coisas da educação... reflexões para o fim de dia...!

"According to Gerstein (1) Education 1.0 is essentialist, behaviourist and instructivist education based on the three Rs – receiving by listening to the teacher; responding by taking notes, studying text, and doing worksheets; and regurgitating by taking the same assessments as all other students in the cohort. Learners are seen as receptacles of that knowledge and as receptacles, they have no unique characteristics. All are viewed as the same. It is a standardized/one-size-fits-all education.

Our educational system is founded on the assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur (5) and critical to students' creative development is the teachers' pedagogic stance which Erica McWilliam (6) categorises into one of three types - 'sage on the stage' (knowledge transmitter / instructivist theory), 'guide on the side' (facilitator / constructivist theory), and 'meddler-in-the-middle' (an involved co-learner/co-producer in the learning process / constructivist and connectivist theories).

In the 1.0 version of education the teacher acts as 'sage on the stage' and education is operationalised as a process for transferring information from the teacher to the student who receives and tries to make sense of it. Traditional venues for teaching - such as the classroom are organised to support this mechanistic process and learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks (5). The ultimate end point of a mechanistic approach is efficiency. The goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardisation is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. The processes that necessarily occur to reach the goal, are considered of little consequence in themselves. They are valued only for the results they provide.

In the instructivist approach, knowledge exists independently of the learner, and is transferred to the student by the teacher. The teacher-centred model requires the student to passively accept information and knowledge as presented by the instructor. This pedagogical approach is the dominant teaching-learning model in universities around the world. The internet and related technologies have been used to support the model for example in enabling the learner to (1):

• Access to information is via ebooks and websites, but these often lack any type of interactivity or capabilities for the learner to comment, share, or interact with the content.
• Watch, learn, and take notes from live and/or video lectures that focus on didactic dissemination of content and information.
• Use technologies and mobile apps based on drill and grill where learners are given direction instruction via these technologies and asked to provide the correct answers via quiz questions.

Education 1.0: Involves the teacher as a Sage on the Stage, and learners as receptacles for transmitted knowledge. There is ample scope for teacher creativity but little room for students' creative development. Creativity 1.0 - the teacher has scope to be creative in the way she finds, makes sense of and uses information in her teaching strategy and the resources she creates. As a professional learner she is the main beneficiary of the affordances for creativity in the process. She might also utilise her creativity to create learning activities that engage learners and in questioning that tests and advances their understanding. But from the learners' perspective there is little room for individuality or personal creativity in this approach and the teacher determines what is creative. In fact for the approach to work the teacher requires compliance and conformance to exactly what the teacher wants the learners to do and learn, and the assessment regime ensures that learners focus on the requirements rather than engage in more open-ended explorations in and mastery of learning.

Learning Ecology 1.0 We can use the idea of learning ecology to frame the evolution of learning processes within formal education environments. A learning ecology is (3,4) 'the process(es) we create in a particular context for a particular purpose that provides us with opportunities, relationships and resources for learning, development and achievement'. This definition represents the integration and interdependence of the elements of learning and achievement which include the contexts and spaces we inhabit, including our history, relationships and resources, (the most important being knowledge and tools to aid thinking), and our will and capability to create a learning process for a particular purpose. Such actions may be directed explicitly to learning or mastering something but more likely they will be primarily concerned with performing a task, resolving an issue, solving a problem, or making the most of a new opportunity. Learning ecologies have temporal dimensions as well as spatial and contextual dimensions: they have the capability to connect different spaces and contexts existing simultaneously across a person's life-course, as well as different spaces and contexts existing in different time periods throughout their life-course.

Extending the metaphor, learning ecology 1.0 is the traditional classroom-based learning ecology where teachers working within the instructivist model of teaching with a pre-determined curriculum or syllabus containing specific knowledge and opportunities for skill development and supported by an appropriate set of resources, engage their students in a process for the explicit purpose of learning which is predetermined in the intended learning outcomes. Learning and achievement reflect mastering the content of the course, determined through teacher assessments. In this type of learning ecology the learner has little or no involvement in the design of the ecology they merely participate in one that has been designed for them.

This approach to education is not intrinsically wrong. It is the way that most of the world has been educated to date. It is only wrong if this is the only approach that is used to encourage and support learning in formalised learning environments. What follows is an exploration of two additional perspectives on formal education.

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