demonstrated, such expectations of behaviour can evoke a biased form of pedagogy, where students eventually become what they are predicted to be - in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. It is therefore important that as teachers, we give our students a second (and even sometimes a third or fourth) chance. If we care for our students as would a parent, and demonstrate that storge love.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


The power of love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

All you need is love #lovelearning

Sixties pop group The Beatles sang 'All you need is love,' and then they broke up. It took them years to reconcile their differences. Love is a fragile thing. It requires nurturing with care. More songs, poems, stories and movies have been written about love than any other subject under the sun. It inspires, it overwhelms, it makes us weep, it makes us smile, or dance with joy. We are all subject to it, and we all succumb to its subtle powers at some point in our lives.

In yesterday's post I wrote about the many kinds of love we encounter, and highlighted the problem that we only have one word to describe them all. The Greeks had many words, one of which is Agape, an all encompassing, sacrificial love, borne out of devotion to the object of one's love. This kind of love is apparent in education when teachers go the extra mile and do extraordinary things to support their students and encourage them to achieve their potentials. It's the kind of love that prompts us to go on marathon runs to raise money for those less fortunate than ourselves. It's what prompts people to throw themselves unthinkingly into a rough sea to save a stranger from drowning. The deep relationship that can be forged between teachers and their students can lead to extraordinary results, and numerous authors have written about this.

Other kinds of love are equally important, not only in education, but in all facets of life. There is a form of love expressed in the Greek word Phileo which means brotherly love, friendship that does not involve any form of romantic involvement. It's where the word philanthropy comes from, to which the word Anglophile (love of English) owes its origins, and was also the inspiration for the name Philadelphia - the US 'city of brotherly love'. Phileo is a love that describes feelings of belonging, and a sense of common purpose. It's the same sense of belonging that Abraham Maslow described in his hierarchy of human needs. It's something we all crave, and is often experienced in social groupings, friendship circles and clubs, where children (and adults) share a common purpose and goals. It's also why many of us join social networks and use social media - we want to connect to others who have similar interests and backgrounds. We want to share. We want to belong.

Phileo is related to another Greek word, Koinonia, which is translated as sharing, participating together, and ultimately enjoying being together with others. Phileo is often needed when children are required to work together, and it's often the case that the groups who enjoy being together perform better. It's about fellowship - going through the same experiences and meeting challenges together. Collaborative learning is on the rise in modern pedagogy, because teachers have discovered that children tend to learn more when they discuss, compare and contrast their ideas. The essence of good collaborative learning is when students work together to achieve a common goal, and draw on each other's strengths and abilities to reach that end. Phileo love is the vital ingredient in this process, because it binds the group members together, and the outcome is mutual respect and support. In such rich learning contexts, love really is all you need.

Photo by Ibrahim Ludaj on Wikimedia Commons


All you need is love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What's love got to do with it? #lovelearning

The lecture my colleague Phil Selbie presented this week to my final year primary education students was quite unusual in a number of ways. To start off, he played Tina Turner's pop anthem, got everyone clapping along, and he even performed a bit of a dance too. His message was clear - what you are about to listen to is not an ordinary lecture. In fact Phil's lecture was about an unusual subject - at least, unusual in that we don't often hear about it in education - love. His theme was love of learning, love of education, and especially love for each other. He argued that the success of teaching and learning is dependent upon good teacher student relationships, and that love was paramount. Phil (his name, appropriately, is loosely derived from the Greek word Phileos, meaning brotherly love) made the remark that love is a word that is easily confused in our western culture, because in English at least, we only use the one word for what turns out to be a large spectrum of different kinds of emotion and attachment - a complex array of loves, from mild affection, through passion to absolute adoration.

Here's the problem: Teachers can get away with saying they love their subject. They can even say they love teaching at their school. But if a teacher to say they 'love' their students, what they mean might easily be misconstrued when in fact what they probably wish to express is that they are dedicated to their students and are fully committed to helping them achieve their potential. Teaching is seen as one of the 'caring professions' for good reason. The problem is that 'love' is a word that is too often misrepresented because it has many meanings, Phil argued, but teachers need to care deeply about their students if they are to help them to achieve their full potential. The Ancient Greeks, he showed, had many words for love (some accounts suggest about 30), each descriptive of different aspects of what it means to love, to care. This huge repertoire of words highlights the importance the Greeks bestowed on love. Love seems to have been eroded and undervalued in our technology driven and fragmented society - hence the lack of vocabulary to express it in all its forms.

