The document discusses concepts related to education and learning. It argues that learning is a progressive mastery of more complex information, with each new concept building on previous understandings. It also notes that current education systems are typically designed this way, with students advancing in comprehension levels over time. However, it questions whether this linear model of education adequately prepares students for the unknown future.

1. Scott Dean Berry UBC Elementary Education Program 2007 – 2008

2. “ For a child to understand a concept, that child is first required to have a working knowledge and understanding of other, related concepts. A student cannot learn to multiply numbers without first learning to add them. In fact, almost all educational systems are built upon this model in that students are required to attain a measured level of comprehension before progressing a step upward into the next, more complicated level or grade. But more specifically, I have observed that this model of teaching in progression was guiding the learning process considerably on even a daily level. I have learned that learning itself is a student’s mastery over progressively more complex information , and that teaching is the art of focusing this idea into challenging, rewarding and meaningful lessons and activities.” - Scott Berry UBC Elementary Education Application Essay - 2006 I once believed that education was a linear phenomenon

3. Western Conceptions Of Teaching Correspondence Theories Coherence Theories gnosis (meaning) episteme (know-how; facts) mysticism religion rationalism empiricism interpretive coherence critical pedagogy transphenomenal coherence constructionism & constructivism Current practice Current discussion A year ago, I was here... ...I am moving to here

4. There has been a SHIFT in my thinking SHIFT HAPPENS Look here

5. “ We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U Today’s students are no longer the people our education system was designed to teach

6. “ And yet it is education that is meant to take us into this future that we cannot grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year [2006] will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise…what the world will be like in five years time and yet we’re meant to be educating them for it.” http://www.ted.com.index.php/talks/view/id/66

7. Bodily Subsystems The person, or biological body Collectivities: Social bodies, bodies of knowledge, etc... Society, or the body politic The species The ecosphere, or the planetary body Current technologies and demographic trends are going to contribute to massive changes at all possible levels Invention of writing Mass printing Current technologies Institutionalized education Mass education ? “ Education cannot be a simple matter of perpetuating entrenched habits of interpretation or of preparing youth for adulthood…such rationales are not only naïve, but impossible…because the world is changing so quickly that the best preparation we can hope for is the capacity for flexible adaptation and much of modern curricula and instruction seem to be pointed in exactly the opposite direction.” - Davis, p. 224

8. … to “resituate education – not as the means through which Western Civilization replicates itself, but as a source of hope for the future. Some have gone as far as to suggest that an education that is about knowing differently rather than knowing more may be humanity’s best hope.” So it is all about the future. We are at a place now where we have no idea what is going to happen in terms of the future. We have no idea how it is all going to play out. If we hope to develop the capacity for flexible adaptation to such massive changes, we need to rethink our approach to education... - Davis, p. 9 knowing differently ...how?

9. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X Knowing differently through engaging in critical examination of the types of implicit associations that are used to structure and defend certain existing educational practices. Ignoring implicit associations – of conceptions of normal , for example – is, arguably, the same as accepting them. “ An important aspect of education is rendering the familiar strange – reawakening attentions to entrenched habits of association and exploring alternatives.” - Davis, p. 40

10. Knowing differently through affecting students’ attentions in ways that spark transformations in their personal perception and consciousness - not so much as helping students to know what they don’t know, but as giving them the tools to notice what they haven’t yet noticed. I am learning to envision education in terms of affecting perception – the deliberate use of strategies to illuminate certain important aspects of the world in an attempt to cultivate different habits of interpretation.

11. Education should not be about persuading our students to see the world in the ways we have seen it in the past or the ways we see it today. It should be thought of in terms of increasing the scope of possibilities for our future. In other words, education ought not to be understood in terms of a linear progression toward realizing pre-determined outcomes or of a perpetuation of established truths, but as active participation in an enduring project of rethinking current ways of being in the world and realizing new, unimagined possibilities for our collective future. Scott Berry Educational Philosophy Statement 2007