CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT: New Professionalism and the Need for

Pedagogical Change

©

Tony Ward

The content of much of this presentation is freely downloadable at:

http://www.tonywardedu.com

Presentation of Summary Conclusions to the

Western Inquiry CenterMiami University

Oxford, Ohio

April 2010.

INTRODUCTION

Today I want to talk about some of my work in field of Education over the last 40 years. As I tell my story, I would like you to consider what you hear in the context of eleven interconnected theses:

• That current theories about Engaged Learning presume that Education has to change.

• That Education plays a dominant role in the creation, maintenance and reproduction of culture and in shaping society

• That the field of Education is in crisis at every level

• That our current system of Education fails the majority of students - particularly those from marginalized cultures and people of colour

• That these failures persist despite numerous attempts (involving vast sums) to reverse the trend

• That these failures may not be “accidental” but rather stem from systemic forms of pedagogy that fail to recognize or address the relationship between learning and culture

• That the world stands on the brink of unparalleled environmental, social and economic calamity

• That our system of Education has been a key component in the creation of this calamity

• That is it not possible to solve our global problems with the kind of educational system that created them

• That Education can play a significant role in resolving the problems that beset the world.

• That if we wish to avert or ameliorate the impending crises we need urgently to radically change the way we educate

EDUCATION OR INSULATION?A Critical View of Education

Let’s not beat about the bush. Our current global situation requires that we speak both plainly and directly.

The way we educate is one of the root causes of the planetary crises that face us. Our rapacious exploitation of indigenous communities, of the environment, of non-renewable resources, coupled with our selfish ideologies of individualism, and competition - all carried out under exclusive and hierarchical management systems stem directly from the ethics and practices that are embedded in our educational system and that our students assimilate and internalize over fifteen or more closeted years of subliminal conditioning.

We need to reconceptualize the entire framework of education if we are to solve our apparently intractable problems and to shape a world based upon the need for peace, social equity, environmental justice and prosperity for all.

The way we currently educate insulates our graduates from the social and cultural experience necessary to become compassionate and skillful future leaders and decision and policy-makers. We need a new kind of professionalism that will require skills in consensus-building, community engagement, cross-cultural sensitivity and savvy and an ability to share power with those that are affected by the decisions that will be made. We do not currently teach these skills.

Indeed, if we are to transform the world through education we must begin by unlearning almost all that the hidden curriculum of our current pedagogies has instilled.

TIME FOR CHANGE:Education itself is in Crisis

Despite the expenditure of $Billions, Education is in crisis at all levels• Primary School:

• Standardized testing is marginalizing culturally different students and resulting in uneven and inequitable distribution of resources• Teaching practice is being increasingly deskilled through standardisation of texts and prescribed presentation techniques• The diversity of school texts is diminishing rapidly through publishing monopolies• Teachers are over-stressed by increasing administrative and bureaucratic tasks• The space and time for creative teaching is being squeezed from the curriculum by imposed economic management systems• Teachers are resigning in record numbers as demand for accountability increases and teacher autonomy decreases• There is a chronic shortage of trained and skilled teachers • There is a chronic shortage of male teachers• With increased class sizes,classroom management becomes synonymous with custodial care.• Parents are feeling increasingly alienated from their childrens’ education and from classroom participation

• Secondary School

• Truancy rates are very high for minority students and students of colour• Bullying is rife and schooling increasingly resembles custodial care• Teaching practice is increasingly deskilled, as delivery of texts in particular ways becomes mandatory • Teachers are limited in the very creativity that they need to establish the classroom relationships with their students that might lead to improved learning results.• Minority students continue to fail or drop out with no qualifications• Students feel bored and powerless to improve their education or to aspire to higher learning• Teachers feel unsafe and battle-weary

• University

• Minority students are hugely under-represented at University level• They are under-represented at faculty level and lack appropriate cultural role models• Minority student non-completion rates are high• They feel alienated by mono-cultural curricula and pedagogues• Graduates emerge lacking in the social and technical skills necessary to address real-world problems

CUSTODIAL SCHOOLSHelene Guldberg - Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear (2009) claims convincingly that in our attempts to protect our children from the outside world’s dangers, we are stunting their development.

NOTE

My family and I live in a part of New Zealand where it never snows. Our 7 year old daughter, Josephine had never witnessed snow falling nor seen it accumulate in large quantities - that is, until January 2010, when it snowed heavily in Oxford, Ohio, where we had just come to live for a year. One morning she woke, ecstatic to see the fat, thick flakes settling up to a foot deep on our front lawn. We still had half an hour before school when we went out there, having a wild time, showering each other with handfuls of the magical white powder. Then it was off, enraptured, for the day at Kramer Elementary. When I came home from work at night, I asked her if she had a marvellous time playing with her schoolfriends in the snow. “No!”, she said, “We weren’t allowed to touch it!” A month later, we visited a neaby local private school Open Day. There, in the playground, was an ice cave and snow tunnel - perhaps 12’ - long that the children had been encouraged to build. Go figure!

THE HIDDEN CURRICULUMOur children are undoubtedly influenced by the information that we place in front of them - whether this be television images of war, murder and violence or ongoing portrayals of mostly white affluent middle-class families living an American Dream (that bears no relationship to their own impoverished and often harsh realities), or the humiliating and degrading assaults on personal dignity portrayed in programs like The Apprentice, American Idol, The Bachelor etc.

