To date scaling educational reform has failed, because we have been limited by our beliefs, models, and technology.
Thanks to the wealth of human, cultural, and technological resources, the 21st century can be about reinventing the culture of human development and learning so schooling becomes a joy rather than a chore for students and teachers.
With a sufficiently vital focus on student and teacher diversity STEAM has the potential to broaden and deepen our educational thinking, design, and practice in ways that positively change resource design, teaching and learning.
However, to implement STEAM well, we must move out of cubicles and into classrooms. We must open classrooms to communities of people & nature, and communities to classrooms.
We must stop thinking institutionally and begin thinking culturally, developmentally, and psychologically. We must grasp that meeting people's social-emotional (SEL) needs is the first step to human development and learning.
Since learning builds on background knowledge and opportunities for self-expression, we must discover where learners are and meet them there.
A person who can't float is not ready to learn to swim.
The kinds of changes required to inspire and make the kinds of changes called for in the educational system would be unthinkable without current technology and our current sciences of learning, personality, culture, management, family & community.
So, let's build a 21st Century model for creating a new ecology for human development, schooling & learning.
Let's imagine 4 pillars that will hold the ecology up. What we immediately see when we look at these 4 Pillars is that we have moved from either /or thinking to INCLUSIVE, and thinking. This is essential to build a complete model and pedagogy that is sensitive to diversity and the common and idiosyncratic dimensions of human development and learning.
The 4 pillars
1. Self knowledge is the beginning and end of social-emotional learning, successful adjustment, productivity, and the pursuit of happiness. Self-knowledge is the common-core of identity and a royal road into the wonderfully weird world of diversity, learning, creativity and productivity.
2. Family, community, natural, cultural, and expert resources are the matrix out of which self and all other knowledge grows. Expert resources are included because while experts are part of communities and are carriers of cultural resources, they are leaders who inspire us for efficient learning and the development of identity.
3. Online cultural + community + design + research + feedback resources are included as parallel elements to #2 because without the internet and knowledge engineering we would not be able to consider how to coordinate so many different elements. It is precisely our ability to engineer all the components in #2 that creates the potential for us to take community organization within a human, cultural, and natural resource environment to a new level that enables us to deploy all of these resources in the service of human development.
4. Flexible, personalized, developmentally sensitive common core curriculum is now possible if we realize the wealth of our human, cultural and natural resources as the vectors for designing our new common core. This common core should focus on problem solving that facilitates service and stewardship to our families, communities and nature. Please note that the goal that was first in school reform, the academic common core, is now 4th, because developmentally this is where it belongs.
Why? because, in general, we grow cognitively healthy where we are socially and emotionally supported. The stimulation for that growth comes out of the natural and social matrix that nourishes us; it comes out of the ways in which the culture designs the knowledge-gaining experiences to make them accessible and meaningful. Assessment is not the goal of learning, productivity in creating, sharing, and problem solving is what motivates us to learn and work. Assessment is simply a part of the work / learning process that functions best when it supports insight and refinement. Thus, we should be talking about personalized development rather than just personalized learning.
The 1st capstone that runs across the 4 pillars reads: We grow & learn from where we are
The 2nd capstone reads: Each person & community has the capacity (sensitivity & knowledge) to solve their problems when communication is open (non-judgmental) and science fact-checks attitude driven opinions & generalizations.
3rd: we are efficient learners when we have a felt purpose to design, build, fix, create, share, communicate--this goes to the heart of the genius of our current 21st century skills model
Note: these may be 2 more capstones that run across the pillars.
We learn best when didactic and immersive learning is balanced, inspired, builds on previous knowledge and is purposeful… which goes to the heart of PBL.
Research into learner (& teacher) diversity will enable PBLl to realize its potential for each person to be fully engaged, responsible and purposeful.
Principles of adaptive learning apply to offline as well as online. They take into account non-academic needs that make learning and learning processes relevant so students have agency, belonging, choice, and creative power.
Now that the foundation, pillars + capstones are in place, let's imagine an outer circle that contains the pillar elements within the circle of knowledge engineering. In other words, all the resources: human, natural, cultural, design, research, engineering, management and so on are placed within, and are coordinated by a digital ⇔ human knowledge engineering environment.
At the center of that knowledge engineering environment is the student and the teacher, hopefully holding hands or the student growing out from, emerging from, the teacher and the teacher growing out of the student. This could be a powerful animation.
The knowledge engineering circle that rest on our pillars and the several capstones have 4 quadrants that interact with the student ⬄ teacher relationship at the center.
These quadrants are:
1. local ⬄ global community human, cultural and natural resources
2, 3 & 4. The human resources is divided into 3 types that form the left, right & top quadrants within the knowledge engineering environment and which interact with the student & teacher @ the center…
a. social and learning support resources beyond the teacher ⬄ student dyad --peer & cross age support, tutors, mentors, and supportive friends, study groups and so on
b. expert human resources -- learning experience designers, facilitators, tutors, learning leaders
c. specialist human resources -- learning theorists, psychologists, anthropologists, researchers, computer scientists and so on
The function of the knowledge engineering system is to gather information about the center people, student & teacher, and to help facilitate and manage the flow of information from the center to the 4 quadrants and from the 4 quadrants back into the center.