The highest kind of love, said Phil, is Agape - unconditional love, devotion to others, possibly to the point of self sacrifice. Many teachers exhibit this kind of selfless love, he argued, staying behind after school, running after school study groups, sports training, exam revision groups, going the extra mile. This kind of selfless dedication to children's education largely goes unrewarded, but the school often relies on this kind of goodwill from its staff. For teachers who practice Agape love, the best kind of reward is to see students achieve and succeed where they would otherwise have failed. It is this kind of love for humanity that attracts people to the teaching profession, because they get the chance to make a real difference in young people's lives. As we all know, while doctors save lives, teachers make lives. Just the identification of being human together and feeling a connection to other thinking, feeling human beings - this is Agape love, and it should be central to the ethos of being an effective educator.

I intend to explore more of the ancient words for love and their implications for education in future posts.

Photo by Hu Totya on Wikimedia Commons


What's love got to do with it? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Like a sponge

I did an interview for Sponge UK last week, talking about my views on technology in learning, and speculating on the future (as you do). Here's an excerpt of the transcript of that interview, with a question about my new book:

You’ve got a new book out based on your popular blog. What ideas are you trying to get across?

It covers a wide range of concepts such as games-based learning and future technology along with a serious critique of the current learning and education system, and how it can be improved. The book challenges people to look at technology as just a tool rather than as something special. I think one of the biggest problems is that we get seduced by the ‘magical’ nature of technology when it’s first introduced. I know schools and organisations that buy the latest technology because it's new and they don't want to be 'left behind' and then once it arrives they think ‘Ok, now what do we do with it?’ And, of course, that is an absolute mistake.

What we should be doing is looking for the challenges and the problems, and fitting technology into that context to provide solutions. The other big message is that if the technology becomes central to the learning process, and people have to think too much about how they can make it work for them, they are not really thinking about learning which should be their prime focus. Technology should be made mundane, it should disappear, should become 'transparent' so learners can see through it and into the real purpose which is their learning.

I suggest doing away with computer suites, for instance, because in the real world we don’t go somewhere specific to compute, we compute anywhere - walking down the street, in the coffee shop, at the airport. People don’t go to a room 'where computing is done' because networked technology it is now ubiquitous. We hold our computers in our hands. I think the ultimate message is that we have a lot of practice going on with the use of technology in learning and there’s a lot of learning theory out there but often the two don’t come together. I want people to think about how the theory and the practice can combine to make learning environments more powerful, more effective and more responsive to individual needs. I call this digital praxis which is the sweet spot where theory and practice merge to optimise learning.

If you want to read more, the full version is on the Sponge website. My new book Learning with 'e's is published by Crown House in paperback and Kindle formats.

Photo by Steven Depolo on Flickr


Like a sponge by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

About time

Time flies like an arrow (...and fruit flies like a banana - yes... I know, I know...), and time flies in only one direction. Unless, of course, you are a fan of science fiction, and then you know. You know.... that there are more possibilities than the four dimensional world we currently live in. The flux capacitor invented by Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future movie trilogy was one such device that distorted the space time continuum (temporal displacement) and enabled him and his young friend Marty McFly (and on one occasion his dog Einstein) to traverse forwards and backwards in time - as long as they could accelerate their Delorean DMC-12 car to a speed of exactly 88 miles an hour. The film trilogy was a tremendous take on the time-traveler trope, exploring many concepts such as space-time paradoxes, personal relationships, societal change and of course, new and emergent technologies.

If I talk about these films, or show the image above, there is a reaction. I remind people that we have now 'arrived' in the year (2015) that Marty and Doc also arrived in 'the future', and people almost always say the same thing. Well, first they call me an anorak or a nerd. But then, once they've got themselves past the mild insult stage, they ask: OK, they say, so where's my hoverboard? Sometimes they ask about flying cars, but I can't help them there. As for the hoverboard, well the simple answer is, it's here. It has already been invented, although just like the earliest iterations of mobile phones or portable computers, it is quite clunky and unwieldy. The YouTube video below demonstrates it being tested out by Tony Hawk and Dave Carnie.... and here is an explanation of the physics of the hoverboard by Wired magazine. Take a look.



