KEN ROBINSON ON EDUCATION, CREATIVITY AND THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

Thanks to Edutopia, here is Ken Robinson again. So much of his ideas resonate with mine, that I couldn't resist putting this up.

DREAMS OF A NEW SCHOOL

This is a first sketch of a proposal for a college with what I believe may be a distinctive founding concept: All courses and activities will be organized so that they are designed to explore and encourage social innovation and transdisciplinarity in the service of four “mission themes”:

• peace-building and conflict-resolution
• social justice
• community-building
• ecological sustainability.

CORE VALUES AND ATTITUDES

Moral: Nonviolence, justice, honesty, reverence for life.
Academic: Reverence for truth, open-mindedness, rationality, rigor, transdisciplinarity,.
Social: Critical respect for differences of culture and tradition; secular stance towards religious practices and traditions; ecological sustainability.

These core values and attitudes define the ideological orientation and idealism of the college.

Education is the process of learning how to act on the world, and on ourselves. But historical experience shows that we need to orient this action in the direction of greater justice and peace within and between human communities, and between human communities and nature, or else human survival and flourishing are imperiled. Therefore educational institutions are needed that foster the capacities for cultivating truth, goodness and beauty, and the wonderful diversity and infinite creativity that characterize our condition.

The college rests on the belief that energized by its ideals, it can be a part of this human search for a better world. It aspires to exemplify the ideal of every person being a teacher and an activist working for a better world in addition to any other professional commitments.

LOCATION

The college will be residential, located in a country yet to be determined, and will attempt to bring together students – mainly of pre-university age (15-19 years) but also older students – from all over the world, but especially from communities and nations that have traditionally seen themselves as being at war or as enemies.

ACADEMIC PROGRAM

The college will offer an “enriched” International Baccalaureate Diploma program where the college will use the curricular framework of the IB Diploma – the IB’s Hexagon model – in a way that enables the mission themes to be explored using the methods, concepts, theories and perspectives of more than one vertex of the Hexagon.

Students may enter the college in years 1 or 4 (as gap year students). The academic program will commence with a required foundation pre-IB year to prepare students for the next two years. It is expected that some students may need a year after the third in which to complete the program as “re-take” candidates for the IB Diploma. Others who may have earned the IB Diploma may wish to stay on for a pre-college gap year, for which external applicants will also be selected. Hence an optional fourth year will also be provided for those who need or desire it.

The college will recognize that different individuals learn at different paces, and bring different degrees of preparation and skills to their learning situations. Indeed, students may, in some cases, and within some limits, choose to stay for as long as they feel it is necessary for them to graduate, without feeling stigmatized for doing so.

Other features of the Academic Program

• All courses will be organized around one or more of the mission themes. They will connect with at least two vertices of the IB Diploma Hexagon to study a mission theme.
• Assessments will include a range of formative and summative instruments, for which detailed feedback will be provided aimed at improving to pre-defined standards.
• Grades will be provided only for final assessments required by the IB diploma.
• Students will not be ranked, nor will prizes be awarded for standardized achievement. However recognition for exceptional and exemplary contributions to the mission themes may be instituted if regarded as appropriate.
• All Extended Essays will need to research a question that reflects a mission theme. World Studies extended essays – involving the transdisciplinary analysis of a global issue in a local context - will be encouraged.
• The CAS program will include (but will not be limited to) activities that provide opportunities to explore a mission theme through experiential learning, and wherever possible will be related to a research activity (extended essay, project or guided coursework).
• The Theory of Knowledge requirement will be met through an exhibition or portfolio of reflective activities and texts (which will include – but not be confined to - the required assessment for the IB diploma - an oral presentation and an essay on a prescribed topic). TOK will also be integrated into all courses and CAS reflections and activities in addition to meeting on its own for discussions on “linking questions” such as those prescribed in the TOK course, but in ways that address one or more of the mission themes.
• ICT will be integrated into all courses, and all members of the college are expected to develop familiarity with the use of web-based instruments for collaboration and communication (Web 2.0).

In time, the college could also offer a career-related education program in collaboration with the IBO, offer shorter summer school courses related to one or more of the mission themes, and function as a gap year college. It could also twin with educational institutions with similar interests to share faculty, facilities and programs.

