Technology as Enabler of Pedagogy

Relationships, Agency, Technology - A New Pedagogy:
At the heart of the educational enterprise are human relationships.
One of the most important of these human relationships is the relationship between adults and children. If we want to understand the implications of socio- technical change for the future of education, we need therefore to explore how socio-technical practices may be unsettling and reshaping our expectations for adult-child relationships, and the sorts of risk and opportunity that such new expectations may pose for children.

The western model of education can be understood as being built upon a relationship between adults and children commonly referred to as the ‘standard model’ of childhood. This model is usually understood to have emerged from the socio-technical changes of the industrial revolution, which called for a large body of educated labour and required the separation out of children into educational institutions away from the labour market. Childhood was seen as a time for careful investment that needed to be protected from malign influence and carefully nurtured until reaching adulthood.

These changes produced education systems that detached children’s learning from the lived experiences of communities and carefully determined which adults children should encounter. Often they were organised around prescribed and predetermined curricula and characterised by pedagogic relationships that saw the teacher as conveyor of knowledge and understanding to the ‘empty minds’ of children. As children were separated from the formal economy, new stories were told about childhood as a time of vulnerability, a time of innocence, a time of dependence. And reciprocally, these stories about childhood also produced particular stories about adulthood as a time of labour, of secure identity and of expertise. In this story, adulthood became the ‘end point’ to which childhood aspired. The institutions and the narratives of childhood therefore became mutually reinforcing. Such a model of adult–child relations brings risks to children – their rights can be overlooked as they are seen as less than fully formed humans; but also benefits – children are invested in, protected, cared for.

Over the last 30 years a number of factors have combined that disrupt this model of childhood still further by requiring a reconceptualisation of children not as ‘less than adult’ but as social actors in their own right. The ‘discovery’ or targeting of young people as a consumer group in the 1980s and the development of a Children’s Rights Agenda, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, for example, began to offer children forms of economic and judicial citizenship that required that their views be taken seriously by adults.

Technology and Relationships:
The relationships between adults and children of care and control, of responsibility and restriction that underpin contemporary education can be understood, then, not as natural relationships, but as contested and negotiated products of their time and their culture and as subject to change.
In these negotiations, new technologies and new socio-technical practices are harnessed to create different forms of adulthood, childhood and family.
At the turn of the century, as digital technologies were being presented by politicians and industry alike as heralding a new ‘information society’, children’s reportedly intuitive capacity to learn to use these powerful symbolic new tools began to provide a new language for talking about adult–child relationships.
In this context, the now familiar ideas of the ‘digital native’ and the ‘digital immigrant’ were born, which described children as natural citizens of the new world order, and adults as analogue impostors, trying to keep up.

In this context, industry and politicians recast as strengths to which adults should aspire the attributes of childhood that had previously been seen as vulnerabilities: playfulness, fluidity, adaptability, malleability, all became desirable attributes for the new knowledge worker. In contrast, the traditional attributes of ‘old’ adulthood – constancy, stability, experience, expertise – were seen as potential risks and barriers to adaptation and change. Rather than seeing childhood as a time of incompetence, therefore, adults were encouraged by companies such as Lego to take children as their models in order to survive in this new world:
A new generational contract
... children are our role models. Children are curious, creative and imaginative ... lifelong creativity, imagination and learning are stimulated by playful activities that encourage ‘hands-on and minds- on’ creation, fun, togetherness and the sharing of ideas. People who are curious, creative and imaginative, i.e. people who have a childlike urge to explore and learn, are best equipped to thrive in a challenging world and be the builders of our common future.

For at least the last ten years we have seen new ideas of childhood and adulthood circulating that threaten to disrupt the standard model of adult–child relations upon which most educational institutions are premised. They destabilise adult expertise and promote images of children as socially and technologically competent in the all-important spaces of the new digital networks.

