‘Enabling’ as leading paradigm for 21st century education
One of the greatest challenges in today’s world is helping to prepare the younger generation for the world to come. Many of us have quite gloomy ideas about what is ahead which is hardly surprising considering the factors of climate change, overpopulation and economical difficulties that are currently shaping our present and future.
We are facing global challenges that we have not really seen before. Surely, in the past humanity experienced wars, economic downfalls, change of political regimes, technological upheavals, or natural disasters, but not on this scale. We have created a truly globalized world, therefore everything is experienced globally. Given this new situation, there are no ‘good old recipes’ that we can adopt. How to prepare ourselves, and most importantly, how to prepare today’s youth for the world to come? How to tell them which strategies work and which do not? How can we know what kind of knowledge, skills and know-how to transmit that they will be able to use?
After spending years thinking about this, I have come to the realization that we don’t know and we cannot know what to teach to young people. Whatever we tell will either work or not, we don’t know this in advance. I have a piece of good news though. THEY know. They know what they need and they know what they will be able to use. They just don’t necessarily know that they know it yet. So our role as the older generation, older siblings, parents and educators is to help them reveal in themselves and for themselves this knowledge that they actually already have, but they are not necessarily aware of.
How can I say with such certainty that they know? Well, we all know. By being born we know. It is not some mystical stuff. People do not need to be taught how to live, they know that instinctually. It is like taking a breath. We do not need to be taught how to do that.
If this is the case, why have we messed up our lives so bad? Well, we have forgotten how to live. We have given reign not to life but to our ego, we have developed a bad routine and that is leading the planet to destruction. This old routine must stop. This ’bad education’, ’bad programming’ that we have been having for some time now shades the force of life. It is our role now to help young people take these bandages off and help them start living again.
How can we do this? Education has been aware of this need to change for many years. Many schools of education has been driven by concepts such as ’letting’, ’enabling’, ’allowing’, as opposed to ’instructing’, ’telling’ or ’directing’. In university education there are different methods that aim to overcome this attitude manifest in frontal teaching and are moving away from content delivery where the teacher stands in front of a silent classroom and presents whatever the class material might be. Frontal teaching actually hardly transmits any knowledge, 3% of the heard material is remembered, whereas with interactive learning 80% of the material is remembered after the classes. It is not enough though to invent fancy teaching methods (interative learning, project based learning, PBL, flipped classroom, you name it) and still ‘teach students the same old stuff’. These teaching methods should be there to enable students to develop new knowledge, knowledge that their teacher DOES NOT necessarily KNOW. And the teacher has to be OK with this not knowing.
How does this look like in practice? Let me tell you my example by walking you through quickly the stages of my teaching career in higher education at various universities:
1. : Teacher stands in front of the class, reciting material with the use of PowerPoint. This is what I did when I started teaching 15 years ago. I was a spring chicken back then, terrified of the job, prepared for hours for a class in which, like a good student, I recited in a lecture form what my students had to know. Although I don’t think I was a boring presenter and I knew my stuff, I noticed how my audience was falling asleep after about the 5th slide of image, concept, theory.
2.: After some time I was still doing frontal talking, used PPT, but I started to ask questions. The questions were directed in a way that I would get the answers I wanted, so I was still pushing down information I thought they must learn.
3. : Showing off how smart I am became boring eventually, and this is when I started to become curious about what my students actually think of the issues I raised. We started to engage in discussions, we applied knowledge and theory onto their personal lives.
4. : I stopped delivering material in classrooms, I just raised an issue, and pointed them to read up on it prior or even after the class. Depending on context, issues varied from purely practical matters such as management or career development to questions regarding the existence of God.
5.: (I must say I enjoyed this the most): I walked into the classroom with no intention at all. I had the issues I was thinking of discussing at the back of my mind, but I didn’t come up with them. I asked my students how they were doing, and we started chatting about stuff, whatever they felt like chatting about. Interestingly, after 5-10 minutes of chatting, they always presented something fascinating to talk about, directly connected to their lives and dealing with the world today. So we would spontaneously discuss issues such as what success means today, what it meant before, the status of women in society and what that implies in smaller scale (work, family etc.) and larger scale in societal operations, political decision-making, what it means to have a self and other issues of all kind. It really did not matter, as long as it was an issue for the group.
I believe that the classes we had in the spirit of Stage Five were truly educational, we left classes in some altered state of mind, really engaged with what we were discussing to our core. We completely embraced the issues we brought up. I know that many of us changed not only in how we think about issues but as people during these discussions. You wonder about tests and quotas and exams? Oh they passed those without a problem. It is incredible just how receptive the human mind can be if it is actually interested in something. The remarkable part was that we have not only grown in knowledge and skills, we have grown as human beings. The sole purpose of any education today is just this: to make us grow as human beings, this is the only way we will be able to cope with this radically changing world. So the need to ‘let know’, to allow knowledge to arise as opposed to ‘letting anybody know anything’ (in other words, telling them how the world is or supposed to be) is the present and future of education.