Yes, it looks heavy and cumbersome, and is nothing like the sleek representation of hoverboards in the movie, but give it time (see what I did there?). We could say the same thing for other technologies that first appeared on our screens in science fiction. Remember the first automatic doors that appeared in Star Trek, or the personal communicators - or even the replicators in the Next Generation series of Star Trek? They look very shiny and high tech in those television shows, but the earliest real versions were incredibly expensive, had clumsy designs and were probably not that easy to use either (for personal communicator read mobile phone, and for replicator think 3D printer). It took time for these technologies to be developed into something that - in the case of automatic doors and mobiles at least - are now taken for granted and have all but faded into the background. I'm sure the same will be said for 3D printers in the next few years.

As for the  Hendo Hoverboard - whether or not it fails to operate over water, or whether it will ever be quick enough to outrun the Biffs of this world, I don't know. I sure as hell have no idea what the pedagogical applications of the device might be either, so don't ask - but the hover board is here, and I fully expect one day for my students to be riding them around. And as for me? Great Scott! You wouldn't get me on one for all the Deloreans in Houston, Texas.

Photo from this website


About time by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Making the future of education

Many would agree that a lot needs to be done to bring education up to date. The methods we use to try to align school and university teaching with the demands of contemporary society will shape the extent to which we succeed. Some advocate the flipped learning approach and to a certain extent, the transfer of content delivery from the classroom to the home (or elsewhere) makes a lot of sense. Time in the classroom with the experts should be used for assimilation of that content, and the critical thinking and application of it, which is a great deal more difficult. A lot of institutions are adopting versions of this method, and are employing technology, particularly video and online content to achieve it.

But this is just the start, and more can be done to ensure that the present day education system adequately prepares young people to take up their roles in a rapidly changing world. One of the most significant movements in recent years, and one that I believe will have a profound impact on current educational provision, is the makerspace. Alternatively referred to as hackerspaces or hacklabs, makerspaces are based on the principles of peer learning and knowledge sharing. You have probably noticed at this point just how similar this approach to learning is to work based learning practices. People teach each other by passing on their knowledge, and learn within their community of practice, focusing on their specialisms.

In makerspaces, people come together to fix things, modify existing materials and design structures, and generally explore alternatives as they learn together. They are zones of self directed learning where there are few limits to the imagination. There is usually a lot of experimentation, exploration and prototyping and testing of new ideas. This can be a very powerful means of learning not only about the things you are fixing or modding, but also about the processes that underline them such as risk taking, discovery and problem solving. A specific theory of learning, Seymour Papert's constuctionist learning theory, could be applied to explain this. Papert suggests that when we involve ourselves in making things, we become a part of that process, by constructing mental models to represent it. Furthermore, the power of sharing what one has made with an audience reinforces the achievement and motivates learners to achieve even more.

It's not that difficult to see how this approach might be used in schools to promote better learning, and encourage students to engage more.  Makerspace learning can enable students to acquire and practice skills they will later need in the world of work. Some thinking has already gone into the pedagogy of makerspaces, and later posts on this blog will attempt to describe how these can be established in schools and universities. In the meantime, if you wish to explore this idea further, check out 7 things you should know about Makerspaces by Educause.

Photo by Mitch Altman on Flickr


Making the future of education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Two innovations that have changed learning forever

Earlier today in an interview for Sponge UK, I was asked the question: During your career in educational technology, what single innovation do you consider the most important? On the face of it, this could be quite a difficult question to answer, simply because I have been involved in the study of educational technology since 1976, almost 40 years. As you would expect, during that time I have seen many innovations and rapid changes.

The extent of change that has occurred in this period has been quite astounding. I witnessed the development of video cassette tapes, CD-ROMs, personal computers in the 70s and 80s but this was just the start. In the 90s we saw the rapid emergence of the Internet and video conferencing, followed closely by the introduction of mobile phones and the rise of the Social Web. Social networks, blogging, podcasting, the growth of online repositories such as Wikipedia and YouTube, and the rapid convergence of older technologies all began to shape and reshape the educational technology landscape and brought us to where we are right now. Interactive technology, touch surfaces and networked resources are now taken for granted in the classroom, in the home, on the move.

To answer the interview question, I decided I had to cheat. I said that there are in fact two innovations that I believe have made the most impact on learning - social media and mobile phones. The powerful combination or convergence of these two technologies has given learners everywhere a capability to discover, create, repurpose, share and amplify content. These two technologies, once combined, have opened up endless global networks of like-minded professionals, communities of practice and connections to virtually limitless resources. The opportunities learners now enjoy are unprecedented. No previous generation has had access to as much knowledge as we have today. No previous generation of learners has been able to create and disseminate so much of their own content. And no previous generation of learners has been able to connect into the global community as quickly and easily as this present one. Another interview I gave for a French TV company is embedded below, where I elaborate on this idea, and also several other perspectives such as the future of learning, open education and new technologies.




