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Beyond the Blackboard
Future Directions for Teaching
3-4 November 2004, Robinson College, Cambridge
Overview by Ben Williamson, Researcher, Futurelab |
What is the teaching vocation going to look like in the future? Who is going to be teaching, and where is teaching going to take place? The Beyond the Blackboard conference, organised by Futurelab, set out to answer these questions and more through a series of keynote presentations, seminars and workshops. Throughout the event, it was apparent that teaching may be on the cusp of major change.
Futurelab's Managing Director, Annika Small, opened the event, claiming that in recent years there has been a significant focus on opportunities for learners in the future. Beyond the Blackboard, she said, should provide opportunities for looking forwards to new opportunities for teaching, while critically looking backwards to the methods and means of traditional teaching in order to establish the limitations imposed on the profession in the past.
Professor Peter D John of Plymouth University continued this theme by analysing the traditions of teaching, and the persistence and change in pedagogical practices over the last century. Professor John encouraged delegates to look at the traditions of the past in order to identify the positives, and to challenge the old teaching axiom that "change can never eradicate the past."
However, he was not uncritical of recent initiatives aimed at introducing new technology into schools. Through a series of photographs of school classrooms taken over the last century, he identified how the classroom and the practices of teaching have primarily remained locked fast in transmission pedagogies delivered from the front. The introduction of computers into the classroom, he said, has the potential to change this, but some technologies, such as interactive whiteboards, are engineering an increased focus on the "quiet, orderly structure" of transmission-teaching.
In his conclusion, he suggested that we need to reconsider what education is for, and reconsider the role of the teacher. One potential reconceptualisation might see teachers as "intermediaries of the environment," interrupting standard delivery teaching by breaking up the classroom and the existing structures that govern teacher-pupil relations. "We need to think about the deep grammar of schooling," he claimed, "and not just dump technologies into the classroom."
David Miliband, MP, Minister for School Standards, delivered Keynote 2 with a focus on the latest DfES initiatives intended to shape the future directions of teaching. He too called for a focus on the quality of teaching, and for "a mature debate on how we - as a nation - teach."
The personalisation agenda at the centre of the DfES proposals for reform, he said, is based on the idea of "the active learner", and on "the way in which the educational system tailors its offer around the needs, interests and aptitudes of every learner." Personalised learning, then, will involve increased choice for learners alongside an increased emphasis on formative assessment. This is "assessment for learning", combining summative test results with teacher-pupil dialogue and structured individual learning plans.
Personalisation, Miliband explained, is not an initiative confined to the UK but an agenda across the industrialised world. The challenges particular to the UK, however, are that attainment and socio-economic status remain more firmly linked than anywhere else in Europe. The agenda seeks to challenge this persistence, he claimed, by offering curriculum entitlement and choice, long-term goals and vocational options, particularly "for those on the edge of disengagement, or disengaged already."
Keynote 3 saw Professor David Buckingham of the Institute of Education's Centre for the Study of Youth, Children and Media consider "the other teachers" - the implicit teachers of TV and new media that shape the ways in which children learn about the world surrounding them. Professor Buckingham talked of media as "teaching machines" that teach bad messages, or alternatively as offering new forms of liberation and 'informal learning'. Children's consumption of media, he argued, is not passive; rather it forces them to make up their minds and to make choices about specific situations.
Using the Pokemon craze as a case study example, Buckingham suggested that learning from Pokemon takes place in self-motivated "communities of practice" - informal groups bound together by common interests and shared activities. The needs for schools, he argued, are not 'Pokemon Maths' or similarly branded learning resources, but the recognition of children's entitlement to a media literacy strategy.
In his closing keynote presentation, Ralph Tabberer of the Teacher Training Agency welcomed the dialogue and the exchange of productive ideas that the conference had prompted around the development of the teaching profession and its practices. While recognising that teacher recruitment numbers are increasing, Tabberer acknowledged the need to ensure that the profession extends its scope to meet the challenges facing the current generation of young people.
In the world of business, he said, there is widespread recognition that success can be achieved in vastly different ways by people with wholly different ways of working; but in our schools, all students still often experience the same materials and the same teaching in the same ways. Outlining current strategy, Tabberer suggested that the near future will see significant changes in UK education, from alterations to the five-day week and the rebuilding of many schools, to "extended schools" offering extra opportunities both for children and their families. The need for dialogue to unpack the new imperatives for teaching, he said, should be welcomed.
