This guest post was written by William Kierstead. His career has spanned 27 years in public education in the province of New Brunswick. He has been a classroom teacher, a high school administrator, a District Supervisor and Learning Specialist, and the Director of the 21st Century Research Office for the New Brunswick Department of Education. Most recently he has rekindled an old flame as he assumed the role of Principal at James M. Hill Memorial High School in Miramichi, New Brunswick. Go Tommies! William is married with two daughters and lives in Rexton, New Brunswick.
In the past few years I have undergone several shifts in my career, each one moving me further from the classroom. Viewing education from a long lens gives a very different perspective on education and learning. From a thousand miles out, I was able to see the bright spots of innovation that were occurring all around me. All across the province teachers were engaging students in project based learning, technology rich curricula, truly authentic experiences and assessment strategies, stretch learning, community based projects and an appreciation for the world and our place in it.
From my vantage point, it was obvious that there were many teachers out there who were already engaging students in the kind of experiences that had come to be known as “21st Century.” The ripples created by these teachers were having a tangible impression on policy makers and stakeholders as the impact of global economies on our workforce and the reality of the technology age created a new set of expectations for public education. In many ways, I believed that the 21st Century movement was well in place before policy and official dogma caught up to it, that it already existed in pockets.
Our job as I saw it was to find those pockets of innovators, nurture them, and use them to create fertile ground for others to follow suit. However, I was also of the opinion that this shift in educational paradigms was going to happen regardless of our intervention. The train had left the station; the toothpaste was out of the tube. No matter how you looked at it, 21st Century learning was here to stay, driven by risk takers and innovative educators. The gaps in best practice would get smaller. Policy and conventional wisdom would always be in catch-up mode.
Recently I was afforded the opportunity to return to an administrative position at a high school and to work directly with teachers and students. I embraced this next phase of my career without hesitation. This move has ultimately given me a fresh perspective on the state of 21st Century Learning in Canada – “nose to nose” as opposed to “from a thousand feet out.” Because my previous view was so distant, I may have been premature in my assessment of the state of 21st Century learning in my province. At ground level, the view was somewhat different.
I have been in this role for a semester now and I see evidence of 21st Century educational practice literally everywhere I look in my school. The gaps that were obvious from orbit seem much smaller and less well defined on the ground. Indeed most 21st Century practice that I encounter on a daily basis is seamless and not necessarily overt. Educators aren’t nearly as preoccupied with the 21st Century Learning moniker as they are with creating world-class experiences for their students. Sure there are examples that stand out more than others. There are even examples of practice visible from space. I am convinced however that public education is much further down the road than previously believed. The ground is more fertile than ever before.
My view on policy hasn’t changed a great deal. Society no longer needs convincing that the purpose of education is changing rapidly. Likewise it needs no convincing that education itself must match pace with that change. Policy is not likely to get in front of the 21st Century movement. At best it will keep up. That isn’t to suggest that policy is a waste of time. In a perfect world, policy is needed urgently to encourage and reward innovation. It must cultivate those regions of excellence and create the expectation that the gaps in practice will be filled in to promote a seamless 21st Century landscape across education.
Economic and social factors in the world are conspiring to change the purpose and face of education at a pace that matches that of technological change. The role of C21 Canada, as I see it, is to provide an overarching vision and to exert pressure on the powers that oversee public education in Canada. In the absence of a national authority for education, C21 Canada is destined to provide insight, resources, research and a means for collaboration between educators from all corners of the country. C21 Canada stands poised to provide guidance to jurisdictions across this country so that the inertia remaining in the system can be overcome.
As an administrator and change agent I am excited to play a part in the upcoming symposium. The future demands that we define the next evolution of public education in Canada.