Photo by Steve Wheeler


Two innovations that have changed learning forever by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Why technology will never replace teachers

Learning is highly complex. Consequently, any attempts to teach, or to provide formal environments within which learning can occur, yield complex problems. The result is a multitude of contradictory theories and explanations on what learning is, how it happens and what teachers need to do to optimise it. How do you cater for the learning needs of every child in a class of 30? Is that really the only way to teach? What are the best methods for education? Should we push content or allow students to discover for themselves? Is dialogue more important than structure in a classroom? What do students actually learn in a formal context anyway, and how can we know for sure? Learning is very complicated, but it is also a deeply human characteristic. It's probably the most important thing we do throughout our lives, and we do it constantly. Yet it is so difficult to understand and describe. We flounder and stumble as we try to navigate a plethora of educational theories and we become bogged down in prescribed institutional pedagogies, providing no more than glimpses of true education for our students.

One of the most important questions for educators in this century is whether technology can offer a transformational influence for learning. The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the flipped classroom, games based learning, social media and mobile learning - on the face of it - seems to herald a new dawn for education. But do these methods and technologies actually live up to the promise? Technology is often great fun to use, and opens up new vistas of opportunity for all who use it, but does in actually impact positively on learning?

Schools spend an inordinate amount of their annual budgets on purchasing and maintaining suites of technology, but what are the tangible positive outcomes for students? Writers such as Larry Cuban have been asking these questions for some time, and the chorus has been joined by many other skeptics including Susan Greenfield, Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier. The common view from this camp is that computers and other technologies either distract from the real purpose of education, cause undesirable changes to the structure of our brains, or undermine knowledge and learning by trivializing it. Does the spell checker on your word processor act as a convenience, or is it a hindrance to good grammar and writing? The answer will differ depending on your personal view of what learning is. It will also depend on your views on the place of technology in education. For example, is online learning, especially free and open offerings from MOOCs, a threat to contemporary education?

We do know that technology will never replace teachers. Teachers perform roles that even the most powerful computers could never replicate. If you think that this is a bold statement, consider this: Computer can only ever follow rules. Humans can break rules consciously, and learn from the consequences. Consciousness, intuition, belief, creativity and emotional engagement are all peculiarly human traits, and none of them are rule bound. Even if you could program a computer to break rules and mimic (or model) these traits, it would still be following rules and would not be able to deviate from them. When children act unexpectedly, or demand support that requires intuition, only a human teacher who knows that child can support them effectively. Compared to the incredible complexity of the human brain, the computer is quite a simple tool. We are only just beginning to understand some aspects of the human brain, whereas computers are fully understandable, because they have been designed by human ingenuity.

Learning is indeed a very complex process, and it continues, increasing in its complexity, throughout our lives. There is no single perfect explanation about how or why we learn, and there is no single technology that supports all types of learning. One thing is clear however. To support learning of any kind, personal choice of method, tools and context are vital. Without this, we will continue down the blind alleyway of partial education, missing many opportunities along the way.

Graphic by John Hain on Pixabay


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The music is in the musician

Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the last decade, you'll know that Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about education and technology. Any one of the 100 million plus viewers of his various TED talks will tell you that his perspective on schools and learning is decidedly progressive. On the occasion of his keynote speech at the 2015 BETT Show, this was abundantly clear.

Many of those crammed into the BETT main arena to hear the great man speak were willing to endure the crush, and also the discomfort of standing or perching for over an hour as he held forth on learning, creativity, the role of technology, and the future of education. There were several memorable soundbites, and subsequently a small Twitter storm, as his audience attempted to capture and share the one liners. One of his most memorable one liners was about teachers using technology, where he said: 'The music is in the musician, not the instrument.', and he was also caught channeling Marshall McLuhan with his remark that 'we amplify our tools and then our tools amplify us.'

If you can stick around, I would like to spend just a little time deconstructing these sound bites, because I believe they hold a significant message that all teachers should hear. Firstly, the statement that the music is in the musician is profound, because it places all of the emphasis of creativity and all of the responsibility for proper application onto the user. Those who have argued that technology has nuances have a point. The argument is that each technology has affordances - design features that enable the user to perceive their possible applications. However, it is difficult to use this argument to explain the many ways that technology can be used that are not expected by the designers. As Sir Ken reminded us during his BETT keynote, 'people use technology in ways we cannot anticipate.' The design is simply the start of the journey. Thereafter, we can use the tools in any way we see fit.

