Let’s get back on track!
November 20, 2017 - Landscape of Education / Mistakes in Education
After a short period of time (pregnancy relief) I am restarting my research on education. Now as mother of two kids. During my relief I found some time to read about learning and watch some documentaires about this topic. There is a lot to be said. In this post I summarize some insights during this two months of research sabbatical.
Next School
Scrolling through the web this video about 6 problems in education came along from Next School, a non-profit school in India committed to making learning more engaging, rewarding and relevant.
It is a clear summary of (some of) the problems in education. It is also helping me to focus my design on this topic of learning, specifically teaching. We need more freedom with educators to create more freedom in learning. But freedom alone isn’t the solution. Teachers need to use designer skills to use the freedom. This still doesn’t require a focus on primairy, secundairy or higher education. We need to design freedom and we need ways to engage with this freedom.
Open Plan Learning
A little while ago I saved this article, but only a few weeks ago I actually read the complete white paper. Markus Fairs, digital journalist, wrote this paper on the flexible learning spaces that seem to pop-up in all kinds of educational institutes, especially universities.
In this article it becomes clear that more and more places are becoming flexible beceause of the need for active learning. “Active learning” involves activities including group work and discussions, meaning that learning spaces need to be able to transform quickly and easily from lecture mode to configurations more conducive to those activities. It also requires other scales of groups. It is nearly impossible to work with 30 students at the same time with active learning. This requires new deaign and approaches in education. It reveales the lack of knowledge on how to design learning spaces but also how to design for active learning in general. That’s were I find my mission, in this lack of knowledge. We need to educate teachers as designers to help them come up with solutions for learning.
Nowadays a lot of solutions are being designed by designers for education. And these solutions sometimes work, sometimes they don’t. But for me it feels like we are giving food to poor countries. It is a solution for the short term. It is much more helpfull if we help poor countries to irrigate their land and grow food themselves. In education it’s the same. We should give solutions for learning to teachers. We should help teachers to become designers of education themselves. (And yes, we need to provide the tools for that!)
Family life
As mother of two kids I got inventive. I can now cook food while entertaining one kid and feeding the other, shower one kid while rocking the other to sleep, eating breakfast with one while dressing the other and so on. But I also get surprised by the inventions and learning scale of the kids as well. The way they learn from me and from others is amazing. The ‘only’ thing I need to do is giving the right example and leave space for them to experiment with other options. And language is not always the way to communicate with them. And I am wondering, am I the teacher at home? Is this another league of learning? Why is this much more fun then lecturing hundreds of students at once? Is it because it doesn’t matter what they learn at what time? The most important lesson I want them to learn is the love for themselves as much as for others. But in the meantime my almost 2-year old daughter can (not perfectly) count to 10, make sentences with 4 or 5 words, take care of her baby doll, build houses, boats and towers with all kinds of materials, memorize more then I can, climb on pretty much anything and make amazing jokes. And I? I learn to be surprised of small things and focus on what matters. I probably should mark down more lessons from family life. Just to make it count as learning.