What If?
Professor Yong Zhao, Ameeta Wattal, Charles Leadbetter, Valerie
Hannon, Professor Stephen Heppell
This presentation was part of the 2011 DEECD Innovation Showcase on 13 May.
This podcast is brought to you by the Department of Education and Early Childhood
Development, Victoria.
Professor Yong Zhao, University of Oregon, US:
Education is about liberating people. It’s about helping everyone realise their dreams and
their potential.
Ameeta Wattal, Principal, Springdales, New Delhi India:
It’s nothing to do about the status in which you grew up, it’s about the opportunity that you
get.
Charles Leadbeater, Author and innovation advisor:
If you’re given the impression or you’ve got the idea in your head, that innovation is about
special people in special places, it’s not. It’s about you. Everyone in this room can - and
many of you will - be innovators even though you may not be given that name.
Valerie Hannon, Director, Innovation Unit UK:
For many young people, school is something to be endured and not enjoyed. They are not
passionate about it.
Charles Leadbeater:
The gap between the sheer sense of creativity and ambition and
possibility that children feel armed, often with technology, and the
sheer kind of intractability and slowness and clumsiness and
clunkiness of school systems…
Valerie Hannon:
The old model no longer works for young people, and if it doesn’t
work for them we have to reconsider how it’s shaped.
Ameeta Wattal:
We all educate, but the idea is - how do you educate and what is
education, is it merely knowledge, is it wisdom?
Valerie Hannon:
What is it that we are educating young people for?
Professor Stephen Heppell, Founder heppell.net, UK:
Some folk then look backwards and say “Let’s do it the way we used to do it”. One thing
you get from the buzz in this room is an absolute certainty that the
genie is out of the bottle and he ain’t going back.
Charles Leadbeater:
So the old world, the world that we are leaving behind in one form or
another, is a world where mainly learning is something done, to you,
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at you, and for you, to a world in which increasing it will have to be
done with people and by people.
Speaker 1:
We facilitate the learning, rather than teaching directly to kids or at
them.
Yong Zhao:
Can we transform our educational system into a system that
supports the development of individual strength?
Speaker 2:
We teach them how to find out more about what they’re interested
in, rather than teaching them more things to be interested in.
Student 1:
The opportunity to learn the way I want to learn.
Charles Leadbeater:
What you see in lots of schools is teachers trying new things,
developing new techniques. But I think what we need in education,
increasingly, is more than that - we need to invent new ways for
people to learn, new places, with new technologies, new
relationships. We need to find ways to combine what we might call
learning with other activities that we perhaps don’t count as learning
but actually people learn through, which is work, or sport or dance or
what have you.
Stephen Heppell:
Suddenly, you know, the race is on. Can we keep up with them?
Can all institutions be fleet-of-foot and agile enough?
Yong Zhao:
Globalisation is a major force for education. It basically means we
have to prepare our children to live, not only in a local community or
in a nation but in a globalised world. Think about the skills and
knowledge in our children or in our students that will not be replaced
or automated by machines.
Valerie Hannon:
We all now have a much stronger pressure on us to connect. To
connect, not just locally and geographically, or within our
communities, but to be aware what the global innovators are up to.
Yong Zhao:
Understand, interact, and be able to work with other people who are
linguistically different, culturally different or economically different.
Student 2:
You could talk to someone from USA and one from Qatar the next
day without having to travel. It’s quite amazing.
Charles Leadbeater:
We need to enable ways in which that learning can take place,
because that is exciting, it’s engaging, it’s creative, it’s imaginative, it
hooks children and it’s the world that they already live in.
Student 3:
Instead of our teacher just talking one on one with our parent, we get
to get involved and tell our parents how we think we’re going and
what we’ve been doing and things like that.
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Ameeta Wattal:
Learning goes beyond the classrooms into life itself and we consider
it a 14-year dialogue which then becomes a conversation with the
world at large.
Valerie Hannon:
The fundamental objective and purpose of learning, organised
learning, needs to be reconsidered, that we need to be inviting
young people to become people who see themselves as stewards
for the planet.
Stephen Heppell:
We seem to have reached the point when the children are
autonomous, they have choices. The teachers have set them a
pathway and they have rushed down that pathway. They have run
down the corridor of learning and every door that was locked,
they’ve just floated through.
Student 4:
I’m in control of my own learning which enables me to learn how I
best learn and get the most out of my learning experience.
Valerie Hannon:
We see practice which is evolving from the bottom up, often coconstructed between learners and educators, which - combined in
really powerful ways - might hold the key to something which is
really exciting and 21st century.
Ameeta Wattal:
The teacher can never be replaced - the person, the teacher because in many ways the value, the accountability, the emotion, the
affection between a child and a teacher is a human bond.
Valerie Hannon:
We have to be lifelong learners who are able and willing and indeed
eager to reconceptualise who and what we are repeatedly over time.
Charles Leadbeater:
The challenge for education now, it seems to me, is to embark
systematically on kinds of innovation that are more stretching, more
ambitious and more radical, and the education systems that are
capable of making that leap, taking those steps, will be significantly
better.
Stephen Heppell:
If anyone could prototype what the future of learning looks like, it’s
this nation.
Valerie Hannon:
The future’s already with us but it’s just unevenly distributed.
Ameeta Wattal:
You have to be the change that you want to see in this world.
End of presentation
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