Education and Info Lit
Week 2 – Lecture B
Why are we having this
conversation?
Current
Conditions
Emerging
Challenges
and
Opportunities
Social and
Historical
Influences
People
and their
Lives
John Bransford
Where Does Learning Happen?
The LIFE Center
Historical Trends in Education
(See Amirault & Branson – Educators and Expertise: A Brief History of Theories and Models)
Ancient and Medieval
 Individualized / small
group instruction
 Education for the few
 Instructor as subject
matter expert

Informal or oral
assessment
Modern
 Mass education

Education for the many
 Instructor as expert in
educational techniques
 Formal, objective, and
measurable
assessment
And Post-Modern??
Development of American Schooling
(See Collins and Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology.
For alternate views, see Tyack’s Ways of seeing: an essay on the history of compulsory schooling)

Invention of the Printing Press


Immutable mobiles
Reformation

Primacy of individually acquired knowledge



1642 Massachusetts law
Massachusetts Act of 1647
American Revolution


Enlightenment
Voting rights

Citizens who understand and able to defend their rights
Development of American Schooling
(See Collins and Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology.
For alternate views, see Tyack’s Ways of seeing: an essay on the history of compulsory schooling)

Industrial Revolution

Arrival of immigrants



Need for social cohesion
Path to security/success
State-provided schools


Parental assumption - learning generally happens in the
classroom
The School System






Compulsory attendance
Graded schools
Tests
Textbooks
“Carnegie units”
Comprehensive high schools
From Melting Pot to Mixed Salad


1820 – 1920 was high urbanization
1836 – 1914 large immigration from southern and
eastern Europe



Urbanization and immigration leads to compulsory
education and schooling as a system
2000 – 2005 large wave of immigration from Asia and
Latin American
What does this all mean for learning today?
Development of American Schooling
(See Collins and Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology.
For alternate views, see Tyack’s Ways of seeing: an essay on the history of compulsory schooling)
“The elements of the new design of schooling evolved
together into a coherent system to meet the demands of
a democratic and growing society. But as the system
became more rigid, it ceased to evolve as the society
around it continued to evolve, and so in recent years, it
has become more and more out of sync with the
demands of a continually evolving society.”
So what kind of system do we need today?
Why information literacy in libraries?





Higher Education
 Entering the discipline’s conversation
 Expectation of student’s abilities
Public Libraries
 Developed to educate the masses (similar time frame to K-12)
 Public access computers
K - 12
 1983 - A Nation at Risk
 1991 - Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills
(SCANS)
Business Settings
 Workers’ use of technology
Basically, because they’ve had to!
Next week – Models and
Standards