The document highlights the need for a fundamental change in educational approaches to address the current crisis in education, which disproportionately affects marginalized students. It argues that existing pedagogies contribute to societal issues, promoting values of competition and individualism, while advocating for a new professionalism that fosters community engagement and critical thinking. The author calls for reimagining education at all levels to equip future leaders with the skills necessary to tackle global problems.

1. CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT:
New Professionalism and the Need for
Pedagogical Change
Presentation of Summary Conclusions
to the
Western Inquiry Center
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
©
April 2010.
Tony Ward
The content of much of this presentation is freely downloadable at:
http://www.tonywardedu.com

2. INTRODUCTION
Today I want to talk about some of my work in field of Education over the last 40 years. As I tell my story, I would like
you to consider what you hear in the context of eleven interconnected theses:
• That current theories about Engaged Learning presume that Education has to change.
• That Education plays a dominant role in the creation, maintenance and reproduction of culture and in shaping
society
• That the field of Education is in crisis at every level
• That our current system of Education fails the majority of students - particularly those from marginalized cultures
and people of colour
• That these failures persist despite numerous attempts (involving vast sums) to reverse the trend
• That these failures may not be “accidental” but rather stem from systemic forms of pedagogy that fail to recognize
or address the relationship between learning and culture
• That the world stands on the brink of unparalleled environmental, social and economic calamity
• That our system of Education has been a key component in the creation of this calamity
• That is it not possible to solve our global problems with the kind of educational system that created them
• That Education can play a significant role in resolving the problems that beset the world.
• That if we wish to avert or ameliorate the impending crises we need urgently to radically change the way we
educate

3. EDUCATION OR INSULATION?
A Critical View of Education
Let’s not beat about the bush. Our current global situation requires that we speak both
plainly and directly.
The way we educate is one of the root causes of the planetary crises that face us. Our
rapacious exploitation of indigenous communities, of the environment, of non-renewable
resources, coupled with our selfish ideologies of individualism, and competition - all carried
out under exclusive and hierarchical management systems stem directly from the ethics
and practices that are embedded in our educational system and that our students
assimilate and internalize over fifteen or more closeted years of subliminal conditioning.
We need to reconceptualize the entire framework of education if we are to solve our
apparently intractable problems and to shape a world based upon the need for peace,
social equity, environmental justice and prosperity for all.
The way we currently educate insulates our graduates from the social and cultural
experience necessary to become compassionate and skillful future leaders and decision
and policy-makers. We need a new kind of professionalism that will require skills in
consensus-building, community engagement, cross-cultural sensitivity and savvy and an
ability to share power with those that are affected by the decisions that will be made. We
do not currently teach these skills.
Indeed, if we are to transform the world through education we must begin by unlearning
almost all that the hidden curriculum of our current pedagogies has instilled.

4. TIME FOR CHANGE:
Education itself is in Crisis
Despite the expenditure of $Billions, Education is in crisis at all levels
• Primary School:
• Standardized testing is marginalizing culturally different students and resulting in uneven and inequitable distribution of resources
• Teaching practice is being increasingly deskilled through standardisation of texts and prescribed presentation techniques
• The diversity of school texts is diminishing rapidly through publishing monopolies
• Teachers are over-stressed by increasing administrative and bureaucratic tasks
• The space and time for creative teaching is being squeezed from the curriculum by imposed economic management systems
• Teachers are resigning in record numbers as demand for accountability increases and teacher autonomy decreases
• There is a chronic shortage of trained and skilled teachers
• There is a chronic shortage of male teachers
• With increased class sizes,classroom management becomes synonymous with custodial care.
• Parents are feeling increasingly alienated from their childrens’ education and from classroom participation
• Secondary School
• Truancy rates are very high for minority students and students of colour
• Bullying is rife and schooling increasingly resembles custodial care
• Teaching practice is increasingly deskilled, as delivery of texts in particular ways becomes mandatory
• Teachers are limited in the very creativity that they need to establish the classroom relationships with their students that might lead to improved learning results.
• Minority students continue to fail or drop out with no qualifications
• Students feel bored and powerless to improve their education or to aspire to higher learning
• Teachers feel unsafe and battle-weary
• University
• Minority students are hugely under-represented at University level
• They are under-represented at faculty level and lack appropriate cultural role models
• Minority student non-completion rates are high
• They feel alienated by mono-cultural curricula and pedagogues
• Graduates emerge lacking in the social and technical skills necessary to address real-world problems

