IS THE 21 ST CENTURY LEARNER STILL RELEVANT IN 2014?
3. Knowledge and the 21 st century learner
I now move onto my third theme and in this section I highlight some of the ways that the teachers in this project talked about knowledge in relation to contemporary students. My purpose here is to shed some light on the way that students are being constructed as 21st century learners. I will start with Julie’s comment about the implications of being able to access a large amount of information easily and quickly. Julie said:
It’s what you do with that, that information, and how you value it and how you order it;
so, you know, recognising or being discerning, I suppose, with data and information.
(Julie, Science Teacher)
There was a lot of discussion about what students do with information – how they select, order and evaluate it, such as this comment by Jenny.
Now that contemporary learning in a contemporary world for me means not knowing, the need to have to know this amount of information and that amount of information; so content is present but not the emphasis for me. So I think it’s the skills in thinking, in evaluation, in problem-solving. That’s far more central, I think, to that learning, to 21st- century learning. (Jenny, Geography Teacher)
In this comment there are a couple of things going on. First she uses the concept of ‘not knowing’
which links to the way that information can be easily accessed through the internet on a needs basis.
Then she moves into a list of skills - “thinking, in evaluation, in problem solving” which is about how information is interpreted and used.
Jack described how he had used a problem solving approach with his year7 Maths class. He had shown his students an advertisement from a local petrol station for discount petrol – the deal involved spending money in the shop in order to gain a discount on the petrol price. He invited the students to find out ‘who wins’ in the discount petrol deal. Jack explained how one student worked through the problem. Initially, she asked the teacher, ‘what car is it?’ and he said ‘I don’t know’:
“…that was my response to every question she asked I said ‘no idea’, ‘I don’t know’…”
(Yr 7 Maths teacher)
The student then decided to use her family car as the example, because that was relevant to her. From there she used web based resources to look up the fuel capacity of her car and to find out how to convert gallons to litres.
She worked out how much she could fill her car up with the fuel and worked out that there was no way that she could save more money than what he was spending by driving that vehicle and in fact she then went on and calculated how many litres you would need to spend in order to make a saving based on current fuel prices as an average and then she realised that the clause in the voucher explains that it can’t be over a certain amount.
…So straight away she said ‘well the company wins’… but then she stopped herself and said ‘well wait a second, if I needed to buy bread and milk anyway and I was going to buy it from another shop and it was a similar price to the service station then buying it from the service station and then getting a discount means I do actually win because I wouldn’t’ve got this discount otherwise’. (Jack, Yr 7 Maths Teacher)
In this example, the teacher has created a learning activity where information is accessed as needed by the student in order to solve a problem, involving critical thinking and in this way the student is seen to be constructing her knowledge. This teacher described this scenario as a response to the 21st century learner – he made the point that this approach differed in many ways to his usual approach – the key points of difference begin that he did not provide the information and his response to her questions was ‘I don’t know”. One way that we can analyse this approach to using information to construct knowledge is with Kress.
Kress (2009) says that the distinction between knowledge and information is not as clear as it once was. But the nature of the problems, he says, is different now in some ways – problems are less predictable and less structured than they used to be and so new knowledge must be produced to use as a tool to solve these types of ‘new’ problems. As for information, Kress says that “Information is the material from which individuals fashion the knowledge they need” (2009, page 25). This means that rather than an established body of knowledge there is information available that can be shaped by individuals to solve these unpredictable problems. This is why the accessibility of information is significant – as discussed in the focus groups – information is easily accessible through digital technology, but applying this as knowledge becomes a process of thinking and also about solving problems.
The example given by the year 7 teacher of the use of a problem solving approach in his Maths class illustrates this way of gaining knowledge through accessing information as needed to solve a problem.
The information was sought by the student as she needed it to produce the knowledge about the situation through a problem solving approach. We could say that knowledge is seen as a tool which is shaped in specific contexts and related to the process of transforming information (Kress, 2009).