We need to understand that as we shape our tools, our tools do tend to shape our use of them, but in entering this relationship, we are capable of discovering new and wholly unexpected ways of using them. We discover new tasks and problems that can be undertaken or solved that were previously tedious, mundane or impossible to achieve. This is the beauty of technology. It gives us options. It provides us with alternative approaches and offers us the space to try out new ideas.

When the pianist sits at her instrument, it is used by her to channel her creativity. The music is in her head, and emerges through the dexterity of her hands. The piano becomes an extension of her capabilities, and amplifies her ideas to her audience. Likewise, when the teacher uses his interactive whiteboard, or opens his laptop computer, the prime consideration must be for him to share his knowledge, competence and passion to his students. The key similarity between the musician and the teacher however, is that the musician has her audience, and the teacher has a community of co-learners - all of whom if invited, can join in with the chorus.

Image by Adam Fowler on Flickr


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Fade away

I firmly believe that if we are to reform education we need the help of technology. Although technology in itself is not enough to solve all of the problems inherent in education, in concert with new pedagogies, visionary educators, and strong leadership, change can, and does happen.

Teachers have always had an interesting association with technology. Often that relationship can be uneasy, as each educator comes to terms with how the new tools that are regularly introduced into classrooms can be used, and what each technology means to their professional practice. Teachers respond in a variety of ways, along a spectrum from gleeful acceptance to fearful rejection. What is important for all those educators who wish to successfully embed any technology into the classroom is that it should be perceived as just another tool. Students aren't likely to be impressed with new technology. They are more interested in whether their teacher is passionate and knowledgeable about their subject. They want to know how their teacher can support them as they learn, and whether their teacher is approachable and cares about their learning.

I wrote a post last year that argued for pedagogy to remain uppermost in our minds. Technology, just like any other set of tools, is there to help us all to do the job better, smarter, more effectively. It will never replace good teachers, but if it can amplify our ideas, strengthen our minds, or extend our abilities, then it is incredibly useful. Just don't ever make it appear to be special - the most effective educational technologies fade into the background as learning, and the student, take centre stage.  

Here's an excerpt from my new book, Learning with 'e's:

"Teaching has always been a challenging profession, but in a time where technology is proliferating and has penetrated just about every aspect of our lives, teachers now have unprecedented opportunities to reform education and create previously inconceivable possibilities for learners. But they need to get past the idea that technology is special. It is not. Technology, just like any other set of tools, is there to help the user perform. In the case of learning technology, it fulfils the function of supporting learning. As such we should make it mundane. Technology that is transparent is more effective than technology that is so prominent that it demands our attention. Technology that frames learning so we can see ‘through it’ to engage and explore, is more effective than technology that is the centre of attention. Introducing technology into schools is not difficult. Ensuring that it is used appropriately is another matter entirely."

By all means, integrate technology into learning, but do make sure that it's there to support learners, and becomes transparent, so that students can see past it to find their learning.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


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Teaching and learning through dialogue

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled 'Learning as dialogue' which was essentially about how students can learn through conversation and by discussing their ideas with each other. This theme is echoed in my new book Learning with 'e's which was published this week. An extract from the book relates one of my own student experiences:






Photo by Steve Wheeler



Teaching and learning through dialogue by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Joining the dots

What happens when you remove restraints from learning, and allow students to discover for themselves? What happens when students are given problems to solve rather than solutions to apply? What happens when students are given blank canvases, digital cameras, an open space? Often, the result is some form of creativity. Time and again I have heard stories from teachers of extraordinary things students have created because they have been given freedom to do so. Give children a camera, and they will show creativity. They will learn to 'see at a higher level'. Ask them to tell their own stories, and they will use their imagination. Give them the chance, and children will astound you with their inventiveness.

I read a wonderful story this morning of a school that created a makerspace in a corridor. A broken computer was placed, in pieces, on a table near to the student lockers. A sign was placed next to it challenging students to put it back together and make it work, and a prize was offered to the successful student. Within a very short time, one of the boys presented the computer, fully operational, to his teachers. He was so thrilled that he had been able to fix it, he almost forgot to claim his prize. Several other students asked if there could be other challenges set, so they could also test their abilities. Some of the girls requested a chance to do the same challenge again, because they wanted to show the boys they were just as capable. There was general excitement in the school, because the students had been offered the chance to show off their skills, and demonstrate their knowledge.

