Mapping the Educational Knowledge for the continuously support of teachers and educational staff

Transcription

1 1. The Author surname: Prof. Dr. Girmes Author first name(s): Renate Institutional affiliation: University of Magdeburg, Germany address: Telephone: / Fax: Theme: Open and distance learning in teacher education in a changing Africa Title of the paper: Mapping the Educational Knowledge for the continuously support of teachers and educational staff Challenge: The Revelation of the Whole World within the Curriculum 2. The complexity of the world, the huge amount of available information, the traditions of disciplines and the conventions about what kind of knowledge is relevant for students and learners - these are the basic presuppositions underlying curricula all over the world. The curriculum itself often is a conglomeration of things, whose consumption is based upon a pretense of necessity. However these things usually offer simultaneously too much and too little: too much detail and too little depth and overview too much adherence to tradition and too little room for imagination and foresight too much reliance on the established with too little courageousness and openness for new perspectives. To re-invent curriculum seems necessary, if we accept that Curricula should open the door to an individual reading of the world the proximal world and the distant world, the real-time world and the future world; they should empower people to participate in the development of the private, the civic and the economic world. Curricula should be the beating heart of an educational process; they should enlighten living conditions, ambitions, decisions and activities and they should support human beings especially teachers - in understanding themselves and the world they live in. The curriculum should stimulate active discovery of all kind of subjects: this would mean to show the world like a map does and thereby unclog the world s structure, variety, its tools, established solutions, relevant matters and open questions. A curriculum should help people to go their own ways through a mapped world of knowledge. The re-invented curriculum will encourage people to develop awareness of things that matter. It will offer a multitude of relevant answers to basic human questions and will show their relationship to each other and to people s needs and feelings. How could this work? My contribution will explain, how we can create a categorizing curriculum not only for children in Germany, but also - in respect to the categories - for the children around the world, how it works as a compounding yet structured framework for learning with application possibilities in every corner of the world through the intelligent use of new media how it allows placing the (disciplinary) knowledge of educational science in relationship to basic things and questions that may appear different but nonetheless matter generally and to everyone being a teacher. 1

2 5. Working on the Basic Questions of Mankind: The Educational Process What is the idea about? Knowledge wherever it comes from is seen as an already existing answer to former and newly arisen questions. Different arts, sciences and disciplines assemble and structure the answers that are already given. Established scientific curricula often tend to give these answers, but in a way which hides the questions themselves. As an alternative, a curriculum that maps the knowledge of the educational world means first of all, grasping the relevant and basic questions questions posed by the educational process. These questions are then to be translated into tasks and challenges (in German: Aufgaben ) that matter to the learning teachers and are at the same time representative of the locations in which they are embedded. Mapping the educational world in this way gives structure to the large amount of available knowledge. Although in such a curriculum the subjects of study and learning may be very different, the curriculum will be able to ensure that all learners develop a relationship to the basic questions and their places in a mapped knowledge world. The learning process is then based on the questions that are fundamental to the chosen subjects and not only on random bits of knowledge surrounding the subjects. In regard to the mapping I propose, there are nine basic questions, which create nine centers for existing knowledge. To ask these different questions means to take different actions, which then recall the assembled knowledge surrounding the question. These activities could be seen as more concrete descriptions of what it means, to learn in respect to each of the basic questions. As a result of this matching between questions, disciplinary knowledge and activities, we create a mapping strategy (the basic questions) in the map of knowledge and the fitting tools for discovery and navigation - the different (learning)-activities - in the mapped world. Here are the nine questions 1 with corresponding areas of disciplinary knowledge, which are arising nine different activities of learners/ people. Questions Corresponding Areas of Activities of Learners/ People Disciplinary Knowledge 1 What are the facts? Natural Sciences to recognize 2 What is the matter? Social Sciences to realize 3 What is the meaning/ story/ development? Hermeneutic/ Science of the Individual/ Psychology to understand and to mean on the basis of empathy 4 What is/ ought to be the character of the situation/ creation? Theories of (Re-) Construction like Geography, Organizational Theory, Theory of Music, Arts, to (re)construct 5 What is to be done? / What should be the character of the running system? 