DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING

CONFERENCE, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008

Re-imagining teaching in the 21st century:

challenging some assumptions
Professor Keri Facer

Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan

University & Futurelab; Contact Keri.Facer@futurelab.org.uk or
Keri.Facer@mmu.ac.uk

Introduction

In this paper I want to talk about how we might go about ‘re-imagining

teaching’ in the 21st century.

I’ll do three things:

First, I’ll talk about some of the lines along which I might re-imagine
education in the context of some major technological developments.

Second, I want to talk through some of the general trends in how the
future of teaching is being re-imagined in the public sphere and wider
debates.

Finally, I want to talk about some of the holy cows in this debate, some of
the unspoken assumptions that tend to structure any public discussion
about the future of teaching. And by doing so, I want to ask whether we
are unhelpfully limiting our capacity to fundamentally rethink education
for the 21st century.

And because this is a lot to try to do in 20 minutes I’ve decided to write a

paper (for a change) – so apologies for reading rather than just talking to
the slides.

So, ‘re-imagining the future of teaching: from technological

development to educational challenges….’

On the basis of what seems to be pretty shared consensus in the tech

field1, we can see a few key trends that are likely to be of significance in
shaping the future of teaching over the next 25 years:

the development of ubiquitous and pervasive computing

infrastructure, the possibility of being able to access information
and network with people wherever, and whenever, we might want.

the development of the capacity to bring massive computing power

to bear on any problem and any issue we might consider relevant.

the development of an increasingly ‘mixed reality’, as objects,

spaces and buildings are tagged and augmented – mixing virtual
and physical like never before.

1 See, for example, the paper by Prof Dave Cliff et al for the Beyond Current Horizons
Project at www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org; see also ‘Beyond 2020’ Facer and Daanen,
2007, www.futurelab.org.uk
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
CONFERENCE, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008
the capacity to create immersive experiences which could
potentially transform us into new times, spaces and simulations.

the development of new interfaces between brain and body, and

the merging of biology and computing in ways which challenge our
understanding of what it means to be human.

the development of increasingly complex systems of systems that

will challenge human intelligence to comprehend - let alone
manage and control.

These trends provide massive challenges in our understanding of what it

will mean to be a ‘teacher’ over the next 25 years.

They challenge our understanding of what ‘knowledge’ means and

what it is that education will need to teach (they require a massive
rethink in the nature of the ‘curriculum’).

They challenge our understanding of what the individual unit of

education could be (a learner, a learner + technology, a learner +
technology + network of collaborators).

They challenge our understanding of the tools and resources we will

be able to bring to bear to solve our problems.

They challenge our understanding of where learning could happen

and who could be mobilized to support it.

These trends also bring with them significant environmental and ethical
challenges

what will be the material and energy costs associated with these
developments?

to what extent will these tools and resources be used to support

human flourishing rather than simple economic competitiveness.?

And so, if I were to produce a scenario of ‘teaching in the 21st century’, I

would produce a picture that is very very different from the type of
education that we know now.

It would show educators and learners working together in fluid ways

on real problems that are meaningful both to learners and to
their communities

It would show different types of people involved in education,

drawing upon the expertise of different communities, and
conducted in a range of different sites and sectors

It would comprise an environment in which learning was

characterised by the ability to enter into, become expert in
and move between different knowledge communities

It would show a system in which assessment of learning was

conducted through multiple lenses – as what is ‘valuable’
knowledge will be massively context dependent2
2 See Facer and Pykett ‘Assessing Personal Skills and Competencies’ paper for QCA,
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
CONFERENCE, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008
And finally, it would show a system in which the ethical and
environmental challenges posed by technological development
were consciously examined in the education sector.

Now, I think that is what I was supposed to elaborate on for the next 15
minutes. However, I’m reluctant to do this. And the reason I’m reluctant to
just talk about my own ‘future visions’ is that I’ve been doing that for the
last 10 years, and many people in this room have been doing it for much
longer, and still, we don’t see significant change in educational practice
today.

This was brought home to me when I read the following paragraph

recently:

The new education has as its purpose the development of a new kind of
person, one who […] is an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative,
tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity
without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet
changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual
survival.

