Ever have one of those moments where you suddenly remember why you started this? “This” being a PhD. That’s what happened to me when I joined the TEL Researchers online session with Dave Cormier (soon to be available via their YouTube Channel).
Hearing the introduction took me back to 2020, the second year of my MA in Online and Distance Education and, of course, Covid. I was juggling work and my own studies with quickly implemented home learning for my 8 and 12 year old boys. It was particularly difficult for my eldest, in the first year of secondary school and taking multiple subjects for the first time. I worried about his lack of engagement in some pretty unengaging learning materials (read this PowerPoint, answer these questions). I feared for his chances in life if he didn’t get the oh so important GCSE grades in standard academic subjects.
Then one day, he asked me to look at something. Now nearly 13, he was entering the teenage hibernation years and so I was keen to see whatever he still wanted to share. I watched as he hit play on YouTube and an edited video, complete with music track and animation over the gameplay he was narrating began. He explained how he had downloaded free software, he’d watched other YouTube videos and he’d talked with friends about how to produce his own work. Suddenly I understood Rhizomatic Learning in a whole new way, and suddenly I was a lot less worried about his future place in the world.
However, as that same son hurtles towards GCSE exams next month, I remain in an ambivalent state about his education. In the TEL Researchers session I shared how his interest in maths was crushed by an early teacher who shouted when anyone in the class got an answer wrong. The impact of this has been, I believe, pervasive across his academic experience. I make him go to school, I tell him about the importance of his exams because they are important in the system we live in. My PhD work is fundamentally based on assessment standards and helping learners pass exams. And yet, do I really think this is the best way to teach and learn? In what Dave Cormier calls “a time of abundance” I am less and less convinced. There is merit in my work, and the work of any Learning Analytics researcher, but the education system as it stands is becoming less and less relevant. Learning Analytics has a part to play but watching my 16 year old prepare for 28 exams (I had to count that twice – 28!) over 10 academic subjects, 9 of which he has no interest in, is quite frankly painful and exhausting. His engagement, his self-regulation of learning is very different to when he is doing the sport he loves – a complex and technical sport which requires his full focus. In that situation he is articulate, confident and committed to learning and improving. He listens and works with adults in a collegial way. I’ve watched him teach basic skills to friends and relations with patience and care. And so I know he can do well in the world, and I know he can be happy. I put my inner educational system based voice to the side, and count the days until the middle of June when he is free of schooling and he can choose his own learning path.
But I also wonder what it would have been like if he could have followed his path through government prescribed education. How much more he might know and enjoy learning about biology for example, if he could have related it to physical development and performance in sport. How much more he might have engaged with maths or design technology if it was directly linked with, I don’t know, funding and building a sport stadium. I fantasise about what such a school might look like, how it might be created to support the huge range of developing individual interests of 11 to 16 year olds.
I don’t know what the future looks like for education, or how change can be enacted. I do know it won’t happen before I finish my PhD, or before my second son does his GCSEs, so for now I’m getting on with it. But this shiny distraction is on my mind, so if anyone has any resources or thoughts about radical change, please do share.
Sarah Alcock 