Discernment, Responsibility and Multiliteracy
What do we need to know to live well in these futures? What curriculum will ensure that we thrive in such contexts?
There cannot, of course, be one answer, one final meta-curriculum ‘to rule them all’ that will provide us with the reassurance that we completely, and definitively, know what we need to know for our future wellbeing.

Rather than a list of prescribed content knowledge or learning outcomes, this collective, embodied, intuitive, human-machine collaborating and potentially dangerous knowledge landscape suggests that we will need to ensure, at the very least, that our students develop three attributes: discernment, multiliteracy and responsibility.

Discernment
Discernment is about the ability to judge not only the traditional qualities of information – trustworthiness, reliability and so forth – but, more importantly, to judge the relationship of information to other information, to your own goals and interests, and to the contexts in which it is used. In other words, discernment is the attribute we need when we realise that the main problem we face in a rich digital landscape is not primarily a ‘filtering’ problem but a ‘relational’ problem, a problem of judging value against context.
A concern for equity in education in these new knowledge contexts implies developing the capacity of all students not only to ‘decode’ information environments, but to create their own identities within them and to understand the criteria that will be operating if they seek to play a role in different knowledge communities – whether in politics, in friendship networks or in high stakes research communities. Fostering discernment is one means by which this can be achieved.

Multiliteracy
The proliferating modalities of the digital landscape, encompassing audio, visual, text based, embodied, haptic, musical and gestural modes of communication require fluency in multiple literacies. To be ‘literate’ in this environment, is to be able to model, to experiment, to visualise, to verbalise, to write and to film (among many other things). The ‘literate’ student, worker or citizen will need to reconnect the mind and the body, to move fluently between working in sight or sound, simulation or storytelling.

If we seek to equip students to engage with the processes by which knowledge is produced, by which ideas are represented, by which information is circulated and encoded, it will not be enough to continue to be concerned only with representation. Educators will need to engage with the materials by which representations are produced, with the ways in which the hardware and software, the networks and biology of our modes of communication also serve to structure our possibilities for representation, modelling and comprehension.

Responsibility
An education that nurtures responsibility nurtures an acknowledgement of the limits of our understanding of our tools, systems and networks.54 It encourages an exploration of unintended consequences, tipping points, complex systems. It encourages an examination of the potential impacts on other people of the ways in which we manage, circulate and control the information flows central to our networks. An education for responsibility means, therefore, seeing our developing socio-technical knowledge as the product of choices and intentions rather than as a disembodied inevitable and unstoppable force.
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An education system that nurtured these three attributes would not guarantee a trouble- free path towards the future. It would, however, begin to equip our students to participate in society’s conversations about that future.

Creativity 
Recognising Creativity as a Key Component of Student Development: 

Introduction:
In the 21st century, an individual must be able to create something new or create something in a new way, utilising the knowledge they have already acquired. It does not just signify art, but also various solutions to a problem in real life situations.

Curiosity, Creativity and Risk-taking
Our goal is lifelong learners who can adjust and adapt to changing environments. Inherent in such lifelong learning is a curiosity about the world and how it works. We now understand the very structure of the brain can be changed through intellectual pursuits—there is a corresponding relationship between the amount of experience in a complex environment and the amount of structural change in the brain—in other words, learning organises and reorganises the brain. Curiosity fuels lifelong learning as it contributes to the quality of life, and to the intellectual capital of our country. Equally as important is risk taking—without which there would be few quantum leaps in discoveries, inventions, and learning.

Creativity Through Learner Agency:
Henry (2001) lists four qualities of creative people:
• positivity, defined by tolerance and a quest for opportunities
• playfulness, meaning mental flexibility and enjoying to take risks
• passion, which incorporates motivation and commitment
persistence, to acquire experience in a field, which is necessary to be problem sensitive

These characteristics can be found in all of us, albeit to a different extent. They can be enhanced in the right environment with the right support. 