What does it take to do this? The student would need to be able to understand the relevant information and also have the capacity to apply it to the situation. Thus there is a need for a learner to be able to be a curator - find and organise relevant information – and be a problem solver - apply appropriate knowledge. Jack concluded that, “She (the student) was suddenly thinking much more openly about it and to achieve… and I don’t know if I could have achieved that learning through some of the traditional methods that we use in the classroom…”
Textual representations of 21
stcentury learners – Sugata Mitra TED talk
When I asked teachers at my school about 21st century learners they spoke at length about accessing information and constructing knowledge. What was significant in the context of 21st century learning was the use of web based resources to access the information and how the information was used to solve problems or connect with things that the students valued and were interested in. I also asked the teachers to identify websites, videos, books, documents or presentations that had informed their views. Not surprisingly the resulting list was large but one text that was cited by three of the 8 teachers which I will refer to here was the 2013 TED talk by Sugata Mitra ‘School in the Cloud’. In the brief analysis of this text I have focussed on beliefs about 21st century learners as users of digital technology to access information and construct knowledge through applying information to problems.
Figure 2. Still from Sugata Mitra – School in the Cloud
Mitra spends some time in this presentation making a case for change in education. He begins his talk with a brief history of education as a mechanism of British rule. He describes school as a machine which produces people who are able to work in the Empire’s bureaucracy, where people had to have identical skills – to be able to do arithmetic in their head, use a standard form of handwriting and read. He accompanies this description of traditional education with an image from the past of students sitting in identical poses in order to emphasise the notion of uniformity. He then contrasts this image of education with a question about what schools should be like now that the empire has gone and now that computers can do much of the work of the bureaucratic ‘machine’ – what is to be the future of learning?
Figure 3. Still from Sugata Mitra – School in the Cloud
Most of the presentation concerns Mitra’s model of collaborative learning called SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment). This system rests on the interest of the learner and Mitra says that curiosity and interest is essential. From that, the learner asks questions and seeks answers through the vast information source accessed through computer or device. Learners do this together so that they can talk about it and solve problems together. When they need to know more then they go and find out more. In this presentation, children are represented as curious, eager to learn and be collaborative and also highly engaged by digital technology. They are presented as able to teach themselves and able to teach each other, with a natural ability to work together and a natural sense of wonder. When we place these representations against other ideas about 21st century learners we can see the idea of 21st century learners working in this text to create a certain view of students. The SOLE system cannot work without learners acting in these ways – it rests on a certain vision of children or young people – I would argue a vision that rests on the ideas of 21st century learners.
Mitra can be seen as somewhat of a policy entrepreneur (Ball 2012). He has identified an educational need and offers an innovative way to satisfy it. He has invested financially in the innovation and, through mechanisms such as this TED talk, has developed networks in order to move the idea around
on a national or global scale. What is interesting is that several of the teachers in my school have picked up on Mitra’s ideas and applied them to their own context and in the context of my question about 21st century learners have mentioned his talk as an influential text. The way that students and teachers are positioned in this text can be traced into the way that these particular teachers talked about students as 21st century learners and about themselves as teachers. And in the example given by Jack, the Year 7 teacher we can see how Mitra’s ideas about teaching and learning, are being adopted in the site under study. We can see how representations of students as independent learners, users of technology, curious problem solvers are informing the pedagogical choices made by this teacher.
Conclusion
The teachers in my school seem to understand the 21st century learner as a user of digital technology to access information and create knowledge by applying information to contexts that they value and are interested in. There was some resistance to use the term, 21st century learners because it was seen as outdated by some - something used in the past to describe a future subject. Perhaps what we are seeing here is part of a wider trend where “educators are increasingly being asked to take the future into account” (Facer, 2013, p142). Certainly in Mitra’s TED talk we can see a focus on the future of learning. However, in the teachers description of 21st century learners can be found their versions of the present – consider for example the way that some teachers preferred the term contemporary learners and the way that they referred to contemporary uses of digital technology. In these versions of the present, we can see how stories about the future are being applied to the present in powerful ways. It was interesting to see how the ideas about the future of learning in the TED talk, ‘School In The Cloud’, can be traced into what the teachers said about contemporary students and education.
The next step in this project is to find out how these ways of representing students as 21st century learners affect pedagogies adopted by these teachers in their classes – how do these ideas travel into their practice?
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