Hi Mr. Kierstead,
I recently defended my MA thesis after researching teachers’ work and ’21st-century learning’ policy in BC at the Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education, University of British Columbia. After reading the above post, I see many themes that parallel elements of my analysis of 21CL policy in BC. The thesis can be downloaded here => https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/43675
Here’s the abstract =>
This study made use of content and discourse analysis to critically examine how the ideas of ‘good teaching’ and ‘good teachers’ were developed and used within the policy-document A Vision for 21st Century Education. Released in 2010 by British Columbia’s Premier’s Technology Council, A Vision for 21st Century Education is a localized policy that attempts to re-imagine key features of teachers and their work in ways that are consistent with the goals of the larger 21st-century policy agenda currently circulating the world. Through my use of content and discourse analysis, I show how A Vision for 21st Century Education promotes a vision of schooling that is largely a neoliberal and managerialist enterprise that relegates teachers and teaching to subordinate roles within processes of policy development and policy implementation. The study identifies two prominent discourses within A Vision for 21st Century Education: ‘learnification’ translates and reduces public education to terms of ‘learners’ and ‘learning,’ and ‘accountingization’ re-imagines teachers’ work as ‘that which can be counted.’ I take care to show how these discourses (i) are developed within the text through genre and style, modalization and passivation; and (ii) subordinate teachers beneath the values of policy makers. I argue that this relative devaluation of teachers and their work provides a basis for increased school conflicts, contributes to elevated stress among teachers, and may encourage teacher ‘burnout.’ As a point of contrast, I sketch an alternative vision of the role of teachers’ work that is grounded in democratic values and practices.
So far it’s been very well received, and I hope you find it worth your time.
Thank you, Mr. Steeves, for an interesting and thought provoking read.
While I can’t say that my experience on the other side of the country has been the same as yours, I do maintain that 21CL will emanate from teachers doing what’s needed to adequately prepare their students for their futures. 21CL will march forward, changing constantly as the needs of society calls for it. Some of the best stuff will be quietly subversive as good teachers push the boundaries of their craft; exploring innovative means for providing authentic and relevant experiences and evaluation techniques.
As you said in your thesis, 21CL is a global movement. Movements are not easily harnessed by policy. Policy, in this case, will struggle to keep up and will likely never “box” or “contain” those teachers who dare to provide meaningful education within a contemporary context. Any policy designed needs to allow/promote 21CL, to support teachers and make good teaching less risky. It needs to create fertile ground and resources to support those who would make a difference and to create the expectation that others will follow.
Are teachers threatened by the way 21CL policy is being promoted/created? Is there a disconnect between policy and teachers? Perhaps. Does this mean that 21CL should be off the table? Or is this more a function of systemic inertia that needs to be overcome before it limits us as a society? All good points for discussion and I expect that there will forever be camps who agree to disagree.
I enjoyed your thesis. Thank you for sharing.
Hi again Mr. Kierstead,
I’m glad you found my thesis worth your time. It has been nominated as thesis of the year in one of AERA’s SIGS’s, and it’s incrementally gaining ground in UBC’s all-time most viewed/downloaded thesis list. At a minimum, I think this simultaneously hints at a pervasive skepticism of the motives that underlie corporate ed reform and shows a widespread interest in critical analyses of 21st-century learning policy.
To begin, I must admit that I am somewhat perplexed by the belief that “21CL will emanate from teachers doing what’s needed to adequately prepare their students for their futures.” Could you qualify this a bit? After reading my thesis I would hope that it would be abundantly clear that 21CL is /not/ a teacher-led agenda. In fact, as I show in my thesis, teachers are more accurately understood as /terrorized/ by 21CL policies. This is because 21CL is more a policy /for/ and /on/ teachers than /with/ them. More precisely, in the case of 21CL we’re talking about the reconceptualization of public schooling to more thoroughly accommodate a global policy agenda that’s complementary with the values of corporatists—IBM, Dell, Cisco, Microsoft, Ford, Disney, Pearson, etc. To (mis)construe this constellation of corporate values as commensurable with those of teachers is, at a minimum, somewhat hasty.
“The starting point has to be the recognition that there are two distinct logics at work. One is a logic of education, based on social and individual needs, and notions of equality and democracy.The other is a logic of business, whose bottom line is profit. Not everything business wants to do is incompatible with educational interests. But the logic of business is incompatible with the logic of education.” (Hatcher, 2011, p. 58)
Against this backdrop, I find some cause for alarm in the assertion that “21CL will march forward, changing constantly as the needs of society calls for it.” This suggests to me that C21‘s vision of 21CL may be more driven by ideology than evidence. In part, this is because the “needs of society” isn’t some reified truth to be discovered but a political claim to power.
For instance, many might argue that the “needs of society” includes access to clean drinking water, secure housing, access to mental health facilities, etc. Or, others might argue that the “needs of society” include massive profits funneled to GM (e.g., ‘What’s good for GM is good for America.’—Charlie Wilson, former Chairman of General Motors); or subsidies for bankers and petroleum companies (e.g., US to pay $100 billion in corporate subsidies for 2012?—http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA703.pdf; Exxon making $104 million profit /per day/ so far in 2012—http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/26/471469/exxon-takes-104-million-profits-per-day-so-far-in-2012-while-americans-are-stuck-with-a-higher-gas-bill/). In Ancient Greece Plato thought the “needs of society” included a world without music and a highly stratified caste system ruled over by philosopher kings. And then we should also acknowledge that Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, and a whole host of despots throughout history have also appealed to “the needs of society.”
As a point of contrast, I might argue that “the needs of society” are more appropriately aimed at problematizing inequities, institutionalizing social justice, realizing and reclaiming the commons, etc. From here I suspect we might have more luck in actually creating an education system that reliably serves “the needs of society” than if we begin with the values and truths of corporatists and bureaucrats.
To clarify, when I note that “21CL is a global movement,” I take this as a problem – not a solution. Yes, 21CL is a “global movement” with backing from many of the largest tech corps in the world. Yes, 21CL is a “global movement” which has infiltrated – or infected – more than a dozen countries. But this does not mean that 21CL is ‘the best game in town.’ Rather, I’d suggest it’s more accurate to think of 21CL as yet another facet of the global lurch towards neoliberalization. Neoliberal education polices are widely studied, and can reliably be linked with exacerbating inequalities and diminution of the commons. More simply: neoliberal education polices have less been shown to serve “the needs of society” than the needs of an elite—the 1%, if you will. Phrased differently:
“Although neoliberalism is a term that is very broad and covers a wide array of topics, when it comes to personal finance, neoliberal ideas work to fulfill the interests of a minority; the very rich, capitalist loving, predominantly male part of society. . . . Today, it seems to be the case that social change is being shaped by capitalist ideology and in turn or democratic system is being ambushed by a modern economic structure; neoliberalism.” (Abu-Jazar, 2009)
Another slightly perplexing claim was that “policy … will struggle to keep up and will likely never ‘box’ or ‘contain’ those teachers who dare to provide meaningful education within a contemporary context.” At one level, this constructs teachers who enact 21CL policy as ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘subversives.’ However, if teachers re-align their practice to accommodate corporate truths and economic values, we’re actually talking about instrumentalizing teachers’ work to better accommodate needs of capital – not “the needs of society.” I would suggest that teachers who “dare to provide meaningful education within a contemporary context” might more constructively engage and apply ideas from critical pedagogy, post-colonialism, critical race theory, discourse analysis, social justice, etc. I would suggest that the latter path is likely to lead us toward a more democratic otherwise; while the former path leads to increased in school conflict, increased teacher stress + burnout, and the entrenchment of coercive relationships among policy actors.
I thought that one of the more interesting assertions was that “any policy designed needs to allow/promote 21CL, to support teachers and make good teaching less risky.” This begins with the assumption that promoting 21CL is a ‘good thing.’ That’s ideology. Not evidence. But it’s also interesting to note the claim that policy needs to “support teachers.” How are teachers supported? How many teachers have been laid off in North America in the last 10 years? How many less librarians today than in 2000? School counsellors? Access to learning specialists? How about job satisfaction – how satisfied are teachers, by and large? After 5 years, what % of new teachers are still teaching? And where does neoliberalization fit into this picture? On my reading, these elements are all obscured by the dubious assertion that 21CL is consistent with “supporting teachers” and a priori a ‘good thing.’
I worry that there may be something of an echo chamber with regard to some educationists’ and policy makers’ engagements with 21CL. When I look at the C21Summit13 list of speakers, I see a lot of white guys and a whole lot of economic/corporate values—but no one who can talk about epistemology, education policy’s role in structural violence, social justice, etc. Previous C21 events have been held at country club resorts, serving an elite clientele [not “the needs of society”]. The ticket price for the events is another give-away: 21CL isn’t a teacher-led agenda. It’s a policy backed by an elite with $$.
To better emphasize this point, I think it’s worth highlighting the fact that in 2005 to join as a partner of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills one had to pony up $35k (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/12/09/14partnership_ep.h29.html). This isn’t a bottom-up policy agenda by any stretch. It’s an agenda backed by an elite with $$$.
There was quite a bit to unpack in this last block: “Are teachers threatened by the way 21CL policy is being promoted/created? Is there a disconnect between policy and teachers? Perhaps. Does this mean that 21CL should be off the table? Or is this more a function of systemic inertia that needs to be overcome before it limits us as a society? All good points for discussion and I expect that there will forever be camps who agree to disagree.”
One thing I focus on in my thesis is a politics of authority vis-a-vis teachers’ work. In brief, I found that managerialist policies are being imposed /for/ and /on/ teachers, not /with/ them. This provides a context for understanding why teachers might find reason to prioritize very different priorities from “workplace skills” and economic values. In fact, I would suggest that managerialist and neoliberal truths may well be incommensurable with the elements of care and hospitality that underlie teachers’ work.
And while I agree that “there will forever be camps who agree to disagree,” I do not necessarily see this as commensurable with “the needs of society.” There are, for instance, still “camps” who “agree to disagree” regarding the inclusion of aboriginal students in classrooms. Likewise, there are still “camps” who “agree to disagree” regarding the role of women—maybe they like to marry women off like property, or maybe they like to mutilate girls’ bodies, or maybe they like to deny women access to voting—or driving a car. All these “camps” exist. So it is not enough to stop there. All ideas are not equal. Some ideas, for instance, lead to the oppression of women—or the marginalization of minoritarian voices. By the same token, some ideas can be toxic to democracy and “the needs of society.” In the same way, some ideas can help reduce teachers’ work to ‘deliverology’—a hollow, technocratic relay for ‘skills’ and ‘learning.’
To illustrate the character of this (re/de)-valuation of teachers’ work, it is helpful to highlight the ideological prioritization of skills over content. Pring (2004) understands this economic skills agenda as relying on “the bewitchment of the intelligence by a misuse of language.” Pring critiques the vocationalistic skills strategy by suggesting that a skilled philosopher is not necessarily a good philosopher. A skilled philosopher, for instance, may be quite adept at the mechanics of philosophical argumentation without actually having “anything philosophically interesting to say.” This critique holds for lawyers, authors, musicians, and other professions. Therefore, Pring suggests that “to focus on skills traps us into a limited language which transforms and impoverishes the educational enterprise.” In other words, there may be noble hopes animating the push for skills and embedded in policies, but they may actually “impoverish the educational enterprise.”
In the same way, in my thesis I focus a great deal on learnification—the translation of all there is to know and say about teachers’ work into discourses of learning and learners.
To explain in brief, learning is an individualistic concept, but the concept of education “always implies a relationship: someone educating someone else and the person educating thus having a certain sense of what the purpose of his or her activities is.” To further distinguish between learning and education, “one could say that the general aim of educational activities is that people will learn from them. But that doesn’t make education into learning; it simply says that learning is the intended outcome of educational processes and practices.” Learning is a “process term,” which is to say that it “denotes processes and activities but is open—if not empty—with regard to content and direction.” A consequence of learnification is that it becomes “difficult to articulate the fact that education is about relationships, and more specifically about relationships between teachers and students … [and] this helps to explain why the rise of the new language of learning has made it more difficult to ask questions about content, purpose and direction of education.” Beyond these points, it’s worth nothing that in my thesis I also take care to illustrate how learnification can function as a vehicle for a ‘democratic deficit in education policy.’
I hope the preceding elaboration helps clarify for Mr. Kierstead why educationists in Canada—and beyond—may feel compelled to actively resist any further entrenchment of the 21CL agenda.
Hi again Mr. Kierstead,
I posted this reply to your comment a few days ago and it /was/ visible. However, now it’s apparently been moved to “moderation.” Hopefully this was just a mix-up – and not an expression of censorship – so here it is again:
I’m glad you found my thesis worth your time. It has been nominated as thesis of the year in one of AERA’s SIGS’s, and it’s incrementally gaining ground in UBC’s all-time most viewed/downloaded thesis list. At a minimum, I think this simultaneously hints at a pervasive skepticism of the motives that underlie corporate ed reform and shows a widespread interest in critical analyses of 21st-century learning policy.
To begin, I must admit that I am somewhat perplexed by the belief that “21CL will emanate from teachers doing what’s needed to adequately prepare their students for their futures.” Could you qualify this a bit? After reading my thesis I would hope that it would be abundantly clear that 21CL is /not/ a teacher-led agenda. In fact, as I show in my thesis, teachers are more accurately understood as /terrorized/ by 21CL policies. This is because 21CL is more a policy /for/ and /on/ teachers than /with/ them. More precisely, in the case of 21CL we’re talking about the reconceptualization of public schooling to more thoroughly accommodate a global policy agenda that’s complementary with the values of corporatists—IBM, Dell, Cisco, Microsoft, Ford, Disney, Pearson, etc. To (mis)construe this constellation of corporate values as commensurable with those of teachers is, at a minimum, somewhat hasty.
“The starting point has to be the recognition that there are two distinct logics at work. One is a logic of education, based on social and individual needs, and notions of equality and democracy.The other is a logic of business, whose bottom line is profit. Not everything business wants to do is incompatible with educational interests. But the logic of business is incompatible with the logic of education.” (Hatcher, 2011, p. 58)
Against this backdrop, I find some cause for alarm in the assertion that “21CL will march forward, changing constantly as the needs of society calls for it.” This suggests to me that C21‘s vision of 21CL may be more driven by ideology than evidence. In part, this is because the “needs of society” isn’t some reified truth to be discovered but a political claim to power.
For instance, many might argue that the “needs of society” includes access to clean drinking water, secure housing, access to mental health facilities, etc. Or, others might argue that the “needs of society” include massive profits funneled to GM (e.g., ‘What’s good for GM is good for America.’—Charlie Wilson, former Chairman of General Motors); or subsidies for bankers and petroleum companies (e.g., US to pay $100 billion in corporate subsidies for 2012?—http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/PA703.pdf; Exxon making $104 million profit /per day/ so far in 2012—http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/26/471469/exxon-takes-104-million-profits-per-day-so-far-in-2012-while-americans-are-stuck-with-a-higher-gas-bill/). In Ancient Greece Plato thought the “needs of society” included a world without music and a highly stratified caste system ruled over by philosopher kings. And then we should also acknowledge that Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, and a whole host of despots throughout history have also appealed to “the needs of society.”
As a point of contrast, I might argue that “the needs of society” are more appropriately aimed at problematizing inequities, institutionalizing social justice, realizing and reclaiming the commons, etc. From here I suspect we might have more luck in actually creating an education system that reliably serves “the needs of society” than if we begin with the values and truths of corporatists and bureaucrats.
To clarify, when I note that “21CL is a global movement,” I take this as a problem – not a solution. Yes, 21CL is a “global movement” with backing from many of the largest tech corps in the world. Yes, 21CL is a “global movement” which has infiltrated – or infected – more than a dozen countries. But this does not mean that 21CL is ‘the best game in town.’ Rather, I’d suggest it’s more accurate to think of 21CL as yet another facet of the global lurch towards neoliberalization. Neoliberal education polices are widely studied, and can reliably be linked with exacerbating inequalities and the diminution of the commons. More simply: neoliberal education polices have less been shown to serve “the needs of society” than the needs of an elite—the 1%, if you will. Phrased differently:
“Although neoliberalism is a term that is very broad and covers a wide array of topics, when it comes to personal finance, neoliberal ideas work to fulfill the interests of a minority; the very rich, capitalist loving, predominantly male part of society. . . . Today, it seems to be the case that social change is being shaped by capitalist ideology and in turn or democratic system is being ambushed by a modern economic structure; neoliberalism.” (Abu-Jazar, 2009)
Another slightly perplexing claim was that “policy … will struggle to keep up and will likely never ‘box’ or ‘contain’ those teachers who dare to provide meaningful education within a contemporary context.” At one level, this constructs teachers who enact 21CL policy as ‘revolutionaries’ or ‘subversives.’ However, if teachers re-align their practice to accommodate corporate truths and economic values, we’re actually talking about instrumentalizing teachers’ work to better accommodate needs of capital – not “the needs of society.” I would suggest that teachers who “dare to provide meaningful education within a contemporary context” might more constructively engage and apply ideas from critical pedagogy, post-colonialism, critical race theory, discourse analysis, social justice, etc. I would suggest that the latter path is likely to lead us toward a more democratic otherwise; while the former path leads to increased in school conflict, increased teacher stress + burnout, and the entrenchment of coercive relationships among policy actors.