Motivation
According to Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, motivation requires three aspects: students need to have a real sense of purpose; they need a sense of autonomy; and they need to develop a growing sense of mastery in what they are attempting. 
Intrinsic motivation fosters creativity. According to Hooker & Csikszentmihalyi (2003) Teresa Amabile found that extrinsic motivators can trigger creativity, but intrinsic motivation produces more creativity. 
She discovered two reasons for this: firstly extrinsic factors can distract from the actual goal by letting the creator focus on the expected rewards. Secondly they can reduce the individual’s willingness to take risks, as these might endanger the extrinsic goal.
It is this willingness to take risks, one part of the playfulness quality, which corresponds highly with the desire to explore. The adventurer, who playfully explores an idea, quenching her thirst to discover new territory, enjoys this without needing any external rewards. The journey itself is enough reinforcement.

All these settings enable people to grow, to mature and to move towards self-actualisation. For this, being autonomous to a certain extent plays an important part. People who suffer lack of control over their lives will not be able to self actualise. 
Myers (1999) explains that learned helplessness is ‘the hopelessness and resignation learned when a human (...) perceives no control over repeated bad events’ (p.52). Based on Martin Seligman’s research, he further states that the feeling to be in control has positive effects on health and helps to reduce stress.

When learners have the freedom and the control to joyfully explore, to promote their self actualisation and experience flow, they will develop a higher commitment to their learning. 

They will own their learning, taking responsibility for it and investing a lot more energy in it, generating a higher - intrinsic - motivation. This means less energy is wasted on side tracks, such as struggling for an external reward. 
For techers, much less effort is necessary for monitoring learners: once the goal is clarified, the high motivation and ability to perceive reality more objectively (as Maslow accredits people who are self actualised, in Davis, 2004) will enable the learner to self-monitor.

This means that a creative learning culture is stimulating and motivating for learners, which results in higher performance.

What would a creative school, or classroom, look like? 
There can never be a 'one size fits all creativity contract' to suit all circumstances. What is required is for creativity to be valued by our political leaders, conditions established for it to flourish in our schools, and a need to respect and trust professional judgment. This must be informed by educational philosophy not 'cherry picked' research.
Creativity is about valuing individual differences rather than ensuring all students reach the same mediocre standard. Personalised learning is not an easy option as it not only requires new thinking but also good old fashioned effort, skill and perseverance by both teachers and students if anything worthwhile is to be achieved.

As described, learning is all about motivation. This intrinsic joy of learning is the 'default' position of learners from birth but this position is 'flipped', Pink says, by formal 'carrot and stick' teaching. We have spent too much time focusing students on things they should know rather than focusing on what motivates them.

Pink refers to Carol Dweck's research that shows it is a person's mindset about ability, whether it is fixed or incremental, that makes all the differences between failure and success. Schools must develop an aspirational learning culture that emphasises the incremental aspect - that ability can be grown. In contrast many students (and adults) believe that people are either born 'clever' or 'dumb' - both are limiting concepts. Those who see themselves as 'dumb' don't bother to try and those who see themselves as 'clever' don't like risking their 'cleverness' on areas of new learning. It has been shown that it is not intelligence that is the most important learning attribute of all, what is important is what we call 'grit', or effort, perseverance, and resiliency.

Pioneer New Zealand creative teacher Elwyn Richardson has written that creativity requires hard work. Elwyn quotes John Dewey who wrote that 'creativity is not just the song of the bird', meaning that there is a degree of hard work, inspiration and thinking before any creativity is resolved.
Creative teachers and schools need to strive for a more human and encompassing concept of teaching and learning. 

If all students develop the confidence to become whatever what they are capable of, appreciating that they actually do count, then they all can contribute positively to the betterment of society as a whole.

The issue of creating the conditions that foster student creativity in our schools has implications for the positive health of the wider society. Schools should be judged by the sense of student wellbeing, their ability to work well with each other, their resilience and their ability to learn. These are the competencies of the NZ Curriculum and they are more important than sorting out students according to standards that reflect industrial age thinking.
Creative education is about valuing the creative spirit, about seeking relationships, about living with continual change and transformation. It is at best an evolutionary adventure for all involved; a means to 'stand upright' able to explore whatever eventuates with ‘spiritual daring’ and, most importantly, for all our students to live fully as future citizens and to make the world a better place.

