Coming to you live from Adelphi, Maryland, while the student panel is talking about their experience of information technologies in their learning. Whitney Roberts from UMW is on the panel and doing us proud. A couple of things strike me right away. “Students” is a necessary, useful, unwieldy, and misleading category. These students are young, and they’re pursuing degrees, and there are of course powerful commonalities. On the other hand, their experiences and habits of mind, along with their own disciplinary “scaffolding,” diverge pretty widely.<\/p>\n
I can’t get all this together on the fly, but I need to blurt it out anyway: we are all students. There are factors unique to various stages of student development; but at a deep level that for me, at least, provides a more useful paradigm, we are all students. Teachers are students advanced enough to be able to shape, guide, and inform students at an earlier place in their learning. Teachers are also students advanced and accomplished enough (accomplished means “peer-reviewed” in the largest sense) to be able fairly and usefully to assess the work of younger students.<\/p>\n
I’m feeling as if greater awareness of continuities in life-long learning is necessary for us to make sense of this activity we call “school.” It seems to be hiding in plain sight. Whitney just talked about how engaged learners don’t mind being surrounded by learning inputs all the time; she said that technology is another way of talking about philosophy on campus walk.<\/p>\n
I wonder: have we designed school so that it–“it” meaning the challenge of constant intellectual activity–is compartmentalized and segmented (Whitney’s word) into toothless, leave-me-alone blanditude? Get your skills, punch the clock, move on to “real life.” We’ve made school into a job, not a calling, and that quite deliberately. Jobs are jobs. Vocations–callings–are always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Coming to you live from Adelphi, Maryland, while the student panel is talking about their experience of information technologies in their learning. Whitney Roberts from UMW is on the panel and doing us proud. A couple of things strike me … Continue reading