Similarly, in schools, the curriculum is the site of an ongoing ideological war between competing groups - Christians vs non-Christians etc. Unnoticed in its impact, however, is the hidden curriculum - the insistence on obedience to authority, the time and space structuring of the child’s world and of the child’s most intimate values, the denial of personal experience and an insistence upon normative social values and perspectives - the Oath of Allegiance being but the most graphic example. Among the many others:

• The silo-ing of knowledge and subjects into separate fields and areas• The abstraction of knowledge from actual problems and life situations• The separation by ages, ensuring that older children feel no responsibility for the younger• Pedagogies in monolingual, monocultural forms that privilege a Eurocentric reality• The isolation and insulation of children from the real world outside the school• The instilling of ethics of competition, indicidualism, hierarchy• The emphasis on patriotism and its association with obedience

Grade School Lecture Grad. Seminar

EDUCATIONAL SPATIAL SYSTEMS

Decreasing Degrees of Control

PhD

Talking Circle?Cooperation?

Total Control Freedom

Learner seen as child Learner seen as adult

Programmed Learning Research

Gate Gate

Competition, Individualism and Hierarchy

Gate

The State’s compulsory Educational spatial system is largely determined by its roots in religious and military training, with total constraint in the early years, developing to greater degree of freedom with “experience”. It is based upon the premise that at every stage until the last, the learner has limited prior experience, must pass through developmental stages (gates), must be “taught”, has no capacity for action in the real world until his or her head is filled with (legitimate) theory.

It is a system of power relationships that promotes individualism, hierarchy, competition, passivity and quiescence to authority. It progressively

insulates learners from everyday life and community and creates an elite system of experts who hoard their knowledge for sale to the highest bidder. ,Compare this with the Maori/Lakota/Iroquois culture and Talking Circle, where learning is leaderless, accretive, cooperative, mutually supportive and consensus-based and where the freedom (and power) to speak is universal. Knowledge is not power or the property of the individual to be used for personal ambition

or profit but is collectively created, owned and shared.

SCHOOL, PRISON OR FACTORY?

Schools are looking increasingly like factories or prisons with few windows and no relationship with the (real) outside world. Children are isolated and insulated from the material world - which becomes internalised as a distant and dangerous place - a place to be feared, and ultimately controlled for safety’s sake.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER?

LEADERSHIP?

THE ENGAGED UNIVERSITY?

Our future leaders spend up to 18 years in this isolated, insulated cocooned world bombarded with antisocial messages about power and leadership.

TRICK OR TREAT?

ISOLATIONALISMLISM AND THE PROFESSIONS

Nov. 2009 Time Cover

PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF BUSINESS

Time Magazine’s survey showed clearly that the majority of American’s see the world of finance as corrupt, its MBA graduates as cynical and untrustworthy. I wonder why?

Ask yourself this:

Is it surprising that Business School students who spend all of their educational time from Grade School to Grad School:

• In paranoid locked-down, schools• In an isolated “silo” discipline• Cocooned within a “free-market” culture and ideology • Indoctrinated into a competitive ethic• Being told that “Knowledge is Power”• In subterranean classrooms without light• On 50 minute schedules that leave no time for digestion or reflection.• Having no community engagement• Over a fifteen year period

Go out to work on Wall Street to earn millions while the people in the street below become homeless and starving as a consequence of their competitive myopia?

In an indigenous culture, knowledge is not power, but responsibility - responsibility to share and support.

In an indigenous culture, leadership is service to the people

KNOWLEDGE AND RESPONSIBILITY

Fortune Magazine, Oct. 6th 2009.

Significantly, Fortune Magazine in October 2009 (see right) noted that key MBA (satirically named as “Me Before Anyone” programs) are currently in great public disfavor as having contributed mightily to the economic collapse. To recoup their lost prestige, Schools like Harvard’s Kennedy School, Carnegie Mellon Tepper School, the Columbia Business school and the New York University Stern School of Business are reintroducing courses on ethics, social responsibility and critical thinking. One can only wonder that they were dropped from the curriculum in the first place....

New Pedagogies• Student-centered• Student-directed• Teacher as facilitator and co-learner• Non-hierarchical• Creative• Dialogical/discursive• Democratic• Consensus-based• Cross-disciplinary• Risk-seeking• Experience-affirming• Critical• Concrete• Community-situated• Praxis-based• Collective and collaborative• Co-operative• Open, sharing• Conflict-resolving• Non-competitive• Supportive of cultural difference• Value-acknowledging• Ideology accepting• Reflective• Reflexive (Theories in action match espoused theories)• Co-evaluated

Old Pedagogies• Teacher-centered• Teacher-directed• Teacher-as-teacher• Hierarchical• Repetitive• Monological• Authoritarian• Majority-based• Silo’d knowledge• Risk-averse• Experience-denying• Non-critical• Abstract• Community-isolated• Theory-based• Individualistic• Non-cooperative• Secretive• Conflict-averse• Competitive• Monocultural• Value-denying• Ideology-denying• No time for reflection• Non-reflexive (Pedagogy does not match espoused theories) • Teacher-evaluated

NEW PROFESSIONALISM FOR A NEW WORLDEducation has played a significant part in shaping the beliefs, theories, practices and identities of the professionals and decision-makers who have led the world to its current predicaments. If we continue to educate future decision-makers in the same way we will fail to solve the global problems that beset us. We need a new form of education that operates at every level, from Kindergarten to University and beyond

For extensive details of all of the material presented here, visit:

www.TonyWardEdu.comNo reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa

In our teaching practice, we model the world of the future for our students

Let’s model a better world