6 What are senseful meanings based on competences and resources of knowledge? Architecture. Theories of Management of systems like the political, educational, social/ health, traffic, administration system Theories of Development/ of Professionalization/ of Knowledge-Creating and Knowledge-Management to labor/ to keep going to interact and communicate 7 What seems to be successful/ Pragmatism, Aesthetics, to judge/ to conclude beautiful? 8 What would make sense? System Theory, Cybernetics, to think 9 What would be good/ acceptable? Religion, Practical Philosophy, Political Theory, Ideology to imagine/ to decide/ to take responsibility I think it is possible to see, what a curriculum based upon this idea is about: It supports the development and the asking of questions and the activities that answer them. It encourages identification of what may matter for learners in a given surrounding and it finds relevance in all activities that learners use, to create interesting solutions thus supported by knowledge, which is made available. 1 Girmes R [Sich] Aufgaben stellen. Velbert Kallmeyer; Girmes R Sich zeigen und die Welt zeigen. Bildung und Erziehung in posttraditionalen Gesellschaften. Opladen Leske + Buderich 2

3 6. Strategies That means on the other hand: this strategy helps and activates the teachers who are responsible for the representation of the curriculum to figure out in advance, during the construction of the curriculum, what kind of enrichment and disciplinary knowledge could and should be offered, when learners are activated and at the same time supported by the curriculum. The constructed curriculum ensures that relevant and interesting answers to the questions within a certain discipline are made available. With this in mind, the presentation of a curriculum will be different: it will show relevant questions and problems, it will encourage possible activities and it will make available interesting knowledge as well as enlighten methods of finding and creating answers. Such a curriculum could offer a guided tour, but it could also allow learners to find their own way through the mapped world using the characterized learning activities and their algorithms as tools, allowing them to act more independently. to Map the World and to Organize the Knowledge Available There is a very strong benefit of rethinking the curriculum as a whole: it is the possibility for teachers as well as for students to develop an understanding about the relationship between all the subjects that a schoolcurriculum may offer. Three relationships can be seen when you look at the nine questions and their corresponding knowledge packages and activities: the first three are handling with the clarification of conditions exploring/ exploration the second three deal with possible actions and interventions acting/ action the last three reflect upon what could be done and what has been done reflecting/ reflection. When we represent this relationship between questions, subjects and activities within each of the nine fields, as pictured below, teachers and learners get a landscape of what the curriculum as a whole will and might handle. In this way everybody becomes and stays orientated about the place he or she is working in and about his or her position in respect to other places of possible exploration, action and reflection. These places could be also characterized in respect to the three other packages you also see: they show a correspondence of activities in relationship to room/space and things/objects (including objects of nature), time and process, which lead to form meaning/sense developed in language and other media. 3

4 When you build a learning world according to this with the support of information technology I will talk about this later more in detail - anything you may choose and teach has already a place and is related in and to the whole world of knowledge: As you see, this knowledge of the world can be characterized as knowledge about conditions and how to explore them, about possible action and intervention and how to implement them, about orientations and how to achieve them. The structure proposed is the bases for keeping things/ knowledge and methods of gaining knowledge in good order. It is also helpful to choose those themes/ issues, which are ready to serve as an example standing for other themes at the same place in this map. So all in all the following network of challenges works like as cartography of the basic topics of mankind or like cartography of the world of knowledge. Working with the Maps of the World s Knowledge: Chances and Practical Consequences If a curriculum would be build in that way of organizing knowledge in relation to it s use, it would be obviously more close to the experiences and interests of the addressed pupils/ students and could be able, to support learning in a new way. In a world of questions and challenges learning activities could be seen as an effort to get a more and more precise idea of each of the nine basic activities, which arise in relationship to the mapped challenges. Learners could take the role of co-constructors and re-constructors of the world, they are living in and thereby more generally speaking they could develop an orientation about what the world is about because the directly surrounding world would stand as an example for the world of a region, a country, as an example for similar questions of a continent and finally of the human world on earth Build in this way, a curriculum could give the opportunity to children to understand and read the construction of the real settings and situations in their surrounding (4) 2 ; they could work about the conditions that may be responsible for the given construction/s of their surroundings (1) and they could try to find out, what are other and may be more nice and better working settings to compare with and to learn from (7) This kind of curriculum would secondly support children to get aware of how things work and keep going/ are kept going as systems of health, traffic, sustentation,... (5), what conditions and structures may be the reasons for the way systems are running or not running (2) and a curriculum assembling knowledge like this will help to get the opportunity to think about other and different ways as alternatives for running a system in this or that way (8) Finally a curriculum that initiates the communication between the generations about relevant stories and meanings would allow that the children participate in the creation of sense and meaning in their society (6); children would occupy themselves with the stories and experiences, that are and that were relevant for the constitution of sense and meaning in the own group, in the society and in the wider context of the world (3) and they would learn, what it means and meant to reflect decisions, that are/ were to be made and to take responsibility for them (9). You see: A curriculum that would rely on the presented facilities for a mental mapping of knowledge could be offered to children in a way, that they could and would be supported in their learning activities, so that they themselves could - more than usual - be their own chairman in this process. With a curriculum that is organized and offered in a way, that it is getting hold of the mapping of the world s challenges and of the solutions correspondingly available, the students themselves are able to choose and combine (learning) activities. They know and feel, that they could solve those tasks/ challenges/ problems, Aufgaben, which they see and find interesting to work on. Students/ pupils decide and know, what they are working about. A curriculum, given in this way, helps getting used to see the offered agglomerations of knowledge as the presentation of interesting questions and possible ways of answering them. It could procure the feeling that clarity of challenges and the use of knowledge attached to them could work supporting towards the unfolding development of the individuality and of the personality of pupils/ students. The education process, which is institutionally proposed and supported, is than a more or less guided tour through the problems and questions, which children - human beings in general - will meet in life. The quality of the tour lies in the preparation for what the curriculum may offer for all users. And it lies in the hands of the teaching stuff being able to take the role of a good and well informed guide through the mapped word. 2 The figures relate to the list from 1-9 printed above. 4

5 7. New 8. The Ways of Teaching towards a Comprehensive Understanding of the World Any (disciplinary) teaching will be supported very well on bases of a curriculum thus elaborated, because it is cross-linked to the teaching of other teachers, who represent an other subject or discipline. In this respect disciplinary teaching could be used to show specific parts of the whole curriculum. That means to offer certain methods, show them in use, creating a certain knowledge, making visible that there are relationships of methods and chosen subjects, etc. Teaching means now to find and to match the own maps of interesting challenges and knowledge with those maps of the other teachers, who represent their areas and/ or perspectives. Professional teaching in this context would mean to be aware of the combination of special fields of activity with questions, which are fitting here, with especially corresponding orientations in the process of answering questions with a check of the validity and the reach of created concepts and finally with reflection about all that. This teaching is relying on a specific conceptualization of Curriculum Studies: Curriculum Studies now understand themselves as the scientific effort, which is necessary to prepare guided tours through a mapped world by organizing knowledge in relation to it s use, by developing good descriptions/ presentations of knowledge in the mapped places, by creating and the managing those guided tours, so that they allow to visit activity-places and knowledge-places and by preparing presentations and opportunities for interesting activities in the visited places. If Curriculum Studies would allow to show the disciplines and their knowledge in the landscape of knowledge as offered above, they could solve a problem, which has at least in my eyes to be solved anyway: that is to allow the collaboration between experts in disciplinary knowledge, so that there are ways conceivable, how to integrate the different disciplinary perspectives into one picture. In my eyes Curriculum Studies could and should show, how the disciplinary maps of the earth on one hand make aware of the different possibilities in handling subjects, but on the other