STORY - "Any change is a long parade"
By Tracey Edstein.

“We are concerned with the present and the future.”

These words of Wayne Tinsey, Director of Catholic Schools, welcoming participants to the Catholic Schools Office (CSO) Learning Technology Expo on 17 September highlighted the need for educators to educate in ways that anticipate and meet the needs of tomorrow.

Keynote speaker Dr Julia Atkin explained that the Industrial Era has given way to the Knowledge Era, and the need for mastery of knowledge is giving way to mastery of learning.

The focus of Julia’s work has been researching how people learn. Through both formal and ‘hands on’ research in educational settings, she has developed a set of principles of effective learning. These principles which define the architecture of learning, have been translated into a set of design tools for developing educational programmes and services based on how people learn most effectively.

Clearly the “one lifetime, one career” principle no longer applies, and what Julia calls “the dejobbing of society” means that students need to be encouraged to develop skills and personality traits that will equip them for significant change, more than once. Rather than “look for a job”, they will need to be able to look for work that needs doing, and ways to do it.

Teachers, therefore, are being called on to teach in ways radically different from the ways in which they were taught, or taught to teach. Everyone in the classroom is a learner, and according to Julia, “technology is giving students a unique way of expressing themselves, and kids sometimes who aren’t terribly good in verbal written form can actually work through, for example, film. I’ve seen some fantastic stuff that students have done when they’ve created films and videos to express ideas which they would have been really struggling to express in linear text mode.”

One of Julia’s aims is to nurture the human spirit of individuals and the organisation. The origin of this is probably her own experience of effective learning: “I feel I’m most fully human when I express who I am, not what a teacher wants me to write.”

There is an obvious disjunction here between “who I am” and what the curriculum demands. Julia feels that some states are doing better than others in “turning the curriculum inside out” to cater to students’ real needs.

Returning to her roots added an extra dimension to the Expo for Julia. She grew up in Dungog, attending St Joseph’s then boarding at St Mary’s Dominican Convent Maitland and attending Marist Brothers for the senior years. She recalls clearly a retreat led by a Dominican priest when she was about 13. Julia had been disturbed by the realisation that while her life had been blessed in terms of a supportive family and a love of, and capacity for, learning, others - especially a particular classmate - were not so lucky. She raised this injustice with the priest, and he replied, “It’s not a matter of the size of the cup, but how full it is.” This was a turning point, and the source of a decision by Julia to use her talents for others.

Julia works with both teachers and students, and so she is constantly learning. She feels that her story has become the teachers’ story. Unlike other areas of property, intellectual property can be freely shared, and the “magic pudding” theory applies: the more knowledge you give away, the more you gain.

Of course, the technology that this self styled “education architect” advocates as a tool, not an end in itself, is daunting for some. While teachers are happy to admit that students are often more skilled in mastering the latest technology, they may be reluctant to ‘let go’ the role of instructor in order to be one more learner in the room. Yet the technology itself assists; as Julia says, “the most collaborative classrooms I see are the ones where technology is being used, because the students are busy helping each other.”

Julia’s passion is infectious and the slow rate of change can be a source of frustration to those similarly infected. Using an image that will be familiar to many, Julia says she realised a long time ago, recalling the St Patrick’s Day parades in High Street Maitland, that those who only see the parade as it’s drawing to a close have inevitably waited longer than those who witness it first.

For more information visit the website www.learning-by-design.com

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