I invited a prominent colleague of mine, Ian MacDonald to share his views with us on education. Ian is a business school professor who has lived and worked in Budapest for the past 30 years. His Doctoral research is focused on the effectiveness of business school education and the extent to which it develops the competencies that future entrepreneurs and leaders are likely to need. Ian is also a professional DJ and a passionate cyclist. When presenting his views on education at one of the conferences we participated in, many colleagues started actually shouting at him outraged by what he was saying while others stormed out of the room, so furious about his propositions. What Ian was saying was completely in-line with my ideas, but it appeared to be so unorthodox that it upset many. In the subsequent entry he presents his views on education.
Hi Delia, very enlightening and, should I also say „revolutionary” way of thinking of education today? Let me put in my 2 cents. I call your „let know, let knowledge arise” notion: „let their energies be free so that they are able to capture what is needed in today’s world for surviving/being aware/furthering/spreading.” Let old rubber stams, mechanical solutions and empty frazeologies, past methods be what they are: the past. Teaching them human contact, paying attention to each other, being curious of each other, each other’s thoughts, problems, will give students today the foundation and courage to discover problems and find solutions. Help them discover themselves in this newly evolving world. Your writing is shedding light on something that few of us will admit: we are letting these kids down; together with the evolving of new technology, we are not giving them a helping hand to teach something that is the very basis of our existencve: to be human, pay attention, reach out. I don’t mean to provide rumbling big words, but this is what I thought after reading your writing. Your „letting to learn,” „let know, let knowledge arise” as we offer our helping hand, be bold „not to know everything as teachers” – God forbid: ackowledging this – WOW, Délia. This new generation knows techology viscerally, no need to teach them. But we can certainly teach them humanity, sympathy, and they will, for sure, know what to do. Fostering this knowledge of what to do to make things better is what we should be striving to help them acquire.
Jee, Enikő, could not agree more! You put these ideas into words so eloquently, thank you!
let’ discover!
Coachként úgy látom, hogy sok előnye volt, hogy a tanári pályád egy új szak indításával, új terület felfedezésével kezdődött, így a kíváncsiságod, tudásvágyad, motiváltságod is átragadt a diákokra, a felfedezés együttes élménnyé vált. Ma már nemcsak a tapasztalatok, hanem idegtudományok is igazolják az érzelmek szerepét az tanulást biztosító agyi hálózat fejlesztésében (1). Az oktatói eredményességed, sikered szerintem jobban korrelál a kialakított szeretetteljes kapcsolattal, hozzáállásoddal, tanulási módszereddel, pozitív példáddal, mint a tanítási módszerekkel. Már az induláskor elvarázsoltad a diákjaid, tőlük tudom 🙂 Ez az élethosszig tartó tanulási kedvük szempontjából kulcsfontosságú.
TANítás/TANulás
Mintha a nyelvünkben is benne lenne, hogy a tanulás legjobb módja a tanítás. Talán az üzleti iskola sem mellékes a tanári pályádon. Közgazdászként azt tanultam, hogy a gazdaság a javak cseréjével indult (gabonát ércért, vagy textilért, …, :), és ez is a mai napig főként társadalmi kapcsolatokon keresztül történik. A legjobb tartós üzlet, ha mindkét fél jól jár. A tudástársadalomban, a big data korában, pláne a pandémia alatt világosabban látszik, hogy ez az információ/tudás cseréjére hatványozottabban igaz. Új helyzetre gyors jó válaszhoz hatékony információcsere, közös tanulás/ együttműködés, jó menedzselés kell. Ez igaz minden területre, kutatástól, vakcinagyártásig, termelésig, elosztásig, klímavédelemig, …, oktatásig és igaz minden korosztályra, szereplőre.
Mérő László elgondolkodtató táblázatot készített a gödeli struktúrák működési mechanizmusairól (2), arról, hogy a biológiai élet, tudomány, emberi gondolkodás és gazdaság területén milyen hasonlóság látható az új dolgok létrehozásában.
Kívánok az új kérdésekre új jó válaszokat, és persze az örök kérdésekre is, amikre folyamatosan keressük/tanuljuk a választ:
Who we are
let’ get to the core who we can be!
Szeretettel, minden jót hozzá Délia!
1. Titokzatos emlékezet Hilde és Ylva Ostbytól, regényíró és neuropszichológus nővérektől
2. Mérő László Élő pénz 346.o
Olyan érdekes, hogy enne a cikknek a kapcsán nem csak Mariban, hanem másokban is a kapcsolatépítés ereje, a szeretet és odafigyelés fontossága, a közösségépítés, és az emberek egymáshoz és a világhoz való viszonyának értékessége fogalmazódik meg. Egymástól tanulunk, egymást tanítjuk; a pedagógiában ez egy konzervatív hozzáállástól távoli megközelítés, amit eddig csak alternatív pedagógiaként emlegettek – most pedig egyre több intézmény jön rá, hogy ez a hatékony oktatás egyetlen módszere. Tehát igen, a kapcsolatok, közösség, egymás megtartása, odafigyelés stb lehet „módszertan”, hiszen sok oktatási fórumon sok évszázadon át nem ez volt a domináns megközelítés, és más oktatási gyakorlatokat eredményez, mint pl a frontális oktatás, ami a diákok személytelen hallgatását és tárgyiasítását (‘a hallgató’ ugye még mindig az egyetemi diák megnevezése) és a tanárt, mint a tudás felsőbbrendű birtokosát veszi alapul.