Interspersed between the keynote presentations, a series of parallel strands sought to introduce delegates to the range of initiatives aimed at transforming teaching from across the UK and beyond. While many of these were aimed at schools, some acknowledged that education does not always happen in the classroom.
Ros Sutherland and Dan Sutch of the University of Bristol outlined the InterActive Education Project, which has seen a number of primary and secondary schools from across the Bristol region participate in researching the roles of technologies in the classroom. With the focus on existing 'off-the-shelf' technologies, Ros and Dan explored how these can be used creatively in the classroom. The project has identified that such technologies alone cannot stimulate better learning - teachers need to frame their use in ongoing productive activities.
Donna Burton-Wilcock of Immersive Education demonstrated MediaStage, a new interactive tool for media studies education, that provides young people with a 'virtual TV studio' to make short films. MediaStage, Burton-Wilcock said, allows children to "perform beyond the school corridor", exploring the new possibilities offered to students as they take on diverse production roles rather than just acting roles.
Ray Barker of the British Educational Suppliers Association started with an interesting premise: that if the last 3,000 years was condensed into an hour, the last 50 years would represent one minute. It is in this last minute that most technological change has occurred. Further, the pedagogic shift towards the learner has happened only in the last few seconds. Suggesting that we are now on the verge of a radical change in education, he suggested that new ICT resources taken alone will not support this change, but can create the conditions for better learning necessary in the 21st century.
Bridget Somekh and Matthew Pearson from Manchester Metropolitan University presented findings from a research study investigating how such new digital tools can transform human activity in schools; and Andy Thompson described the 'exemplar designs' for new school spaces that have been developed through the DfES Building Schools for the Future program.
An art space run by children for children was presented by Amy Bryant and Shannon Coombs, two pupils at Hareclive Primary school in Bristol, where they currently sit on the management board of Room 13. Room 13 has become a mini-brand in the last few years, spearheaded by the successes of the original organisation in Fort William. Each Room 13 is an art room for children that is run by the children, who employ artists-in-residence to help them to explore and experiment with their art skills in and out of school time.
Looking even further away from the school gates, a number of speakers explored what non-school learning might mean for teaching.
Simon Widdowson of the trAce Online Writing Centre and online teacher-in-residence for the Kids on the Net project outlined a number of schemes designed to allow children to write and publish stories for the internet. Some of these, he said, have explored the use of hypertext, and have allowed children from schools that are geographically separate to collaborate on the writing activities, as well as individuals and groups working from home. Jean Johnson and Jonny Dyer extended this model in their presentation on NotSchool, an online community of learning for over 100 teenagers who have been excluded from school, are too ill to attend, or have been forced to leave mainstream education for a variety of reasons.
Julian Sefton-Green from the Weekend Arts College then outlined how education take can place in informal contexts as well as in the formal context of the school. Establishing that formal and informal learning often take place synchronously through varied activities, he added that a great deal of learning occurs 'accidentally' and goes unacknowledged and unvalued.
Jane Lowe outlined the work of the Home Education Service, and particularly her work with Romany traveller children, and Rose Luckin of Sussex University explained the Homework Project, which extends teaching beyond the school using interactive television delivered over the broadband-enabled internet.
Futurelab's Ben Williamson, Richard Sandford and Martin Owen described the Racing Academy project, an online motor engineering and racing simulation designed to support groups of individuals to work together on the construction of virtual racing cars, and then to compete in races with other teams over the web. And Dan Howarth of the Science Museum outlined a project which has taken new interactive technology outside into the playground in order to promote learning through play activities.
Over two sessions the pan-European I-Curriculum framework was also described. I-Curriculum seeks to identify the real needs of learners and teachers in becoming digitally literate, and identifies ways in which this framework can be implemented practically to meet the needs of diverse European curricula.
In order to facilitate debate and dialogue around the issues and ideas being presented by the speakers, a 'Tools for Teaching' workshop was held on Day 2 of the conference, during which all delegates were invited to work in groups to design ideas for tools for the future teacher. These included tools to support teachers to share expertise, tools for language teaching at primary schools, and others to support peer-to-peer learning about health issues between young people outside school.
Beyond the Blackboard demonstrated that the future directions for teaching are many and varied, but that there are already a range of interesting and exciting projects and initiatives in place to investigate what happens when these are explored. We are already beginning to see how children can become teachers in informal contexts, and how new technologies can help to create better conditions for teaching and learning in the 21st century. Over the next few years, some of these changes may become more concrete and integral parts of every child's learning from the early years through to the final years of school. It is these final years of school and the crucial transition years of the 14-19 age range that the next Futurelab conference focuses on.
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