Let’s FIX education
January 19, 2018 - Context of Education / Landscape of Education / Mistakes in Education
Summary of my research (view presentation under this post)
Context of education
Society nowadays is changing rapidly. With the possibility to connect, learn, play and work worldwide the game of live is changed. Surprisingly, our education (the place where we get ready to enter society) is not changing in the same pace. Policy makers are taking years to create new policy and content before it is imposed to education. They feel powerless towards schools because they have no control on them (in the Netherlands schools have a lot of freedom to make their own choices). On the other hand, teachers don’t experience that freedom to innovate. They have the feeling that ‘the system’ is forcing them to educate the way they do.
Landscape of education
The Dutch school system is very fragmented. In this research I would like to focus on the fragmentation in secondary education, because this landscape can easily be translated towards primary and higher education. There are a lot of written words on the landscape of education, but so far nobody created a design to deliberate the differences and similarities in this landscape. I would like to design a landscape of education to make it easier to work in specific areas of education. Because some approaches are more open for other ways of learning, like for example maker education. If we want to change education from the inside out, I need to get a better grip on the landscape and context of it. I would like to focus this landscape on maker education in secondary education.
Questions I’d like to address
- How does the landscape of education looks like?
- What segment of education / teachers are open to a more designer-maker approach in education (and why is that a good thing)?
Maker education making a change
Making is hot. All kinds of maker education are entering educational institutes. Very promising results turn up (Peppler, Halverson & Kafai, 2016) like makerspace in schools, hack schooling, fabcourses and all kinds of maker events. But still, the promising experiments haven’t led to embedded innovation in education. Teachers are the ones making it a success, mostly on a personal title and with invested personal time.
Changes in education take a long time to integrate and are therefore hard to design. We (Dutch educational system) are in need of a flexible / hybrid environment in which education (easily) can adapt to change(s). Nowadays the change (and innovation) is coming from designers and makers. We put a lot of faith in designers to change the wicked problems of tomorrow. Can we learn to resign or fix education with this designer-maker approach?
Teachers as designers
To change education (from within) I truly believe we need teachers to be(come) more hybrid like designers. Teachers fulfill all kinds of roles, for example as mentor, coach, instructor and so on. But the role as designer of education seems to be addressed only when courses need to be designed at the beginning of the course / curriculum or at the end when courses are reflected upon. I think this is a missed opportunity. In a hybrid society we constantly redesign life. Why shouldn’t we redesign education more often (and much easier).
Action research
Richard Gerver from the United Kingdom took over a bad performing school and turned it in one of best schools of the country in just a few years. His success was due to a complete different approach in the way they work and learn. He convinced the teaching union of his new (and unapproved) approach by using a form of action research. While creating tomorrow’s school he collected the mistakes and successes of his new approach. I believe this way of changing education (close to how designers work) can work in the Dutch school system as well.
Mishaps
In most professions it is common to talk about successes. Only a few professions (like the aviation industry) are used to talk about mistakes, or how they like to call it ‘near misses’. They use these near misses to learn more about aviation and create a safer industry by doing so. In education we can learn a lot from our ‘near misses’ or maybe we should call them mishaps: “thing that could have gone wrong”. When we open up our classrooms and courses for mishaps (and successes) we can then start to redesign education on a specific way, without writing and discussing first. Let’s fix education!
Room for error
Earlier this year (2017) I conducted a cultural probe on mistakes and successes by makers. These makers are open to make mistakes and share those insights with others. By doing so they encounter new opportunities and learn new stuff all the time. It has become an attitude to do so. Something they had to (re)learn. I would like to repeat this probe, but this time with teachers from secondary education. I want to know what mistakes / mishaps they encounter in their work and what successes they like to share with others. Are these insights really helping education? Let’s find some room for error!
Questions I’d like to address:
- What do teachers do with their mishaps?
- (How) Do mishaps make us better?
- How do mishaps help to improve education (from within)