The cartoon at the top of this post says it all. Life is about joining up the dots, connecting things together, making sense of the world. Some environments encourage the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, while others demand that you apply your experience. But there is another level we can all aspire to, where we have freedom to join the dots in any way we wish, ways that are unique to us, in a manner that suits our personal style or personality. To reach that creative level, there needs to be freedom. There might be a challenge of some kind, to demonstrate how well you can do, an opportunity to imagine, to create. The bottom line is that creativity of any kind is best assessed by the individual themselves. If you have painted a picture, or written a song, it will often mean more to you than it will to others. The sense of achievement you can feel once you have created something you can be proud of, is usually reward enough.

So here's hoping that more schools decide to invest in this approach and provide makerspaces for their students, creative opportunities for them to show what they can do, and environments in which they can try out new ideas without risk of penalty.

Image from Deviant Art
Original idea and artwork by Hugh MacLeod



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Future educators

What will educators do in the future? How will they work with students in the coming years? Will the role of the classroom teacher change? Certainly, people's perceptions of education seem to be changing. Some experts are predicting that the time of the traditional classroom is coming to an end. They suggest that the future of education will see learning located in any place, with technology mediating all forms of communication. Others argue that schools will always be needed, especially to maintain the social context of education. Many are undecided and hope that life will continue much as it has in the past. Change is often unwelcome, and disruption is feared by many teachers.

It is likely that teacher roles will need to change because the context of learning is changing. Exactly what those new roles might be is still unclear. Much change is happening. However, there are elements of education that remain constant. Educators discover time and again that the most powerful kinds of learning occur when students are interested in the subject, and the teacher is passionate about it. Everything else appears to be secondary, whether it is the aims and outcomes, methods of assessment, the resources or even the location of the learning. Whatever the future brings, educators will remain important in the learning process, but their roles may change significantly to accommodate new modes of learning and new educational environments. The graphic on this page is very useful as a depiction of the progression of learning over the last few years, and the implicit technology influences. It shows that the community will have a significant role to play in the future of education, but that relationship will likely change. Your comments on these ideas, as ever, are most welcome.

Image source Shuichiro
Graphic source Teacher Toolkit




Future educators by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My top 5 posts of 2014

I started blogging back in 2007 to capture my thoughts and make them more concrete. When I began to share them publicly, I opened up my ideas for others to consider and comment on. I have learnt a lot from doing so, and I encourage all my students to do the same now. It's a case of 'now go and blog about this', to encourage them to reflect on what they have learnt before they articulate it. My own blogging is regular, about 3 times each week, and in the last year I have managed to publish 130 posts.

I'm grateful to all those who read my blog posts during 2014, especially to those who have amplified them through social media platforms such as Twitter and Google+, and for those who have taken the time to comment. Below is a quick analysis of my top five blog posts from 2014, based on the number of views and comments.

No. 5: Vygotsky, Piaget and YouTube                  20 comments, 5586 views
No. 4: Watch and learn                                          00 comments, 5688 views
No. 3: Education, schooling and the digital age    07 comments, 5872 views
No. 2: Flipping the teacher                                    16 comments, 6082 views
No. 1: Learning first, technology second              22 comments, 8602 views

During 2014, my blog attracted almost 1 million views, with a mean average of around 77,000 views each month. If you missed any of the above blog posts, do take a look and feel free to add any comments to the discussion.

Here's to 2015!

Photo by Justin Russell on Flickr



Top 5 posts of 2014 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Something old, something new...

Commonly, the New Year is a time when we think of renewal, look forward to the future and anticipate what might be on the horizon. It's often 'out with the old and in with the new.' What might we expect in the world of education this new year? Globally, there is the potential for a great deal of change. There is also a lot of inertia. The two are incompatible. Somewhere in the middle of this tension sits the student, who is there to learn, despite sometimes being a political pawn in the game.

There are signs that a new learning ecology is emerging. As you will see, it arises largely from the interface between humans and their technology, and is mediated through their need to connect with each other. It is propagated within the digital habitus and amplified through the free sharing and repurposing of content. It rides on the back of the willingness of some maverick teachers to practise new forms of pedagogy where learning takes precedence over teaching, and where being a content expert is less important than being a co-learner with one's students.

'I don't believe education is about centralising instruction any more.... it's the process of establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.' said MIT Media Lab's Joi Ito. In so doing, he described a juncture in educational history where some teachers have transgressed the age old boundaries laid down by traditional, realist educational philosophy.  These visionaries and mavericks have begun to establish new curricula where conversation becomes the conveyance and community becomes the subject as well as the recipient. Such teachers are considered radical, because they fly in the face of what many consider to be tried and tested methods.