5. CUSTODIAL SCHOOLS
Helene Guldberg - Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear (2009) claims convincingly that in our
attempts to protect our children from the outside world’s dangers, we are stunting their development.
NOTE
My family and I live in a part of New Zealand where it never snows. Our 7 year old daughter, Josephine had never
witnessed snow falling nor seen it accumulate in large quantities - that is, until January 2010, when it snowed heavily
in Oxford, Ohio, where we had just come to live for a year. One morning she woke, ecstatic to see the fat, thick flakes
settling up to a foot deep on our front lawn. We still had half an hour before school when we went out there, having a
wild time, showering each other with handfuls of the magical white powder. Then it was off, enraptured, for the day at
Kramer Elementary. When I came home from work at night, I asked her if she had a marvellous time playing with her
schoolfriends in the snow. “No!”, she said, “We weren’t allowed to touch it!”
A month later, we visited a neaby local private school Open Day. There, in the playground, was an ice cave and snow
tunnel - perhaps 12’ - long that the children had been encouraged to build. Go figure!

6. THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM
Our children are undoubtedly influenced by the information that we place in front of them -
whether this be television images of war, murder and violence or ongoing portrayals of mostly
white affluent middle-class families living an American Dream (that bears no relationship to
their own impoverished and often harsh realities), or the humiliating and degrading assaults on
personal dignity portrayed in programs like The Apprentice, American Idol, The Bachelor etc.
Similarly, in schools, the curriculum is the site of an ongoing ideological war between
competing groups - Christians vs non-Christians etc. Unnoticed in its impact, however, is the
hidden curriculum - the insistence on obedience to authority, the time and space structuring of
the child’s world and of the child’s most intimate values, the denial of personal experience and
an insistence upon normative social values and perspectives - the Oath of Allegiance being but
the most graphic example. Among the many others:
• The silo-ing of knowledge and subjects into separate fields and areas
• The abstraction of knowledge from actual problems and life situations
• The separation by ages, ensuring that older children feel no responsibility for the younger
• Pedagogies in monolingual, monocultural forms that privilege a Eurocentric reality
• The isolation and insulation of children from the real world outside the school
• The instilling of ethics of competition, indicidualism, hierarchy
• The emphasis on patriotism and its association with obedience

7. EDUCATIONAL SPATIAL SYSTEMS
Programmed Learning Research
Learner seen as child Learner seen as adult
Gate Gate Gate
Grade School Lecture Grad. Seminar PhD
Decreasing Degrees of Control
Total Control Freedom
Talking Circle?
Competition, Individualism and Hierarchy Cooperation?
The State’s compulsory Educational spatial system is largely determined by its roots in religious and military training, with total constraint in the early years,
developing to greater degree of freedom with “experience”. It is based upon the premise that at every stage until the last, the learner has limited prior experience,
must pass through developmental stages (gates), must be “taught”, has no capacity for action in the real world until his or her head is filled with (legitimate) theory.
It is a system of power relationships that promotes individualism, hierarchy, competition, passivity and quiescence to authority. It progressively
insulates learners from everyday life and community and creates an elite system of experts who hoard their knowledge for sale to the highest bidder.
,
Compare this with the Maori/Lakota/Iroquois culture and Talking Circle, where learning is leaderless, accretive, cooperative, mutually supportive and consensus-
based and where the freedom (and power) to speak is universal. Knowledge is not power or the property of the individual to be used for personal ambition
or profit but is collectively created, owned and shared.

8. SCHOOL, PRISON OR FACTORY?
Schools are looking increasingly like factories or prisons with few windows and no relationship with the (real) outside
world. Children are isolated and insulated from the material world - which becomes internalised as a distant and
dangerous place - a place to be feared, and ultimately controlled for safety’s sake.

9. THE ENGAGED UNIVERSITY?
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER?
LEADERSHIP?
Our future leaders spend up to 18 years in this isolated, insulated cocooned world
bombarded with antisocial messages about power and leadership.

10. ISOLATIONALISMLISM AND THE PROFESSIONS
Nov. 2009 Time Cover
TRICK OR TREAT?

11. PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF BUSINESS
Time Magazine’s survey showed clearly that the majority of American’s see the
world of finance as corrupt, its MBA graduates as cynical and untrustworthy. I
wonder why?

12. Ask yourself this: KNOWLEDGE AND RESPONSIBILITY
Is it surprising that Business School students who spend all of their educational time from
Grade School to Grad School:
• In paranoid locked-down, schools
• In an isolated “silo” discipline
• Cocooned within a “free-market” culture and ideology
• Indoctrinated into a competitive ethic
• Being told that “Knowledge is Power”
• In subterranean classrooms without light
• On 50 minute schedules that leave no time for digestion or reflection.
• Having no community engagement
• Over a fifteen year period
Go out to work on Wall Street to earn millions while the people in the street below become
homeless and starving as a consequence of their competitive myopia?
In an indigenous culture, knowledge is not power, but responsibility -
responsibility to share and support.
In an indigenous culture, leadership is service to the people Fortune Magazine, Oct. 6th 2009.
Significantly, Fortune Magazine in October 2009 (see right) noted that key MBA (satirically named as “Me Before
Anyone” programs) are currently in great public disfavor as having contributed mightily to the economic collapse. To
recoup their lost prestige, Schools like Harvard’s Kennedy School, Carnegie Mellon Tepper School, the Columbia
Business school and the New York University Stern School of Business are reintroducing courses on ethics, social
responsibility and critical thinking. One can only wonder that they were dropped from the curriculum in the first
place....

13. NEW PROFESSIONALISM FOR A NEW WORLD
Education has played a significant part in shaping the beliefs, theories, practices and identities of the professionals and decision-makers
who have led the world to its current predicaments. If we continue to educate future decision-makers in the same way we will fail to solve the
global problems that beset us. We need a new form of education that operates at every level, from Kindergarten to University and beyond
Old Pedagogies New Pedagogies
• Teacher-centered • Student-centered
• Teacher-directed • Student-directed
• Teacher-as-teacher • Teacher as facilitator and co-learner
• Hierarchical • Non-hierarchical
• Repetitive • Creative
• Monological • Dialogical/discursive
• Authoritarian • Democratic
• Majority-based • Consensus-based
• Silo’d knowledge • Cross-disciplinary
• Risk-averse • Risk-seeking
• Experience-denying • Experience-affirming
• Non-critical • Critical
• Abstract • Concrete
• Community-isolated • Community-situated
• Theory-based • Praxis-based
• Individualistic • Collective and collaborative
• Non-cooperative • Co-operative
• Secretive • Open, sharing
• Conflict-averse • Conflict-resolving
• Competitive • Non-competitive
• Monocultural • Supportive of cultural difference
• Value-denying • Value-acknowledging
• Ideology-denying • Ideology accepting
• No time for reflection • Reflective
• Non-reflexive (Pedagogy does not match espoused theories) • Reflexive (Theories in action match espoused theories)
• Teacher-evaluated • Co-evaluated

14. In our teaching practice, we model the world of the
future for our students
Let’s model a better world
For extensive details of all of the material presented here, visit:
www.TonyWardEdu.com
No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa