A very old bun fight. Education philosophy and current debates in New Zealand education.

If you have been following education news in New Zealand lately, then you know that debate is in the air. Perhaps you have seen the PPTA’s article called Curriculum wars: coming to Aotearoa? Or maybe you have read Elizabeth Rata's article The basic flaw in our education system. You may also have read the report from (newcomer?) Briar Lipson and the work she was involved in with the New Zealand Initiative Think Tank.

Rata is talking codswallop. Trying to assert hegemonic control through the academy by deculturing literature is a move more familiar to Tories... #unhelpful

— martin henry (@martinallenh) April 17, 2018

You may even have been part of the discussions on Twitter. However, before the debates get too heated, I wanted to take a moment to point out the redundancy of this supposed 'curriculum war'. You might be saying whoah! Redundancy? That’s a bold claim! Well actually...

Any ideas when the quote above was written? Or who wrote it? It seems to capture the current debates about knowledge vs skills vs competencies vs other-edu-jargon quite well don’t you think? The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) might suggest that students should learn things that will be useful in life, things that will give them jobs so that students are able to contribute to a stable economy. The United Nations might argue that a focus on virtue and character of the soul is critical if we are to maintain world peace in the face of climate change, radical inequality and the ever-increasing impact of automation. I would hazard a guess that Elizabeth Rata would be more interested in developing intellect than virtue. I suspect that Jane Gilbert possibly would have a different argument altogether. Where do you think Francis Valentine might fall? Or what about Michael Absolum and John Hattie? What about Aristotle? After all, he is the author of this quote. The very same Aristotle from 384 BC. It seems the progressives vs traditionalist bun fight stretches back a very, very long time.

With so many opinions in the air, it is easy for debates to become polarising (especially when they are made out to be 'wars'). The cognitive dissonance sets in and before you know it, nobody is learning anything because we are too busy defending our position. And at the end of the day, the heart of the matter remains unaddressed - the fact that we cannot seem to agree what should be learnt at school.

To understand why we are plagued with this never-ending debate, one needs to understand the three philosophical purposes of education, socialisation, qualification and subjectification. (See a more detailed infographic here, or my post, Education's great wicked problem for more in-depth explanations about these).

While most of us can find some agreement with each of the three purposes of education, philosophically these ideas are “fundamentally irresolvable” (Biesta, 2009; Egan, 2001). This means that our entire education system is built on conflicting ideas that are constantly in the midst of a tug of war. This means that debates about the success of the education system are incapable of reaching a consensus, as different parties inevitably prioritise different purposes of education (Kieran Egan does a marvellous job of explaining these ideological conflicts).

Despite these conflicting ideas underpinning most, if not all debates about educational success, they are rarely acknowledged, and so the bun fight has continued for literally centuries. You will possibly recognise these debates in your context too, play (socialisation) vs literacy and numeracy (qualification, or exams (qualification) vs inquiry-based learning (subjectification), etc.



So if the debate about what we should be teaching our students is old and philosophically unresolvable, then what is the point of debating this at all?!

I don't have a whole lot of answers to offer you. Instead, I will conclude with a few questions that I would like to see debated...

• How useful is it to publish articles titled curriculum wars in these debates about the future of our schools? Does calling it a war (rather than a debate or discussion) polarise, and thereby fuel the bun fight?
• What does helpful debate and discussion look like (as compared to unhelpful, polarising debate)?
• How can one school or one teacher serve our super diverse communities when each of us cuts the socialisation/subjectification/qualification pie so differently?
• Should socialisation, subjectification and qualification all be the responsibility of school? And if yes/no, what should we do about it?
• How different might our debates in education be if we were all more explicit about which purpose we align ourselves with?
• If we developed an alternate purpose for education, what would it be?
• What if the 'educational experience' was completely redesigned, from the bottom up? What if we changed the time, the place, the content, the funding, the ratios, the jobs, everything? And where would one even begin?
• Would our schools and classrooms be any different if all teachers and school leaders had a richer understanding of philosophy? 

