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Schooling Australia II: the 21st century learning furphy

By Fiona Mueller and Deidre Clary - posted Friday, 28 September 2018


 

 

What is life like in Australia?

What has made your way of life in Australia just what it is?

How can we improve the Australian way of life?

 

    Social Studies for Australians (1952 – Book 4 Sixth Grade)

 

 

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Here we are in the second decade of the first century of the third millennium, worried (at least in Australia) about the declining performance of students and once again looking across the seas for solutions. This time around, the holy grail of school education is ‘21st century learning’.

Notwithstanding the slightly awkward reality that students and their schools and communities are already well into the 21st century, the rhetoric is everywhere and hard to counter, especially given the powerful references to building a better world. But what does it all mean?  Will it deliver real and lasting improvements to education in this country and give everyone confidence that all is in hand to prepare young Australians for post-school life?

Or is it a bit of a furphy?

Current school education policy and practices rest largely on the two overarching Educational Goals of the Melbourne Declaration, agreed to by state, territory and federal ministers ten years ago. The first goal promotes ‘equity and excellence’; the second describes students as ‘successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens’.

According to the Declaration, ‘major changes in the world ... are placing new demands on Australian education’ and ‘in the 21st century Australia’s capacity to provide a high quality of life for all will depend on the ability to compete in the global economy on knowledge and innovation.’ In 2008, the Declaration asserted that a national commitment to ‘world-class curriculum and assessment’ would enable all young Australians ‘to take advantage of opportunity and to face the challenges of this era with confidence.’

As state and federal governments fret about school funding, NAPLAN results, academic standards, teacher quality and myriad other issues that never seem to get closer to resolution, education authorities around the nation are undertaking their own research and consultation as they explore possible solutions. Many countries and systems, including Australia, are taking note of curriculum work led by United Nations bodies such as the OECD and UNESCO.

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Fundamentally different assumptions about schooling underlie the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of learning in the 21st century.

The OECD’s 2018 Education 2030 Position Paper  ‘summarises a global effort for education change.’ According to that document, students will be well prepared for post-school life in the 21st century if they are ‘future-ready’ and educated through a ‘learning framework’ that

encapsulates a complex concept: the mobilisation of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values through a process of reflection, anticipation and action, in order to develop the inter-related competencies needed to engage with the world (p. 6).

Such students will be able to contribute to what the OECD refers to as ‘The Future We Want’, in which the overarching aim is to ‘shape a shared future built on the well-being of individuals, communities and the planet’. Similarly, ‘human flourishing’ is identified as the transcendent goal by a ‘global partnership’ comprising representatives from the OECD, Intel, Microsoft and Pearson as well as high-profile experts from Australia and other countries according to Fullan and Langworthy’s 2013 book, Towards a New End: New Pedagogies for Deep Learning.

Echoing the OECD’s worldview, this group maintains that the current ‘crisis’ in education requires new pedagogies and ‘new policies, measures and evidence-based pedagogical models to enable learning relevant for the knowledge-based, globalized era’. They point to statistics on disengaged students and frustrated teachers, saying that there is a ‘moral imperative’ to ensure that education is ‘radically rethought’ because of the ‘chaos’ resulting from ’ transition to knowledge-based economies and global interdependency, enabled and accelerated by technology’. A radical shift will ensure that students benefit from ‘the interaction between pedagogy and technology’ and avoid boredom.

All advocates of curriculum redesign based on the 21st century worldview emphasise a combination of knowledge and human skills, values and attributes. Pioneers of the focus on 21st century skills, Fadel and Trilling (2009), in 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times, maintain that education is at the crossroads of the ‘knowledge age’ and that a shift in pedagogy and curriculum is imminent because technological advances in automation and artificial intelligence are recasting teaching and learning. Fadel and Trilling’s model identifies the practical skill sets that today's learner will need for life and work in the twenty-first century, prioritising critical-thinking skills, communication skills and creativity and innovation over rote memorization and ‘predetermined application conducted in isolation’.

A major dilemma for education systems, according to the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, is how to ‘educate young people for their own future rather than for our past.’ Schleicher claims that there has been little progress in educational practice since the Industrial Age, particularly as school systems still employ ‘norms’ of age, fixed curriculum content and achievement standards that rely on retention and/or memorisation of knowledge. While the OECD’s framework refers to academic rigour(e.g. Topics should be challenging and enable deep thinking and reflection), students are already being led to believe that because knowledge is instantly accessible, old ways of learning have lost their value. Advice provided to Canadian parents, for example, includes the statement that ‘the focus on memorizing information to learn is no longer a priority’ (C21 Canada, 2018).

Contemporary trends in curriculum design also emphasise ‘deep learning’, an approach that purports to address concerns about student engagement and academic achievement and enable more effective application of ‘transferable’ knowledge and skills.

In contrast to the scholarly expectations of the past, ‘deep learning’ in the 21st century does not simply mean sustained intellectual effort or rigorous discipline-based study. With some semantic variation across education systems, this approach identifies the key elements of ‘deep learning’ as character, citizenship, critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, creativity and imagination, according to Fullan and Langworthy. The starting point is not the mastery of what can be referred to as ‘the basics’. Instead, there is a renewed emphasis on assessment as the means of ‘operationalising’ deep learning so that students can ‘co-create new knowledge’.

The contention is that in order to ‘prepare youth for effective participation in this kind of world, our education systems should refocus on engaging students in this kind of work, where ideal outcomes are not achievement scores on tests but students’ capacities to collaborate, connect with others, create innovative products, programs and solutions, and ultimately to implement them in the real world’.

In anticipation of new, internationally validated tests and other ‘emerging’ assessment tools, and with an eye to greater understanding of the learning environments of students, the ‘critical first aim for the project is thus the development of more concrete, measurable operationalizations of deep learning skills and indicators for tracking to what extent this kind of connected and flourishing learning is happening’ say Fullan and Langworthy. So21st century teachers – referred to as ‘designers of learning experiences’ – ‘must know where their students are on their individual learning continuums, and be able to identify success criteria that push forward students’ knowledge and skill mastery at progressive stages of that continuum’.

Notwithstanding any innovations in measuring progress and providing improved learning experiences, it is arguable that students will need very clear parameters in the acquisition of knowledge that will allow them to apply it effectively. For example, given too much choice, or ‘agency’, many may elect only to learn about what interests them in the moment or what they perceive to demand least intellectual effort. This raises inevitable questions about cognitive development in the longer term. Will all students have equitable opportunities to achieve in high-quality learning environments?  How can they know what they need to know and will their use of technology enhance learning rather than drive it?

Is it educational heresy to question why the 21st century model is likely to be successful? Is the ‘future-ready’ philosophy so much more applicable now than in earlier times? Was it not a feature of schooling for young Australians born in the post-Federation years, when mass education began to be seen as a critical factor in nation-building? 

Importantly, is there a risk of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, given the implication that much or all that has been thought and done by previous generations of schools and teachers has lost its cachet? And who gets to decide which knowledge, skills, attitudes and values will actually be taught and tested?

These are profound areas of debate ... certainly challenging for parents and teachers and school leaders who are directly accountable for the personal and academic growth of young Australians. These issues raise questions about academic rigour, national standards and values, and the development of a genuine understanding of the benefits of lifelong learning.

In recent decades, Australian education systems have experimented with numerous approaches to curriculum design and pedagogy (e.g. adopting whole language approaches to the teaching of reading with the expectation that the teaching of writing would be accommodated, devaluing foreign language study and eschewing explicit instruction in English grammar).

The consequences of these strategies have been evident over time. In some cases, such as English literacy, the inter-generational loss of expertise and respect for technical competence in the national language has been so great that it is difficult to see how the situation might be retrieved. There are serious concerns about students’ engagement and achievement in science and mathematics, seen most clearly in unsatisfactory results in international assessments and falling enrolments in the ‘hard’ sciences.

Another area of considerable concern is the humanities, where low enrolments in subjects such as history, geography, economics and foreign languages reflect different learning priorities from those of Australia’s European and Asian counterparts, especially in the senior secondary years. Amidst the excitement of creating ‘new knowledge’, will there be room to learn about what it is to be human?

Returning to the three questions that preface this article, some might question whether they are too ‘last-century’ to be helpful in this new era. The 1952 Social Studies syllabus posed key, nation-building questions and, just like its 21st century successors, concluded that one aim of education should be to contribute to a better world. A close look at the subject content shows that those young Australians of the mid-twentieth century were expected to read a lot, undertake extensive research and think, speak and write critically about their place in society and the wider world. The future-focused fixation on 21st century learning may be a furphy on a grand scale.

 
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Article edited by Margaret-Ann Williams.
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About the Authors

Dr Fiona Mueller is a teacher of English and foreign languages and a former Head of ANU College at the Australian National University. In 2016-2017, she was Director of Curriculum at the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). She is particularly interested in the history of education, international education, single-sex schooling and K-12 curriculum design.

Dr Deidre Clary is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English and education at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia. A former secondary teacher and deputy principal, her research interests include disciplinary literacy, critical literacy and new literacies. More recently, Deidre has engaged in comparative curriculum studies involving the Australian Curriculum.

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