This was written not this year, not ten years ago, but nearly 40 years ago
by Neil Postman and Charles Weingarter in a book called ‘Teaching as a
Subversive Activity’.

Despite the many years we have spent arguing for a new sort of teaching,
a new sort of education, today, we still have an ‘information-obsessed’
education system, designed around individual attainment, tailored to short
term accountability measures and which unfortunately (and despite the
best efforts of many people) ill equips children and learners to cope with
the complexity and challenges of the world today (let alone in 25 years).

So the question, I think, is not what ‘future visions’ I might have for
teaching over the next 25 years, but what is it that keeps education
systems fundamentally unchanging in the way they are organized,
the way teaching and learning happens, and the types of people
who are involved in education?

I’d like to say that it isn’t enough, today, to simply berate education for
‘looking the same now as it did 100 years ago’ (only with a few
computers). Instead, we need to better understand the forces which drive
the innate conservatism of education. And I’d like to suggest that the
answer to this question is nothing so straightforward as ‘technophobia’ or
simple inertia.

Instead, I think that what gets in the way of serious change in education is
simply our unexamined assumptions about what education is for and
how it is organized, and the fact that many of us who argue for
educational change are often quite coy about tackling these assumptions.

To elaborate this, I want to take a look through the sorts of assumptions

that underpin some of the popular debates on the future of education. I’ll
do this by looking at how ‘Google’ constructs the public debate in this area
– by analyzing the sorts of issues that constitute the public debate and the
sorts of issues which are overlooked or absent from the discussion.
available from www.futurelab.org.uk
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
CONFERENCE, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008
What happens when you google ‘teaching in the 21st century?’.
You get 415,000 hits, of which about the first 20 to 30 are highly relevant
to the specific issue.

So what are in our top ten3? They include

A website offering a ‘the gateway to 21st century skills’ – resources for

teachers to teach a new curriculum comprising collaboration, thinking
skills, entrepreneurship and the new basics.

The Scottish Government’s agreement on pay, conditions and

development for teachers

The Australian Government’s strategy for teacher development – focusing

on skills, leadership, school management, and ‘quality recognition’ (for
which you might want to read accountability….)

The ‘Digital Classroom’ edition of the Harvard education newsletter – use

of ICT in education and the role of teacher development

A teachers blog with technology tips & a teachers blog on his experiences
as a teacher and things he wants to do differently

A report on an international study comparing TIMS data in the US and

internationally, and the role of ICTs in supporting maths and science

The University of South Florida course on ‘teaching for the 21st century’ –
lots on use of ICTs

21st century skills teaching wiki by a teacher (no affiliations identified) –

tips on using technology, summaries of 21st century skills campaign and
ideas of digital natives.

Cisco website looking at use of ICTs to support learning and enhance

attainment in range of subjects

And it goes on in a similar vein for the next 20 or so sites before it

descends into the specifics of ‘the future of petrology teaching’ and other
wonders.

There are 5 main areas of debate in these websites

First – there is the debate on the role of technologies in the

future of teaching and learning

Dominating the debate are ideas about the relationship between teaching
and ICTs. At least three quarters of the sites are concerned with this
relationship – ranging from top tips for teachers using technology, to sites
promoting the creation and development of online learning courses, to
sites about using ICTs to enhance the teaching of traditional subjects. And
remember, this was a search about ‘the future of teaching in the 21st
century’, not about the future of teaching with ICTs. The two terms

3 NB – google searches on the basis of keyword matching, incoming links

(relevance/quality), and website optimization for search purposes. Google can
also take into account previous Web history in focusing search. In this case, in
order not to skew the search towards my previous interests, this search was
conducted with web history turned off. Search was conducted October 10th 2008.
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
CONFERENCE, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008
‘technology’ and ‘21st century’ seem to have become synonymous.

Second – there is the debate on the types of ‘21st century skills’

that schools should be teaching

A famous quote from Alvin Toffler turned up on two different websites 4 in

the top 10 sites. The quote runs:

‘the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn’.

The quote appears alongside teaching materials and resources and reports
to support the teaching of ‘21st century skills’. It is notable in these sites
that this is a debate that is driven massively by commercial companies –
entrepreneurialism and business skills are flagged up alongside team
working, collaboration and leadership. Another analysis that we might
conduct looking at the ‘public debate’ on the future of education is an
analysis of who is involved in this debate? Who gets to shape the
agenda?