A very VERY first draft Introduction - Using complexity thinking and MOOCs to disrupt current debates on educational futures.

I am a firm believer in showing your work (Austin Kleon style). Especially when it is in the super messy, 'I just had a go just to get something written down' phase. For many of us showing the raw, vulnerable side of things is incredibly difficult, myself included. However, I have learnt that the sooner you show your work, the sooner you can get feedback to make it better. So here goes... The very, very first draft of an introduction to my thesis. I have a hunch it is not formal enough, not official enough and is probably littered with spelling and grammar mistakes. But, it does tell the very important story of #edchatNZ and why I do what I do, and that seemed worth sharing regardless of whether the words below end up in my thesis or not.

Introduction
Formal education is broken, expired and fundamentally flawed. Academic experts across the world have argued that our current education system is not fit for purpose. The public mirrors their arguments too, everyone from politicians, parents, teachers and students can, and do find fault with the current system. Yet, despite these arguments, formal education has changed very little since the industrial revolution. The question then arises, if so much is wrong with education, and so many are dissatisfied, why then has there been so little change?

My personal experience as a beginning teacher also mirrored this dissatisfaction. With less than two years of experience as a classroom teacher, I had already become disillusioned with the education system.  My dissatisfaction was not just limited to the education system in New Zealand, but rather started in England where I had begun my career as a science teacher in a very low socioeconomic area. I started my career in a school that had a disproportionately large number of students in foster care, a large number of refugees and a student body that was so malnourished that school inspectors and other visitors frequently commented on the small stature of particularly the boys (Murray, 2011). Whilst working in this school, it was glaringly obvious, everyday,  that the current system was just not serving those students who were most at risk. The students were disengaged, angry and disheartened. From this very  low socio economic school in England, I moved to my next role as a science teacher in New Zealand. This new school was only eight years old with great infrastructure, had good reports from the education review office,  and was in a high socio economic area. However, here too, the students were disengaged, anxious, unhappy, and found much of their schooling experience irrelevant to their lives. If in both these polar opposite schools, the system was not serving the students, I started wondering if there was something fundamentally wrong with the entire education system.

As well as the severe disengagement of student, national and global news was and is littered with stories of university graduates who can not find jobs, who are moving back home at thirty, who can not buy homes. In addition, employers are arguing that graduates do not have the skills required to be successful in the workplace (Alton, 2016; Duronio, 2012).

Increasingly, I became dissatisfied with the status quo. It was this dissatisfaction that drove me to Twitter where many educators were convening around a range of hashtags to discuss their own frustrations with education in their context. Twitter functions through the use of a hashtag that tags words, making them searchable and filtering them to a particular stream. This means that using a hashtag, anyone can participate in the discussion about a certain topic. A number of the education chats are contextualised to location or theme for example, #dtk12chat for design thinking in K12 education or #UKedchat for United Kingdom Education. Through the public discussions of educators around hashtags such as #edchat, #PBLchat, and more, I had been exposed to a brave new world of alternate ways of thinking about education. It was through Twitter that I was first exposed to new pedagogies that attempted to reconcile some of the shortcomings of the current systems such as project based learning, bring your own technology, design thinking and more.

However, despite there being many New Zealand educators participating in these online discussions, there was not yet a hashtag that allowed a single space for New Zealand educators to discuss education in our national context.

Hence, in October 2012, in the absence of a clear New Zealand hashtag for education, I launched #edchatNZ. This was an effort to curate the New Zealand discussions of education, teacher practice and professional learning. Now more than four years down the track, this hashtag has grown beyond a bit of code, into a professional learning community. Although there is no formal membership, various educators from across the country regularly use this as a space to discuss and learn. Fortnightly Twitter chats have become supplemented by two national conferences, a podcast and a range of live webinars. #edchatNZ has also helped a number of other New Zealand based education chats get started. We have even collaborated for joint chats with #aussieED, an Australian based Twitter chat. Because the foundation of this community was around the need for change in education, all online events have remained free so that as many people as possible might engage in the discussion. Even our two conferences charged a registration fee below $30 in order to enable more people to participate since almost everyone in our community participates in their own time, through no encouragement of their school.