hand may show, that and how they all refer to the same topics/ challenges/ Aufgaben. In respect to that the integration into one picture would not mean to deny the different perspectives of description, but it would mean to show, that finally a differentiated but - nether the less - integrated picture is possible. This could work, if all disciplinary maps would use the same method of projection, to show their different and specific views and findings. To compare it with the mapping of our earth: The mapping of the earth s climate looks different to the mapping of the earth s mineral resources. Both need different methods and strategies and this leads to a different knowledge. But the results of these mappings could be integrated into one map of our world on earth. And alike: the mapping of the world of history/ development and the one of its prosperity as well as the mapping of its literature does create different maps; but these also could be integrated into one picture of the world. Even the concentration of some disciplines on some topics as shown above - is comparable to the mapping of the earth: As well as some high mountains or some deep waters belong to certain areas of the earth, so some disciplinary findings belong strongly to some topics/ challenges and don t arise in others. If we see that in maps of the earth, we don t argue, there would be no possibility, to integrate these findings into one map. So at least in my eyes there is no reason to argue, that there would be no possibility, to integrate the different findings and types of disciplinary knowledge also into one map of the world s knowledge. The integration is possible. In relation to the world s topics/ challenges it helps to gain an integrated with Buckminster Fuller (1969) a comprehensive picture or understanding of the world without dining the plurality and high variety of cultures and perspectives, of individuals and groups, of the younger and the older generation in the handling of the challenges. Transformation of Education and the Role of Curriculum in the 21. Century Today the world s knowledge in principle is available in any place at any time. The reason for that is the development of technology with the consequence of the arising of a global village as Marshal McLuhan said already 1960 in which anything and everything latently is in place. This isn t yet realized for all people in the world s societies, because there is a digital divide, as well as there was and there still is a divide in literacy. To overcome this problem of divide means to work on the 5

6 question of the improvement of living conditions for all members of the human society in a way that a life in human dignity is possible. In relation to this challenge of generally unfolding human societies towards a life in human dignity education marks a special and changing dimension. Why? If we put the question, what a life in human dignity will mean today, in the 21. Century, we see that it will not only mean access to water, food, medical service etc. but also the access to the internet and that means, in an increasing way, to the knowledge of the world. If we would/ could guarantee this access to the world s knowledge which is, at least technically, a question of a short time, education and it s curriculum will start from a very different point than it did and does in a world, where the access to knowledge is/ was a limited privilege. The consequence of this is, that there will be a transformation of what education and teaching should mean and what a curriculum has to do in the educational process: The transformation is from opening access to knowledge by gathering and presenting it to organizing and supporting the navigation through and the use of the knowledge, which will be made available for everybody. This transformation is already happening and in my eyes is one more reason to organize the world s knowledge around the basic human challenges. As I showed already in the beginning: if you don t know the questions, the knowledge to answer the questions is often useless. So teachers should learn to avoid giving answers to questions nobody asked. You may see, what kind of transformation education will have to pass through within the 21. Century: Education could play a very relevant part in the efforts necessarily to be taken, while unfolding human societies towards a life in human dignity. Education could play an important role, if the educators would engage in mapping the world s knowledge and if they would achieve the acceptance to make this maps available to all children and people. In this process the role of Curriculum Studies is important: Education relies in my understanding on the quality of the curriculum-work as a rethinking of the disciplinary knowledge in the way described before. On basis of the mapping of the world s knowledge informatics technology and the Internet will help teachers to create something, what Seymour Papert 3 called The children s machine. The so called machine will bring up a learning environment possibly to be reached from everywhere and everybody that gives children, and learners in general, access to the world(s) of literature, biology, history, music, maths, etc. Presented in a challenge-orientated way this environments will allow that learners move themselves into and within these worlds, getting hold of their specific questions and answers and following their methods and their ways of creating knowledge. The role of