We are looking for the correct frame to understand the picture.
Internet technology, data analysis, the speed of information, the amount of discoveries humanity has made are all simultaneously on offer as potential options, but where do we start?
This enormous range and quantity can be frightening, but it must not paralyse us. We can really make a difference and transform school making it more effective in responding to children’s needs for both the present and the future.
Artists have already gone through this phase and can provide a different perspective.
In the 20th century, artists repositioned their work through a process of self-analysis that led them in different directions compared to traditional art. They started meeting other people directly, leaving their circles and social classes, and chose to practice outside dedicated structures like museums and galleries. Deprived of any certainties, they questioned first of all their own role, their distinctive ‘sign’. That’s what’s going to help us in the near (or immediate) future: our ability to genuinely meet children halfway, to discover their germinating and restlessly striving talents, to allow each of them to listen to their own voice and tune it to the requirements of their times.
Art has left the picture frame. Learning can do that too, contaminating the school and the educating community.
Up to last month, the textbook was the element giving structure to the painting.
Through the manual, the perspective of learning is clearly drawn. A perspective reproducible in space (the different classrooms) and time (one year after the other), a sort of automatic pilot unable to deal with possible glitches or variations: if these occur they don’t lead to questioning the book’s (absolute) truth, but the (relative) ability of some of the children to adjust to it. If there is a book, there is a table to place it on, a chair to sit on and a blackboard to write a further explanation on: the teacher might skip a few pages, but the direction is set. This same book for everybody validates a way of schooling, a vision of the world based on the idea of progress as unstoppable and in continuous acceleration: “From the cavemen to the present day”.
There’s no crisis, no opportunity to refute.
We have given time and space a theory of relativity, we now have to take it to the school. To do that, we have to divert from the assigned course, try other routes, facilitate other exchanges. And now it’s our opportunity: this forced “break”, the emptiness it has generated can help us step up our game. Our chance to explore new grounds, searching for a different role as educators, a different position.
At the moment, the frame available to teachers is technology. The platforms through which to implement remote didactic methods are in fact empty containers, a fantastic void ready to accommodate anything. Once the frame has been chosen, we need to think further though, concentrating on the “what” and “how”.
We then start conceiving alternatives to the common book for everybody, let’s think, for example, about who has already built school libraries spending the same amount that would have been spent in buying the same book for everybody, about the possibility of offering subscriptions to audiobooks for children, about creating our own textbooks in the classroom and share them with other classes, thus transforming them from absolute devices to instruments for producing knowledge.
Let’s use this time out of the picture to experiment with our diverse intelligences, with our creativity: it won’t be difficult to go back to the old frame, but we might not want to do that anymore.