Although #edchatNZ started as a means to curate New Zealand education debate, conversation and learning, it has evolved immensely. The community, and the leadership thereof has evolved into a narrative of rethinking education, both at the classroom teacher and system wide level. Through the discussions of the #edchatNZ community, it appears that this community has evolved to think of themselves as the space where the movers and shakers, the lone nuts (see Derek Sivers’ TED talk, How to start a movement), and even the revolutionaries meet and discuss their ideas. It is often those people who find themselves dissatisfied with the status quo that makes their way to #edchatNZ.

The #edchatNZ community consist of a diverse group of people with a range of expertise. It is for this reason that the leadership of this community needs to examine how it brings appropriate levels of challenge for all members of its community. Additionally, Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters, and although over a single hour of live moderated #edchatNZ conversation there are usually well over 1000 contributions, the medium is ultimately limited in depth. Hence, in pursuit of challenging this community, I began exploring alternative options to further our collective learning and resulting practice. It was through the exploration of these alternative ways that might extend the professional learning and discussion of the #edchatNZ community, that the idea of the #edchatNZ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) was born.  A MOOC could still maintain the informal membership and  community aspects of #edchatNZ, whilst providing the space for extended, deeper and sustained discussion, exploration and new avenues of professional learning. The #edchatNZ MOOC, or formally called Cyborgs, Schrödinger and School – Rethinking Education for the Future, became an eleven week course that sought to challenge participants to deeply question their underlying beliefs about education, test those ideas in against current global trends, and then take action accordingly.

This thesis explores new territory in a number of ways. Firstly, the #edchatNZ community has a fundamentally different approach towards teacher professional learning as it seeks to develop the collective intelligence of the group, rather than focussing on the individual teacher in the classroom. Additionally, this community is both dynamic and diverse, with individuals in the community stretching the span of New Zealand, from remote, suburban and urban locations. Individuals have a range of expertise from beginning teachers, all the way to veteran teachers and senior leaders. Participation in community events are highly informal and community members will opt in or out according to their schedules and their professional learning interests and needs. Hence, the community members are highly autonomous, whilst still acting together as a network.

Secondly, this thesis also explores new territory in that it attempts to bring together a theoretical framework to make sense of this diverse and dynamic community,  and the ways in which this network might be enabled to influence large scale shift in education.  The #edchatNZ MOOC was specifically designed to increased the number of interactions participants had about education futures. Hence, This thesis uses ideas from complexity thinking and adult cognitive development, to make sense of these interactions, and any potential changes in the way participants or those they have interacted with think about education futures.

This masters project intends to capture whether a MOOC might serve as a means to nudge a learning community towards rethinking education at a deeper level. Ultimately, this project is an exploration of how we might develop the collective intelligence of the lone nuts in our schools to act with greater knowledge as they challenge the status quo in a system that is no longer serving its purpose.

References

• Alton, L. (2016). Millennials Are Struggling To Get Jobs - Here's Why, And What To Do About It. Forbes, 2016.
• Duronio, B. (2012, 24 April). Bad News: Just Half Of Recent College Grads Are Landing Jobs.  Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com.au/northeastern-recent-graduates-jobs-2012-4?r=US&IR=T
• Murray, J. (2011, 27 June). New GCSE targets are a fresh blow to struggling school. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jun/27/schools-government-gcse-targets

PS: The first go of planning this introduction and the literature review to follow was an explosion of post it notes. It was incredibly helpful and I really appreciate all the invaluable advice for getting started from the Patter blog, an incredibly useful blog for those doing academic research. 

The photo does make me wonder just how many steps I am of going full John Nash from A Beautiful Mind...