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What I'm proposing now in a partly idealistic kind of
way is that schools are sites for building equity agendas.
They are sites where we just can't simply reproduce the world as it is,
as teachers, as learners.
They are sites where,
in fact there are opportunities.
Opportunities to do better in life.
So education is just about the only opportunity for social mobility that there is.
You might win the lottery,
or you might have a predictable rich uncle that you didn't know about who dies.
They're all fantasies really.
The only way that the social mobility happens is really education.
It's the main route to social mobility.
In a way, partly what that means is we need to build
equity agendas where every student can become knowledgeable,
become skilled, become an active participating person.
And we don't build the system premised on an outcome of inequality.
So that's another important aspect,
I think, of 21st century education,
which may be different from the practices of education in the past.
Perhaps I'm being a bit idealistic,
perhaps a bit naive, but I think we need to set that as a kind of moral compass.
That's the social context.
So what I want to do now is to try and deal with these words which
describe this paradigm of education that we're trying to build together,
and in a way, one of the difficult contrasts is
what's the difference between this and authentic pedagogy?
And in a way, there is a kind of a strong continuity and
a strong connection and a strong lineage from what I'm arguing for this new learning,
this transformative, this reflexive education.
And the progressive movement which, in one measure,
began in the 18th century with Rousseau rallying against didactic pedagogy,
in another major, in the 20th century with people like Montessori and Dewey.
There were active attempts to build alternatives.
If we say that this new learning, this transformative pedagogy,
this reflexive pedagogy is in that tradition,
how does it extend that tradition?
How is it, in some sense,
is also somewhat different?
So here are the limits of authentic pedagogy,
and I'm going to give you a little example from John Dewey,
who was a great person.
I'm not being totally dismissive of John Dewey in any sense.
What he said was, the formal education of kids or working class kids,
is going to be not relevant to their interest, their lives,
their learning, so let's do certain forms of technical education for the boys,
and let's do certain forms of home science for the girls.
And this is true to the interests,
true to the dispositions,
true to where they're going in the world.
One of the problems with progressivism is,
instead of filing these kids and saying on the stands the economic curriculum,
we're going to bore you and fire you,
we create something which is relevant.
But by creating something that is relevant,
we find another way to reproduce structures of inequality.
Authentic then means true to the world,
but it doesn't do anything to disrupt the form of the world as it is,
with all these endemic inequalities.
Now of course, I'm being hypercritical,
I'm only talking about one of the side effects of progressivism,
often despite its best intentions.
What we mean by transformative,
is education that changes the conditions of life,
and the conditions of life for each individual learner.
So, it gives them opportunities,
it takes them beyond the horizons of possibility,
or they may be limited restricted horizons of possibility.
It pushes those horizons further
and there are many cases where this actually does happen.
People talk for example, about resilience,
about students who deal with all the exegesis of their life in a reflective kind of way,
and move forward, and get outside.
Those conditions which are often less than favorable.
And there is some sort of demographic [inaudible] for example,
immigrants who actually do not as a whole,
but some immigrants end up doing well just because there's
this incredible motivation on parents in the migration process,
which transfers on the kids.
And the kids do end up doing better than the previous generation.
It is possible to use education to transform the conditions of an individual's life.
But the question also,
is how can we use education to transform the conditions of social life?
How can we build knowledge systems,
communities, ways of life which are more participatory?
Where we have more agency,
where we are more in control of our everyday lives.
How can education be transformative in those senses?
Whereas, authentic pedagogy or progressivism often
falls back to being another reflection of the world as it is,
here we have an active change agenda,
where we want to create another world,
either for an individual student,
or for the social context that we're in.
And, what reflexive means in this context,
is these forms of engagement,
these forms of indirection.
Which might be, a learner in their learning,
kind of feedback loops there,
instead of the classic transmission model from the center out to the periphery,
of the teacher to the student,
the textbook to the student,
the syllabus to the school,
those kinds of models of transmission media.
That what we've got is things which are far more engaging which turns to
active builders than there are knowledge,
and there's constant feedback around that.
Hence the notion of reflexivity.
So, I'm trying to draw these distinctions,
perhaps subtle, perhaps fine,
between the models of progressivism and authentic pedagogy,
and this third model that we're now trying to characterize.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisDean
