Whalesong

Whalesong

The challenges of a new millennium. Exponential global change. Social, economic, religious, environmental and agricultural globalization. What was our place in the world? What WILL be my place in the world? Where to from here?

What does this mean for our young people? A generation who will live more than 90% of their lives in the 21st Century?

According to Friere;

..acquiring literacy does not involve memorizing sentences, words and syllables - lifeless objects unconnected to an existential universe - but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self transformation producing a stance of intervention in one's context¹.

Then for me, many of the challenges that face we educators revolve around understanding and identifying that which traditional schooling and pedagogy often ignores.

The triumph of function over form in our 'schooling'.

Many have asserted that our schooling and learning extends from a past that is no longer completely (if at all) relevant for the challenges of the future. My anecdotal and organised research experiences encourage me to further pursue these assertions.

A writer and thinker that I will refer to many times across this site, Andy Hargreaves, concludes in one of his 1994 texts,

"Teachers know that their work is changing, along with the world in which they perform it. As long as the existing structures and cultures of teaching are left intact, responding to these complex and accelerating changes in isolation will only create more isolation, intensification, guilt, uncertainty, cynicism and burnout"..as schools move in to the postmodern age, something is going to have to give.²"

As the pace and complexity of change heightens, the traditional methods used by teachers and educators the world over to 'filter', 'interpret', 'codify' and present 'understandings' within a formal 'learning environment' are increasingly seen as, at best, problematic, at worst, profoundly irrelevant.

Barbara Bee, an Australian writing about Friere in the early 1980's commented quite eloquently when she asserted that ;

"If a person is to become genuinely literate, as opposed to functionally literate, a quality of critical reflection must be engendered in the pedagogical methods"³.

How is schooling and the formal years of our education preparing our young people to become 'genuinely literate'. At what stage does the educational system reflect on the changing circumstances of the world around us and incorporate those 'understandings' in to 'enhanced' pedagogical methods.

What role if any do the new 'learning technologies' and the capabilities of the Internet and networked learning environments play in providing solutions to these questions?

This research stream will endeavour to identify the "millennial challenges" that I speak of in the context of teaching and learning. This stream will look at developing greater understanding of the pedagogical methods that are being utilized or adopted to confront these challenges and to look closely at what role the newer 'learning technologies' play in developing these methods.

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