Once Upon a Time in the 21st Century
I recently gave a talk on Education in the 21st Century. As I collated my research, experience and understanding, I have come to identify the following key characteristics of meaningful eduation that matters and is significant to life in the 21st century.
Education in the 21st century is:
AUTHENTIC: Education starts first and foremost with the person being educated, in the life circumstance they are in. It is not about technology, the digital age, social media, the climate or economic crisis above being about the person and her life circumstance. Just like knowing the kings and queens of England is begininng to feel arcane when you can Google them, so does learning about the economic or environmental crisis if first you don't touch the heart, soul and life of the child learner.
We cannot teach about the economic crisis to a boy in Brazil who is struggling to survive. He needs education as much as the girl in St. Louis who loves to dance or the boy in Africa who needs to harness wind power to bring electricity to his village. Each needs, no yearns to learn what is most relevant to her life, to her heart and mind. The boy in Brazil cannot but wait to learn how he can make some money quick. The St. Louis girl wants to learn to dance and then learn something else. The boy in Africa, he needs, no he will pull and push to learn about wind power and windmills whether or not you teach him. Sure there is a place to broaden and stretch the realms a child might explore but even wh
MULTI-MODAL: If there is one thing we have learned about technology it is this — it will change. Email, is on its way out. MySpace, gone. One day, texting and Facebook will also have moved on. As technology rocks our world and we find increasingly sophisticated ways of engaing with our world, we can no longer rely on a single modality. Books, yes, online books, yes, paper books, yes, those too. Blackboard, maybe. Digital boards, yes. Writing, yes. Typing, yes. Laptops, maybe. Phones and smaller devices, of course. Google goggles, soon.
What's more, when we teach the individual, to really reach them, we need to find media that work for each one of them. Some of us, we love our videos, some of us need to draw, some of us need to speak. And now with technology and the combination of technology and traditional media, this is getting easier.
DYNAMIC: Learning happens all the time. We know that. But even more so now. Teachers are no longer the gatekeepers of information. No longer do students need to wait to be told. As information is increasingly accessible, students are accessing it, questioning, analyzing, evaluating it all the time. Education is literally happening 24/7. So, what is a teacher to do? Teachers are no longer meant to impart knowledge. They are meant to create knowledge and ultimately wisdom along with their students, based on information. Information is not knowledge and certainly not wisdom.
As the world continues to be swept away with rapid technological, informational, environmental, economic and cultural changes, so too is what we need to learn. Education needs to thus be dynamic. No longer can curricula be used over years. They need to be created as the learning happens, together, with students. And what better way is there to making education authentic than to involve students in creating it?
COLLABORATIVE: Even as we squirrel ourselves away behind screens, we are using those screens to interface with each other, posting, tagging, liking all day long. We are and will always be social creatures. We are just finding new means to collaborate. As the world shrinks, as economies mingle, collapse and rebuild, as fires in one part of the world cause rains in another, we are beginning to see our interconnection in more obvious ways. There are also more of us now than there ever have been. We are in the midst of the greatest growth of human population in the history of humankind, from its birth until 2300. We'd better learn how to get along.
We are now entering the era of the Collective genius. Gone is the era of individual excellence. Now, I think our excellence is to be understood in terms of how we work together to create it. We need to then teach in collaborative environments, where individual work is intricately connected to group work. Not just as a theory — "because it is good to do it that way". Instead, because it is the only way that makes sense given the nature of our lives and our need as humans.
Here's to the 21st century then — Authentic, Multi-modal, Dynamic and Collaborative.
Photo credit: all-mixed.blogspot.com