Opening Minds to Change: The Role of Research in Education.

Even the youngest students delight in producing and working with ideas. Kids are more than ready for the Knowledge Age. The question is, are we? — Marlene Scadamalia and Carl Bereiter. (Fall 2003 Vol. 43, No.4.) I believe that our greatest problem is a theoretical confusion at the heart of our enterprise, and that most educational research and theorizing today pass educational practice by. — Kieran Egan. (Spring 2003. Vol.43, No.2.) Theoretical and conceptual confusions in education are multiple and fundamental. They are about the purposes of schooling, the nature of intelligence, concepts of childhood and human development, about curriculum, and the nature of literacy. While conceptual confusion in public education is always to be expected to some degree, it seems to me to be a larger problem at this time. Ronald Manzer, professor emeritus of political science, who spent his academic life in the study of public policy for education, offers one way of better understanding this phenomenon. He explains that public education in Canada is rooted firmly in a liberal political ideology that changes over time. Manzer argues that beginning in the 1990s we with technology per se, but with the disjunctures and dissonances between traditional library practices and the new social conditions, textualities, and literacies emerging within a context of increasing economic and cultural globalization.”5 What would a school librarian, principal or superintendent make of this? The ways that academics go about developing and testing theories or hypotheses are not necessarily the ways that the rest of us use and their language is unfamiliar to many outside of the ivory tower. Yet academic theorizing seems to me to offer a critical perspective on many of the problems in education in an era of rapid change when both social and economic imperatives demand better learning. Approaches to making research that re-frames important concepts (for example: intelligence, learning, literacy, mathematical literacy) more relevant to educational change makers must take account of the fact that that to replace old concepts with new ones requires that people change their minds. Most of us add new information to what we already know. But what do we do when new knowledge contradicts what people think they know; when their ideas rest on faulty assumptions or inadequate theories? Charles Handy, in a short essay on the future of organizations wrote, “Our use of old words to describe new things can often hide the emerging future from our eyes.”6 But it is equally true that the use of new words to describe essentially old things also obscures. The education domain frequently adopts the language of theoreticians – for example multiple intelligences, emotional intelligence, multi-literacies, learning communities – to describe human qualities or aspects of human learning that are intrinsically old, as old as the human species itself. These words, representing new constructs or concepts, could help illuminate the mismatch between how humans learn and how we organize for learning in school. But all too often, the new words become grafted on to old ideas. They get turned into policies and programs and risk becoming yet another educational fad or failing to make the intended difference. Yet fundamentally they are new ideas that challenge old ones. They are ways of thinking about something rather than ways of doing something. Think about ‘life-long learning’. I assumed its intended purpose was to crystallize the idea that learning, the same as breathing, occurs from birth to death and in all settings that we inhabit. If life-long learning is different from adult learning, or adult education, then why do we talk of children as ‘becoming life long learners’? Why are they not already life-long learners? This is not simply a matter of semantics. What we understand as the underlying concept will have significant bearing on what possibilities that concept suggests in both policy and practice. It is a widely held belief that the world has changed. Analysts disagree about the impacts of economic globalization driven largely by technological innovation, but many accept that the 21st century requires new skills to be widely available – critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and flexibility of mind with communicative and technological competence. Above all, we need to be expert learners throughout our lives. Since many school leavers lack these attributes, where do we look for an understanding of the challenges and for better ideas about schooling? C A N A D I A N E D U C A T I O N A S S O C I A T I O N I E D U C AT I O N C A N A D A 41 EN BREF L’education necessite la creation, le transfert et la diffusion de savoir. Dans le milieu de l’education, toutefois, les liens entre ces fonctions sont maintenant dysfonctionnels. Nous savons deja ce que nous devons savoir pour garantir le succes de nos enfants. Cependant, les intellectuels qui concoivent des theories et des hypotheses n’arrivent pas a influencer les decideurs publics qui, eux, ont peu d’influence sur les enseignants. Consequemment, le fosse se creuse entre ce que nous savons sur l’apprentissage et ce que nous faisons de ce savoir. Ce fosse resulte en partie de differences fondamentales entre la tour d’ivoire et la salle de classe et du fait que de nouvelles connaissances concurrencent souvent des connaissances existantes construites sur des bases theoriques inadequates. Il est essentiel d’etablir le dialogue entre les universites et les membres de la profession afin que nos connaissances sur l’apprentissage preparent adequatement les jeunes pour le 21e siecle.

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