In the film Karate Kid, the central character Daniel has to perform a number of seemingly pointless tasks for the wise old sage Mr. Miyagi before he receives his expert tutilage in karate. All the while he is learning, but he doesn’t realise how the tasks relate to that which he wishes to learn.
Courtesy of John Connell from an ongoing discussion with Greg Whitby, comes the concept of ’subject discipline 2.0′. So I thought I’d add in my thoughts, for what it’s worth.
In so many ways I worry about how technological innovation changes the model of education. As a specialist, I have qualifications to graduate and post graduate level in Scottish History, Medieval History, Ecclesiastical History and Systematic Theology. That said, I’m always mortified whenever history questions come up in a pub quiz or TV game show. Why? I suppose it’s because for the majority (sadly) of my university level studies, gaining and retaining knowledge and understanding centred around knowing things for a certain period of time only. I wonder how many other people would also fall into that category? Whilst I greatly enjoyed studying, aside from a small spell teaching History, I have not had to use this knowledge, so it has largely faded from my mind. I still find history fascinating, but it is not a driving force for me as a learner at the moment.
As a teacher of Religious, Moral and Philosophical studies, how have technological developments changed my understanding of how my subject could be taught? Well for a start, things are far more connected. Technology makes things far more immediate and ironically ‘real’. For example, when teaching the most basic of things about a religions origins, I wouldn’t be looking at a faded image of a world map in a textbook, but rather zooming around the globe in Google Earth, Flash Earth or Nasa World Wind. Imagine talking about the Hajj with a class of kids – “Do you want to see where the Grand Central Mosque is? Well let’s go and have a look!” Every day in the news we see examples of moral dilemmas that religious groups give their stance or opinion on – using blogging, shared whiteboarding and video conferencing/editing tools we could be making our own news stories with our pupils in reaction to these moral dilemmas. Most importantly, we could be inviting debate and comment on these opinions, from all over the world.
These are tasks that innovative teachers are already doing, but what does this mean for ’subject discipline 2.0′? For me, it comes back to connections. Learning about the origins of a religion ties up beautifully with Geography and History. investigating moral dilemmas links wonderfully with English, ICT, Drama, Modern Studies and PSD. In order to teach our own subject better, we need to know far more about what our colleagues in the same school are teaching the very same children we teach. And we need to make connections in their learning.
Time and time again I always got asked the question by pupils of ‘what’s the point of RE’ – when it is taught in isolation, it is very difficult to explain to a kid that it is important to help them understand both who they are as an individual, and how they relate to others. Put the subject in the context of a ‘rich task‘, or some form of ‘project based learning’, then pupils ‘get it’. They understand its importance as part of the ‘collective whole’ they are learning about.
As a teacher of guitar, I was very aware of my limitations. With a handful of students, you reach the ‘No more can I teach you’ moment. Where the connected world helps, is that finding the person who can pick up where you leave off is far more possible and realistic. As teachers in the classroom, charged with the delivery of a ’subject discipline’, we need to learn to look outside of our classroom walls for the expert that can help our pupils develop their knowledge and understanding of a subject. For many teachers, this may be the hardest thing to come to terms with. Perhaps the Oracle at Delphi summed it up best when asked who the wisest person was – ‘wisest is he who knows he doesn’t know’. You’ve got to be brave to do that though, or is that fearless?