One of the most important facets of the new ecology is the act of supporting personalised learning. There is a movement toward teaching and assessment that focuses on the needs of individuals. There is clearly tension between this stance and the constraints imposed upon state funded schools where massified education is conducted through the delivery of homogeneous content, teaching children by age group and standardised testing. Alternatively, personalised learning approaches are generally student centred, and where teachers take a supporting role in the process. Some personal learning approaches also enable learners to determine their own routes through education, and where assessment is process rather than product based. Personalised Learning Environments (or PLEs) are generally, but not exclusively, based upon each student's personal selection of personal devices, web tools and learning communities.

Another important component of the new ecology is the choice of progressive pedagogy. Teachers who elect to facilitate forms of pedagogy that involve learning by making will discover that less content is required, and that learning outcomes are generally much more open and unpredictable than those resulting for more formal, traditional lessons. Students tend to collaborate together more, and conduct more personal research than those who are engaged in traditional forms of education. Learning by inquiry and the solving of problems are major elements of this kind of education, and the learning tends to be deeper and more meaningful than didactic approaches. Students have a purpose for making and as they make, and as Phil Shapiro has pointed out: 'Teachers who incorporate making into their teaching are not at all interested in what their students are not able to do. They focus on what their students are able to do. They look for hidden talents and help uncover those talents.' 

Both of these approaches are heavily dependent on digital media and personal technologies. I intend to write more on the concept of new learning ecologies in future posts.

Photo by Ian on Flickr



Something old, something new... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Maker pedagogy

More and more teachers are beginning to realise that creating environments and possibilities where students make things is a very powerful pedagogy. Students learn a number of skills and draw on a variety of subjects when they design and create objects. Teaching takes a back seat and product based education is sidelined in favour of process based learning. Recently I have visited a number of schools in the UK and New Zealand where children have shown a deeper understanding of their subject when they are engaged in making. Seymour Papert's work on constructionism outlines the cognitive gain that occurs when we create something new rather than simply repeat knowledge that has already been acquired. They create strong mental models of their world by engaging directly in the process of construction. Learners who produce more than they consume are generally more aware of their own learning processes and can adapt more quickly to changing environments and demands on their skills. My own students become familiar with researching, problem solving, decision making, team working and expressing their creativity. They generally work harder and also develop ability to reflect on their actions and critically evaluate their own work. They are constantly creating new content, and presenting their new knowledge in blogs, videos and on other digital media. Here's a video (made by Oliver Quinlan) of two of my undergrad students discussing what they learnt in the act of creating personal blogs:



To reach the point where they can start establishing a maker culture in their classrooms, teachers often need to undergo a reboot of their mindsets. American educator Jackie Gerstein makes some important observations about how teachers can change their perspectives and embrace maker pedagogy. She suggests that teachers need to break out of their old mindsets, develop new skills and entertain new roles. In her excellent slide deck, Gerstein argues that teachers need to break out of the constraints they impose upon themselves. She provides seven key areas that need to be reappraised around the questions: what does it mean to be a teacher, what is the expectation of teaching, and what might change? (my annotations included)

1. Teachers often believe they should be content experts. This is often a barrier that prevents them from occasionally learning something new from their students.

2. Teachers often believe they should lecture, to directly instruct so they can impart important content to their students. Sometimes this is necessary, but often lecturing is the best way to transfer notes from the teacher's textbook into the student's notebook without having to pass through two minds.

3. Teachers often believe they should know all the answers - but this sometimes precludes further exploration of the topic and the opportunity is then lost for teachers and their students to learn together.

4. Teachers have been trained to believe that there should always be predictable outcomes from a lesson. Sometimes lessons go in a direction that has not been planned, and predictions (aims, outcomes, objectives) are circumvented - teachers should be aware that sometimes, you can't plan for learning.

5. Teachers often believe that a quiet classroom is the best classroom because all students are attending to what they are saying. However, there are occasions when students should be allowed to explore for themselves, create their own content and objects, and where the teacher does not need to be heard.

6. Teachers have been trained to make sure they never make mistakes in front of their students. And yet sometimes, a mistake can become a teachable moment, where everyone - including the teacher - learns an important lesson.

7. Teachers have been told that they should be the sole assessor and evaluator of their students' work. However, self assessment and peer assessment also have important roles in the learning process. Incorporating a variety of alternative assessment methods into the classroom can gain some important benefits.