I thought that one of the more interesting assertions was that “any policy designed needs to allow/promote 21CL, to support teachers and make good teaching less risky.” This begins with the assumption that promoting 21CL is a ‘good thing.’ That’s ideology. Not evidence. But it’s also interesting to note the claim that policy needs to “support teachers.” How are teachers supported? How many teachers have been laid off in North America in the last 10 years? How many less librarians today than in 2000? School counsellors? Access to learning specialists? How about job satisfaction – how satisfied are teachers, by and large? After 5 years, what % of new teachers are still teaching? And where does neoliberalization fit into this picture? On my reading, these elements are all obscured by the dubious assertion that 21CL is consistent with “supporting teachers” and a priori a ‘good thing.’
I worry that there may be something of an echo chamber with regard to some educationists’ and policy makers’ engagements with 21CL. When I look at the C21Summit13 list of speakers, I see a lot of white guys and a whole lot of economic/corporate values—but no one who can talk about epistemology, education policy’s role in structural violence, social justice, etc. Previous C21 events have been held at country club resorts, serving an elite clientele [not “the needs of society”]. The ticket price for the events is another give-away: 21CL isn’t a teacher-led agenda. It’s a policy backed by an elite with $$.
To better emphasize this point, I think it’s worth highlighting the fact that in 2005 to join as a partner of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills one had to pony up $35k (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/12/09/14partnership_ep.h29.html). This isn’t a bottom-up policy agenda by any stretch. It’s an agenda backed by an elite with $$$.
There was quite a bit to unpack in this last block: “Are teachers threatened by the way 21CL policy is being promoted/created? Is there a disconnect between policy and teachers? Perhaps. Does this mean that 21CL should be off the table? Or is this more a function of systemic inertia that needs to be overcome before it limits us as a society? All good points for discussion and I expect that there will forever be camps who agree to disagree.”
One thing I focus on in my thesis is a politics of authority vis-a-vis teachers’ work. In brief, I found that managerialist policies are being imposed /for/ and /on/ teachers, not /with/ them. This provides a context for understanding why teachers might find reason to prioritize very different priorities from “workplace skills” and economic values. In fact, I would suggest that managerialist and neoliberal truths may well be incommensurable with the elements of care and hospitality that underlie teachers’ work.
And while I agree that “there will forever be camps who agree to disagree,” I do not necessarily see this as commensurable with “the needs of society.” There are, for instance, still “camps” who “agree to disagree” regarding the inclusion of aboriginal students in classrooms. Likewise, there are still “camps” who “agree to disagree” regarding the role of women—maybe they like to marry women off like property, or maybe they like to mutilate girls’ bodies, or maybe they like to deny women access to voting—or driving a car. All these “camps” exist. So it is not enough to stop there. All ideas are not equal. Some ideas, for instance, lead to the oppression of women—or the marginalization of minoritarian voices. By the same token, some ideas can be toxic to democracy and “the needs of society.” In the same way, some ideas can help reduce teachers’ work to ‘deliverology’—a hollow, technocratic relay for ‘skills’ and ‘learning.’
To illustrate the character of this (re/de)-valuation of teachers’ work, it is helpful to highlight the ideological prioritization of skills over content. Pring (2004) understands this economic skills agenda as relying on “the bewitchment of the intelligence by a misuse of language.” Pring critiques the vocationalistic skills strategy by suggesting that a skilled philosopher is not necessarily a good philosopher. A skilled philosopher, for instance, may be quite adept at the mechanics of philosophical argumentation without actually having “anything philosophically interesting to say.” This critique holds for lawyers, authors, musicians, and other professions. Therefore, Pring suggests that “to focus on skills traps us into a limited language which transforms and impoverishes the educational enterprise.” In other words, there may be noble hopes animating the push for skills and embedded in policies, but they may actually “impoverish the educational enterprise.”
