What are the designs for social futures?
What kind of education are we all going to be part of?
How are we going to deal with the blurring of the formal and informal learning?
What role do each of us play?
Do you play as a bureaucrat or an educator or a student or parent?
We need to think very carefully about the kinds of
purposeful decisions that we make in order to address
the changed environment and also to prepare people for
a world of engagement which requires much more complex action from them.
This means we, ourselves,
have to be flexible.
We have to be prepared to adjust.
We have to be prepared to explore.
And we have to be prepared to test all of
the preconceived notions about how learning happens and even our own experiences.
We need to be much more networked.
We certainly have to be collaborative,
but most importantly, our focus cannot only be on the process.
It has to always be on learner performance and the things they produce,
not just the things they can repeat to us.
So we are all engaged in what we call designing of learning.
Learning is not just a syllabus in a curriculum in some linear form.
It's a much more complex,
flexible environment of design and code design
between teams of learners and teams of instructors.
What are we going to do in this kind of environment?
The phrase that we've got here is designed for social futures.
We, as educators, need to think about our roles in the context
of the designs for social futures. So what are we gonna do?
One thing we can do is we can defend these increasingly anachronistic institutions.
We can say, "Education is good.
It's been done the way it has been for 150 years.
We're going to go back to basics."
That's a frequent phrase,
we're going to get back to the basics.
We're going to drill the students.
We're going to make sure they get good marks.
We're going to keep the authority of the teacher in the form that it was and all
these cherished forms which we lived with as students,
perhaps we got to maintain those because the way to deal with
a scary future is to retreat to a safe past.
Well, we can try to do that but I don't think it's going to work for us.
So perhaps then, could I suggest this?
That the fluidities and the uncertainties of our times also offer us an opportunity.
And they also not just offer us an opportunity but also,
they put on us a kind of responsibility
to not to be reactive but to be leaders of change in this process.
So as educators, we have a kind of unique role.
If you like the intellectual profession,
we think about the nature of knowledge.
If we're a science teacher, we think about the nature of science.
If we're an English teacher, we think about the nature of
human communication and literary takes in the meaning of life.
So we're an unusually philosophical and intellectual profession.
And given the fact that we're in all is remarkable change,
let's try and take a bit of an intellectual lead.
Let's just try and think, "Okay, what do we do next?
How do we respond to these changes in our practices?
What do we actually do as teachers to transform our practices?"
And we want to do that not just because we're being reactive
to a world that's changing around us,
but we want to be designers of that world.
We want to build human relationships and
knowledge ecologies which represent a certain set of ideals that we have as a profession,
and we are going to be active agents in that process.
So what I'm saying is we, as educators,
need to take a strategic stance if we're
not simply to defend an anachronistic institution,
if we try to move forward into the future as designers of
that future as opposed to people who were tossed around by change.