Recognising Creativity as a Key Component of Student Development.

1.  What am I currently doing around this issue?

Our focus is on developing self-managing, self-motivating, self-moderating leaders of our own learning.
We apply the correlated Cs model for Teaching and Learning

Project-based learning
Students can follow, investigate and explore projects in their own ways and in spaces other than schools. Education within such a social environment might be understood as relationally agentic

Experiential Learning
Students test out their ideas and learning through the real-world, this might be project based but will be about working with ideas, concepts and knowledge that relate to the real-world. Technology offers new ways and new contexts for this kind of pedagogy, through internet tools and resources to technology that facilitates investigation and interconnections with the real world.

Place-based Education
Taking a place-based approach is about looking to the local communities as a site of learning. Students develop a sense of care for the planet and education for sustainability and are points of ‘contact’ between animal and human communities. Such views on communities can be useful in sustainability debates be they about ecological, social, or economic sustainability. As such, agency can be seen as ecological and could involve technology that facilitates investigation about places online or in the local places themselves.

Evidenced by:
Our School-wide Focus on The People and The Land:  

• Our Strategic Plan Focus
• Drives  Our Five Pōhatu Tūmu Focus
• Five Pōhatu Our Theme Focus for 2019
• Whanaungatanga and Turangawaewae - People and Land 
•           Mentor-Learner Interactions and Conferencing
•           The Environment as a Learning Vehicle
•           Kindness 

                               To Ourselves
                               To Others
                               To Our World

2.  How am I using digital skills/tools or technology in this issue?

To tell our stories. Technology offers power, potential and possibility to tell and share stories in ways that are more engaging, interactive and immersive than ever.
It offers children a new dimension to the oldest literacy of all, storytelling.
We incorporate music, moving and static visual imagery, and soundscapes to evoke emotion and embed rich memories and deep understandings.

3.  What is the current role of the learner, myself as teacher and the technology in how I  might be using technology to do this?

Two specific examples:
A young Maori girl was lacking in confidence. It was impacting her relationships and her learning. From observing her art, I felt she had an ‘artist’s eye’. I asked her to capture a photo for me for a specific story in our newsletter. The image was captured from an angle and perspective that would not have occurred to me. I asked her to take more, for our newsletter and our school brochure. She inherently understood the ‘rule of thirds’, and had an amazing eye for the magic shot.
Her confidence grew enormously. Soon she was leading a Photography Club that she established, and training children to take over her role when she graduated.
Her confidence and language when helping children to analyse photos and what makes a ‘good’ photo was remarkable to listen to.

At graduation she spoke to our whole school assembly. She gave a simple message, “I used to think I wanted to be a fashion model, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t pretty enough. Now I am not worried about that, I’m pretty enough for me. What I want to be is a fashion photographer - no pressure to always look my best, and I can make others look beautiful with my camera.” 

Another much younger Maori girl had grown up roaming the streets. Often I would get a call from mum on a Sunday night to help her go look for four-year-old Misty, who had been out all day and not come home. When it was time for Misty to start school she would often not make it all the way to us, becoming sidetracked by other adventures to be had in the community. I introduced Misty to iMovie and taught her how to make and edit simple movies. She was a natural. From that point on she would arrive not long after 8am because she had so much ‘work’ to do on her latest movie.

Technology engaged and empowered these two girls who would otherwise have realised much less in their learning and life.

4.  What am I not doing and how might technology enable me to do this in the future?

Field trips and visits are becoming increasingly expensive for our parent community. VR offers an awesome alternative for this - provided it is meaningful, purposeful and connected to real learning - as opposed to gimmicky ‘look at this’ experiences.