In the same way, in my thesis I focus a great deal on learnification—the translation of all there is to know and say about teachers’ work into discourses of learning and learners.
To explain in brief, learning is an individualistic concept, but the concept of education “always implies a relationship: someone educating someone else and the person educating thus having a certain sense of what the purpose of his or her activities is.” To further distinguish between learning and education, “one could say that the general aim of educational activities is that people will learn from them. But that doesn’t make education into learning; it simply says that learning is the intended outcome of educational processes and practices.” Learning is a “process term,” which is to say that it “denotes processes and activities but is open—if not empty—with regard to content and direction.” A consequence of learnification is that it becomes “difficult to articulate the fact that education is about relationships, and more specifically about relationships between teachers and students … [and] this helps to explain why the rise of the new language of learning has made it more difficult to ask questions about content, purpose and direction of education.” Beyond these points, it’s worth nothing that in my thesis I also take care to illustrate how learnification can function as a vehicle for a ‘democratic deficit in education policy.’
I hope the preceding elaboration helps clarify for Mr. Kierstead why educationists in Canada—and beyond—may feel compelled to actively resist any further entrenchment of the 21CL agenda.
Hi Tobey,
I took the liberty to copy-paste your comment on my blog and direct readers to your thesis. http://moments-snippets-spirals.posterous.com/
Here in the US, and more specifically in Chicago we have a great (as in “large” not “good”) example of the influence of business interests defining the purpose of education. This movement could have been called “20th Century Skills” because since about 1880 Chicago’s system of public education has been shaped by the Commercial Club of Chicago (CCC) – a civic organization made up entirely of the business elite of the time. The CCC wanted to create a tiered system of education with factory style vocational education for the masses and an upper tier of schools for the children of the managerial class. The only reason this explicit tracking didn’t occur at the time was the opposition of the fledgeling teachers unions and some reluctance in the mayor’s office to allow the CCC to dictate policy so openly.
The CCC has usually tended to remain in the background, using its connections to shape policy through member influence in City Hall, but there have been times when they have been more upfront in their advocacy. In the 90s they helped to draft the re-centralization of the Chicago Public School (CPS) after progressive Mayor Harold Washington instituted community control of schools through Local School Councils (LSCs) The CCC was also behind the Renaissance 2010 program in Chicago which involved closing and taking over schools considered failing on standardized tests. This fear-based program forced administrators and teachers to drop all non-testing based activities in schools that were put on probation.
The CCC model of strict mayoral control and standardized test based accountability were the inspiration for most damaging aspects of NCLB and Race to the Top. Chicago started using standardized tests – supposedly to bring accountability to students, then to schools and now to teachers and principals. These policies have not improved schools in Chicago – even based on the CCC’s own reports and unfortunately this Chicago-grown policy has spread around the US and is quickly becoming the global status quo.
In 1880 the educational system of Chicago was shaped by the needs of the business elite and not be the needs of the students – especially the low-income, African American and immigrant students of the time. Very little has changed. In 2013 the CCC and the mayorally appointed Board of Education made up of CEOs, bankers and real-estate investors make the decisions about Chicago’s schools. We have about 15 days of standardized testing per year. Principals can make 20K bonuses for raising test scores. The Chicago Teachers Union went on the first strike since 1987 to protest teacher evaluations being based on invalid and unreliable standardized tests. CPS is considering closing over 100 schools in a single year while greatly expanding privately run charter schools despite their record of lackluster performance as they skim motivated students from the neighborhood schools and dump those with special needs back into them.
We are finally getting the tiered system that the CCC tried to institute back in 1880… is this really the global movement we want for the world’s children?
What an interesting overview of your work, thank you for sharin. c21 learning comes into my PhD increasingly as I analyse data. Your critique of what is behind the term is timely and important. Thank you.