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND INTERACTION PROGRAM

Apart from requiring of its students service within the school community and interaction with communities outside the school, the college will also have its own program of institutional community interactions that reflect at least two of the five mission themes. This will, among other things, mean that:
• The college will establish a collaborative network of schools in the neighborhood, with teachers of the member schools and those at the college collaborating in professional development, and students at the satellite schools collaborating in various learning projects with the students at the college.
• Faculty and administrative members of the college will contribute in other ways to the community service and interaction programs in addition to their own teaching, pastoral and administrative duties.
• The college will need additional resources to devote to its institutional CAS program.
• The social innovation envisaged in the college mission will be realized in the long term by the college acting as a learning organization, and an engine of knowledge creation by its students and faculty members through its own teaching and research, and through developing applicable models of business, educational, health-related and cultural activities that promote the mission themes.

SCHOOL LIFE

Learning opportunities for both students and faculty will be designed not only in the classroom and laboratory, but also in interaction with the local community. Furthermore, students and faculty will be required to work on the campus on maintenance, cleaning and agricultural and culinary activities, in order to acquire habits of working with their hands, and learn useful skills.

The academic year of the college will be organized into 36 five day cycles to avoid interruptions by holidays and legally mandated closures. Classes will shut down every sixth cycle to enable learning to extend beyond the classroom into the community. Students may devote their time to coursework, projects or exhibitions in the campus or outside, or travel for educational purposes.

Student governance

Students will be expected to play a key part as “beneficial owners” in the governance of the college, under the guidance of faculty and administrators. The idea is to understand the constraints and opportunities of a democratic community through open discussion and respectful dialogue. Despite being temporary residents of the college, with no legal rights and responsibilities of ownership, students will be expected to act with as much respect and responsibility as if they were stewards and trustees of the college. This attitude of trusteeship will extend as much to the natural environment of the college as to its physical property, with special attention to the needs of future generations of students.

DESIGNING THE LEARNSCAPE IN SCHOOLS AND ELSEWHERE

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend in India who lives with his family in a remote village, and refuses to send his two children to school. The conversation turned, as it has often done in the past, to the benefits of schooling (as in sending children to school) versus schooling them at home. This conversation came right in the middle of a few other things that are engaging me at the moment. At school, I am involved in an attempt at improving the national high school program for the type of schools that I work for in Turkey (private schools for mostly wealthy kids many of whom aspire to study abroad, with the choice of the IB diploma to help prepare them for university) by building in more flexibility, student choice and school autonomy. I am also trying to design a new kind of IB school that I hope to start in India or elsewhere if I can convince enough people about the need for such a school. And again, despite my sympathy with my friend's refusal to send his children to school, I caught myself falling into the compulsive error of conceiving of education as synonymous with schooling.

If innovation in education is to occur at all, I believe it's necessary to detach the concept of education permanently from schooling. Or rather, reconceptualize schools as an important vehicle for education, but not the only one. This assumes that children will not be obliged to go to school at all, but only if they wish to for specific purposes. Forcing children to go to school is like forcing people to eat at a restaurant: why can't they just go there to eat with friends when they want to, or to learn a new recipe? Why not cook a good meal at home, or at a friend's?

Once one can conceive of schools as only one of many vehicles for education, one can then go on to conceive of various designs for schools that can support educational objectives. One can also imagine other ways of designing the learning process independently of schools, e.g., through informal or formal learning networks.

In thinking of alternatives to schools, traditional or unconventional, I was searching for a word to express a space for structured learning. I hit first upon learnspace, and then learnscape, only to find in Google that it had already begun to be used by various people. One of them was Jay Cross, whose use of the word came closest to what I had in mind - an "ecological" process (involving collaboration with others and with interaction with the learner's environment) of acquiring the abilities to do things in the real world. This applies not only to little kids learning how to speak, or teaching each other a game, or how to play the guitar or hang out on Facebook. It also applies to more formal educational situations. According to Howard Gardner, it is the "disciplinary expert" whose abilities enable him/her to understand the world, and to apply that understanding flexibly and in an unscripted manner to new and unfamiliar situations and problems. Presumably, the perfection of understanding is an "asymptotic" process of developing successive versions that are more and more accurate versions of reality, or versions that "get it less wrong". But however the process of developing understanding proceeds, it is most accurately conceived as an ecological process.

The big question for me is: how do I apply this conceptualization to my idea of a new school? Perhaps I should write a bit more about my school in my next posting.