Jackie Gerstein recommends that all teachers who aim to establish a maker culture in their schools should consider the above points. A change of mindset is the first step, she says, in creating an environment in which students can explore, discover and create and go beyond the sun of the mill, every day learning that occurs in schools across the globe. The outcome is that students interact with each other, external resources, digital materials and content, more than they do with the teacher. They learn to build their own personal communities of learning, and rely more on their own skills and abilities than they do on those of the teacher or content expert. They learn from their own mistakes and express themselves more creatively through their own endeavours.

Photo by Pamela Adam on Wikimedia Commons



Maker pedagogy by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A learner's curriculum

I worked for several years alongside Professor Mike Newby, who at the time was serving as Dean of the Faculty of Education at Plymouth University. After his eventual retirement, he continued his research, and in 2005 published what I consider to be one of his most significant contributions to the education literature. A Learner's Curriculum, published by the Association for Teachers and Lecturers, outlines what Newby considered to be a curriculum for the 21st Century. Almost a decade later, in a time where all school children have been born after, or have no memories of the last century, it seems an appropriate time to revisit his work to see how it relates to present day 21st Century practices.

Newby's first assertion is that in a time of rapid change, the curriculum cannot remain static, but must be responsive to the shifting needs of society. He remarks that learning will change, because in the age of the Internet, 'non-hierarchical, self-managed networks will become characteristic organisational features of the middle years of the twenty-first century, and that we must therefore prepare children and young people for a networked world.'  Clearly this has already emerged as a phenomenon in the last few years, and since the proliferation of social media and smart mobiles, seems to be accelerating.

His second assertion is that the structure and boundaries of the curriculum will need to change. He suggests that student needs are changing too, and 'if learners are to flourish and thrive in the decades to come, they will need an experimental, progressive curriculum – one focused on the learner – where moulds will be broken and traditional barriers between disciplines and subjects will start to crumble.' Again, there are signs that this is beginning to happen, but this is a slower process. Conservative organisations such as schools often resist change, and the curriculum is perhaps the most resistant stronghold of them all. Some schools are beginning to break down the barriers between subjects, and are offering cross curricular opportunities. Others are seeing the benefits of progressive methods where learning is student centred, and where experiential approaches, personalised learning and learning through making are coming to the fore.

Newby shows that there are three common curriculum types. The first, and most prevalent in state funded schools is the content based curriculum, which is premised on the belief that children attend school to learn facts. There are several problems with this approach to education, including the fact that some subjects are privileged above others and that some kinds of knowledge can become irrelevant. The content based curriculum is characterised by rapid transition between subjects, little time to experiment and express creativity, and a great deal of testing to ensure that students are as knowledgeable as possible when they leave school.

The second type of curriculum is known as the vocational curriculum, and focuses on preparing children for eventual work. It emphasises skills alongside knowledge, and attempts to support children in their progression from novice to expert status, showing direct links between what is learnt in school and what is eventually practised in the world of work. The major criticism of this approach to education is that it considers children as commodities, and assesses their economic worth in their capability to transition from learner to earner. It fails to acknowledge many of the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of learning, and can stifle creativity.

The final type of curriculum Newby features in his review is the child centred curriculum, which encourages children to question and discover. It imposes fewer boundaries and constraints than its alternatives, and is based less on subjects and more on exploration, because it places more importance on how a child learns than what they learn. Interestingly, Newby describes the child centred curriculum as 'Making discoveries, being encouraged to connect unexpected ideas, not being corralled within conventional subject-based stockades – these habits of thinking could as well describe famous inventors, explorers and university
researchers as children in primary school.' The criticism of this approach is that knowledge is secondary to experience, and that too much school time is wasted on play and experimentation.

One of Professor Newby's statements could be considered a warning to the traditionalists: 'Knowledge will no longer uniquely reside in the heads of teachers, to be conveyed each lesson to their pupils, but will be perpetually available on the internet. The content-based curriculum, such as it is ‘delivered’ in schools (for it will be available everywhere), will have to change to take account of the ready availability of knowledge of many kinds. Subjects, where these remain important, will be in a constant state of flux. Barriers between disciplines will start to crumble, as subjects begin to blend and morph into new subjects. Teachers, eager to protect the status of their subjects, will nonetheless be asked to think anew, and to work alongside others from different disciplines.'

Photo by Frederick Wallace on Flickr



A learner's curriculum by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.