teachers is to support children in their learning process. The worlds of mapped disciplinary knowledge, where all children could have access to, are going to change and to transform the meaning and the relevance of education towards what it wanted to be in the beginning 4 : Johann Friedrich Herbart made clear, that education should be always more, than life and experience could give to children/ learners anyway. Keeping this in mind, education in the 21. Century could give access to the knowledge available for everyone if the investment in developing such a curriculum and the access to its presentation will be done. Education in the 21. Century could/should transform into the creation of settings, which give freedom to the learners in using the access to mapped knowledge worlds individually according to their needs and interests. In respecting the individual walks through these worlds, education will accompanying help, when help is needed. It will more initially offer the support of guided tours through the worlds of knowledge in a way, which learners could book them also in relationship to their needs and interests. Although there is so much freedom possible, education with a curriculum of mapped knowledge-worlds will achieve as a result, that learners will show reliably engaged in the relevant challenges of mankind and that they will be able to use the worlds of knowledge to answer them. The attendance that educators give to learners should induce and strengthen them in their engagement to walk through the knowledge worlds using them in a way, that they become a useful support and background for their better understanding of everyday life, increase their facilities of organizing their own lives and challenges and help and support in becoming self-reliant persons. I m aware of the fact that the transformation of education and educators won t happen necessarily. More than that: I expect that the increasingly free access to knowledge, which is already given in many countries, leads 3 Papert S The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. ISBN The beginning of educational science in Europe, Germany, is to be seen in the context of the Enlightenment and in relation to Johann Friedrich Herbart s book: Allgemeine Pädagogik (1806) 6

7 to the creation of knowledge-pieces, which are (only) relevant in schools. According to this the educational establishment may fear to loose influence and to become less relevant. This may enforce the development of tests, to check the competences of pupils in reproducing of these school-corresponding knowledge-pieces. Competences than are defined in relationship to those knowledge-pieces tested. Consequently the certification of those competences and the right to test them is reserved to schools or to other authorities. In a practice of teaching to the test we than see those poor curricula, characterized in the beginning. What pretends to offer a solution for quality-management seems to create and enforce the qualityproblem and apparently won t help to solve it. What is the alternative? The quality of education basically relies on the quality of the intellectual diet so Herbart said more than 200 years ago and he still is right. The diet is offered by the curriculum. The curriculum is to be called the basic educational knowledge, teachers must get hold of to do a good job. They won t be able to do it in the way, which would be necessary within the time available for teacher education. So the point is, that the Mapping the Educational Knowledge for the continuously support of teachers and educational stuff, which I wanted to present, could be part of a solution of the problems in respect to the quality of education: In 21 st Century there is no shortage of knowledge and the capacity of children to develop their intellect could be basically taken for granted. So the challenge lies in the building of curricula, in the organisation of knowledge, which is ubiquitary available, in a way that it meets the demands of the educational process of children, but also of individuals, who want to unfold their knowledge in general. I wanted to show, that and how this could be done. A comprehensive understanding of our world in its complexity and plurality is possible, if education would be scientifically and technically be supported by a learning environment, which is consisting of maps, which show the world s knowledge. The mapping will transform the abundance of knowledge into richness and wealth. The Internet offers the means to give open access to this richness and wealth finally to all people. The setup of education and of educational systems will thereby be able to support human beings in understanding themselves and the world they live in comprehensively, if the chance is taken 5. References Girmes R [Sich] Aufgaben stellen. Velbert Kallmeyer; Girmes R Sich zeigen und die Welt zeigen. Bildung und Erziehung in posttraditionalen Gesellschaften. Opladen Leske + Buderich Fuller B Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth Herbart J.F Allgemeine Pädagogik. Translation into English: The Science of Education and the Aesthetic Revelation of the World (1892) by H. M. and E. Felkin McLuhan M The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. 1st Ed. Univ. of Toronto Press Papert S The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. ISBN odyssee s end is the strategy I found, to do this job and I would like to invite everybody to join me in using it. 7