The 21st Century learner and curriculum

Image above: A Society and Culture class at Thebarton Senior College.

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Email contact: malcolm.mcinerney@thebartonsc.sa.edu.au

 What's changed?

This posting explores the issue of where students as learners have changed. Is there such a thing as a 21st Century learner? The research indicates that there is! If we are on about developing a 21st Century curriculum then we must take into account that the learner has changed and think about how the currciulum may be different to accomodate these changes.

These changes may be categorised under the headings of what they require and expect and what they are interested in.

*They require and expect:• not to have to learn “by rote”knowledge. They recognize that knowledge is important but not to be expected to learn chunks of deep knowledge

• respect from their teachers. They consider respect needs to be ‘earnt’ by their teachers

• to learn the skills of knowledge acquisition, analysis and synthesis

• to develop a taste of the ethos and frameworks of disciplines.

• relevance of learning to their life. They ask how the curriculum delivered will prepare them for the real world whilst they are at school and when they leave. They expect real world competencies through their learning

• the freedom to personalise/customise their learning/tasks to meet their personal needs

• their learning to be flexible, self reliant and autonomous

• new technologies to be available to support their learning and collaborative work

• to work collaboratively in the real and virtual space

• be able to meet achievement standards if they work as required

• the opportunity to study in depth a topic/issue they find of interest

• connectivity with their life and their learning experiences.

* They are interested in:

• issues of social justice

• real stories

• connecting with others in the real and virtual space

• using current technology to learn – in particular to enhance connectivity

• being active citizens and make a difference

• embracing cross-cultural competencies – sensitivity to other cultures

• greenness and sustainability through real ecologically responsible acts

• being global in outlook – citizens of the world

• customising their education to their needs – personal pathways

• being a resourceful learner, curious, enquiring, community relevant and learning

beyond the school day.

The 21st Century curriculum needs to be written to ensure that ‘teachable moments’ happen to the maximum! To do so the curriculum should be written to incorporate:

o Flexibility• be flexible to meet the needs of the self-reliant and autonomous learner.

o Multiple literacies• recognise and consider as equally important the range of ‘non-traditional’ literacy’s i.e. visual, financial, health, media, environmental, spatial etc.
To develop cultural literacy and intercultural understanding.

o Orientation
• be thematic in nature, providing guidance via the provision of ‘big ideas’and ‘essential questions’, instead of discreet content alone.

• view all topics studied though the lens of sustainability.

2013 faculty plan in Prezi

Image above: The Prezi site

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Email contact: malcolm.mcinerney@thebartonsc.sa.edu.au

Prezi: Another way to present for and with students

Prezi is a useful way of presenting information and worth a look. As the site says:

"Both teachers and students have become numb to conventional classroom presentations, where they’re confronted with slide after slide containing too much information in quick, disjointed succession.
Prezi’s zooming canvas opens up the classroom to active learning and interactivity, making lessons understandable, memorable, and fun."

To help me learn the program I put our 2013 faculty Plan into the Prezi format. This is the most simplest Prezi possible but shows the abilty of the format to help us focus on content, be creative and visualise information. Click here to go to the Prezi site to view the faculty plan.

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Scooping research

Image above: The Scoop.it interface.

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Email contact:  malcolm.mcinerney@thebartonsc.sa.edu.au

Using Scoop.it to scoop spatial technology

Over the past month I have been using Scoop.it website for my students to research their geographical issues. I continue to be impressed by the potential of this great site to gather sites of interest - many of which I would never have come across by a normal Google search. For quite some time I have been a fan of Dr Seth Dixon's Geographical Education Scoop.it. His Scoop.it continues to feed me some great information and sites every day via an email.

My four Scoop.it topics are Spatial education and technology, Spatial literacy, Geographical thinking, Aborigical culture and Hisgeography. Already I am getting some great feeds (blogs, Instagrams, Twitter feeds, Facebook links and the normal Internet sites) through the Suggested content facility of the Scoop.it site, which is fed through to my topics each day. As well as the automatic Suggested content that appears for review on a daily basis (to bin or scoop), one can add Posts manually to the topic when anything else is found on the Internet of interest to the topic.
As time goes I hope that these Scoop.it topics will grow into really useful curated site as an adjunct to the Spatialworlds blog. I highly recommend Scoop.it as a tool for curating and harvesting sites on whatever takes ones fancy. Feel free to follow my two Scoop.it topics at:
http://www.scoop.it/t/spatial-education-and-technology
http://www.scoop.it/t/spatial-literacy
http://www.scoop.it/t/geographical-thinking
http://www.scoop.it/t/hisgeography
http://www.scoop.it/t/aboriginal-culture

Geocareers

Image above: The AGTA GeoCareers website

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Think about nominating a profile for the GeoCareers site

The Australian Geography Teachers Association (AGTA) GeoCareers website was established back in 2007 to promote to schools and students the idea that many people we see working in our world, may not be known as geographers but in fact trained as and are geographers (they just don’t use the name). As schools do their career and subject counselling it is often said that students need to think about subjects that lead to a vocation. As previous Spatialworlds postings have made clear, there are a plethora of jobs for the geographically trained (albeit not called geography).

The Geocareers site hopes that profiling geographers doing a wide range of jobs will encourage students to consider choosing geography as the vibrant, relevant and vocationally pertinent subject that it is. The site profiles geographers working indoor, outdoors and in the areas of environmental care, knowledge sharing and research.  Those profiled are asked questions such as: prior studies, work description, best aspects of job, career pathway /opportunities and advice to people considering  the career.

As well as providing interesting profiles of individuals, the site provides information on geography courses around Australia and a range of resources related to careers in geography.

In the future AGTA hopes to make the site more dynamic through videos and interactive contact with those profiled (if the profiled are happy to do so).

Through this posting I encourage readers to forward themselves or individuals they know who would be candidates to be profiled on GeoCareers. The GeoCareers site manager, Rob Berry would then make contact asking the nominated person to complete a GeoCareers questionnaire and provide a picture of themselves at work. The more profiles AGTA can muster on the site, the more effective the site can become to encourage young people to consider studying geography and working in a field related to geography and/or working in a job where they consider their geographical skills will enhance their capacity to perform their job. Please consider this call and let’s see if we can build the best geography careers site on the web. By the way, considering that many of Spatialworlds visitors are from all around the world, AGTA is happy to profile individuals from anywhere in the world. Just send the email contact details to me at manning@chariot.net.au and AGTA will do the rest.

 Another Australian careers in geography site

Another site to support the GeoCareers site is that from the Geographical Society of NSW (GSNSW). The Geographical Society of NSW (GSNSW) has recently produced four videos of Honours Students from 2012 in a series called "Why Study Geography?"   I believe that it has relevance to geography in all Australian states and territories. The videos are of students from the University of Sydney, Wollongong, UNSW and Newcastle explaining why they became interested in geography, what they love about it, what they have been studying and how they see geography as being a useful subject for their lives and careers.  The videos are of young people communicating in a manner that is likely to be received well by other young people, such as prospective students.

 

The importance of Humanities

Image above: Thebarton Senior College Stage 1 Society and Culture students presenting in the House of Assembly, Parliament House, Adelaide.

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THE THREAT OF FOCUSSING ON UTILITARIAN EDUCATION

With today’s global competition, there is increasing concern about the nature and quality of education– should it be primarily practical and utilitarian and equipping students to be competitive in the workforce or should it rather be a liberal education with broad ideas and values to prepare a well-rounded student with the capacity to be fully functional democratic citizens, prepared for life in contemporary society? For students to be successful in today’s global economy, it should be seen that utilitarian and liberal education need to be tightly coupled, and that students’ academic, developmental, interpersonal and experiential lives are entwined. Schools should move towards developing transformational learning for students and not just focus on providing knowledge and understandings based on employability. Such questioning of the utilitarian trend in education around the world is critical when we consider the decrease in curriculum time for humanities in schools and the significant drop off in the number of students studying geography in particular in the senior school in Australia and around the world.

“Transformational learning means that the “whole student” has to develop so as to prepare him or her as a thinker and citizen for a challenging world; to question and affirm or change what she or he believes; and come to a greater understanding of the complex questions of his or her own life and the lives of others than they otherwise would. By attending to both leads to transformational learning and the development of the whole person into a flourishing individual and citizen.”

Traditionally in our school system the humanities’ (history, geography, studies of society etc) have developed those capacities referred to as liberal education. Ironically, it was the liberal subjects that dominated early education! In the present economic and educational environment the humanities in the senior school are being devalued and squeezed out of the curriculum in face of utilitarian demands. In Australia the humanities is declining in schools in terms of numbers, prestige and general influence. Many young people now leave school with a scant knowledge of history, geography and our society in general (law, government etc). The impact is particularly serious in the senior secondary year that provides a sophisticated understanding of the humanities for young people. The utilitarian demands on a young person when choosing subjects has resulted in significant reduction of the perceived ‘non employment direct’ subjects such as history, geography etc (in fact these subjects do have significant and much needed career pathways but often not seen as direct and thus not promoted as getting a student a job). As this blog has highlighted and discussed over the past 4 years, the opportunities in the spatial industry is enormous and subjects such as geography and history have an important role to play in developing student knowledge, skills and capacities in-line with the needs of that industry.

Australians hold what appear to be conflicting aspirational and practical notions of the purposes and value of a schooling. Economists and corporate leaders refer to this function of education as the development of human capital.
“…education is more than preparing for a job; it should be for acquiring the knowledge, skills, competencies, values, dispositions and capacities for many life roles in a world of inevitable change and that this is ultimately the more “practical” preparation for life.”
Anecdotally the trend away from the liberal humanities in school education, towards the demands of a utilitarian education, in particular in senior secondary, is common throughout the western world and similar OECD countries to Australia. There is a need to get quantitative and substantiated data on the trend away from the humanities and to research what other countries are doing to arrest the trend away from the humanities as highly respected (in number and prestige) subjects in schools. Those involved in humanities education consider that the trend away from the humanities towards utilitarian education in our schools (and universities) is undermining and threatening the development of a ‘well-rounded, thinking, socially analytical young citizen ready for the demands of the 21st Century globalised world.
Here are two really interesting articles from the UK re: importance of geography and diminishing numbers. Seems that the drift to utilitarian education is happening everywhere. 

1. "Without geography, the world would be a mystery to us"
Geography is the subject that contributes more than any other to young people’s knowledge of the world, writes David Lambert.

2. "History and geography 'diminishing' in schools", says head
Subjects such as English, history and geography are being marginalised as schools ditch academic rigour in favour of “accessibility”, according to a leading headmistress.

The irony is that humanities subjects do have a vocational 'purpose'. The humanities subjects develop the highly sought after employability skills of literacy, teamwork, decision making, problem solving, interpersonal skills etc. For example, geography is a great humanities subject for young people to do as citizens now and in the future and is a subject with increasing vocational opportunities in the branches of geography (climatology, economic analysis, planning, environmental management, disaster mitigation etc etc) and the related areas of the spatial industry. Geography is also a subject which goes somewhere in the world of employment. There is a lot of work to be done with subject counselors, vocational consultants, parents and the community to get the message across that geography and all the knowledge, skills and capacities it develops in young people is and should be promoted as a learning area with great (and increasing) vocational opportunity.