Interestingly, none of the sites promoting 21st century skills (amongst

which most flag up the need to be critical about information sources and
analyse information) cite the origin of this quotation – it has become
disconnected from its source document and now flies around the web as a
rationale and justification for educational change. It would be good to see
the advocates of 21st century skills practicing what they preach by
showing some basic good practice in referencing. I tracked over 50 pages
with this quotation, not one of them gave a source for it. It turns out to be
a misquotation or amalgamation of quotes from his early book ‘Future
Shock’ in which he is quoting someone else entirely.

The third debate is the debate over what ‘knowledge’ should be

valued, what should count as ‘truth’ in education – and the role
of the teacher in mediating that

One site, for example, is dedicated to a set of resources designed to help

science teachers challenge creationist and intelligent design beliefs5. The
site suggests that teachers are going to be operating in a very complex
knowledge environment in the 21st century – it makes visible the fact that
there are competing beliefs about what counts as truth, about how we
come to value different sorts of knowledge. The debate is over the
teachers’ role in maintaining the boundaries between these different sorts
of knowledge.

This representation of teacher as ‘boundary maintainer’ comes up again in

the teachers’ blogs. These blogs are sites where individual classroom
teachers share their experiences and their advice and a frequently
recurring theme in the blogs are the ongoing battles over what knowledge
should count in schools – one teacher6, in particular, spends many posts
discussing whether she should care about grammar or creativity.

4 http://www.thegateway.org/teaching-learning;
http://21stcenturyteaching.pbwiki.com/
5 http://www.teachersdomain.org/pd/nova/teachevolution/index.html
6 http://aquiram.wordpress.com/
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
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The debate here is nothing less than what counts as truth and knowledge
and what role a teacher should play in maintaining this.

New slide

This question of what knowledge counts also emerges in a very different

set of debates around the future of teachers and teaching.

For example, two sites reference the Third International Mathematics and
Science Study comparing mathematics and science results among
students in 41 countries, and both make recommendations for future
teacher development strategies on the basis of this work.

These sites suggest a different area of debate in education. They suggest

there is contention over:

How should student data be used to assess individual, teachers,

school and national performance?

What could or should be assessed?

What is the relationship between teaching and accountability – to

students, to tax payers, to government?

Interestingly, this area of debate foregrounds the fact that developments

in ICTs have arguably had most impact in education precisely in the area
of generating massive amounts of standardized data about students, and
thereby making it possible for students, teachers, schools and countries to
be compared, assessed, audited and held accountable for their progress.

The whole accountability and assessment regime is underpinned by this

fundamental change in information about students – and we never talk
about this in discussions about the relationship between ICTs and
education. It’s not cool, it’s not sexy, but it is, fundamentally,
underpinning significant shifts in educational practice, policy and
philosophy today.

Finally, there is the debate over the professional identity of the

teacher.

Very visible in our top 20 sites were the sites in which unions and
governments share the results of their negotiations over pay and
conditions, professional development and training. The future of
teaching, in these sites, consists of new terms and conditions of
employment, entitlements to hours of development, delivery strategies for
initial teacher education provision and strategies to raise the esteem in
which teachers and teaching are held in wider society.

In stark contrast, but part of the same debate over the professional
identity of the teacher, there are the sites that represent a completely
different account of teaching. In these sites, usually teachers blogs,
teachers debate their personal motivations and aspirations to make a
difference to students. Whether it is in the site dedicated to finding ways
to teach Shakespeare for the 21st century through performance, or the
blog which describes a moment of success in ‘reaching a child’ for one
disillusioned teacher.
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
CONFERENCE, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008
These different types of sites showcase the debate that teachers are
having within the profession around the types of relationships they should
attempt to build with their students – whether teachers are functionaries
or visionaries, whether teachers are there to engage emotions or to
ensure attainment of standards

What, from this rapid survey, are the key areas of public debate in
about the future of teaching in the 21st century7?

So there are five big debates going on – around the role of technology,
around the question of new skills, around the question of who acts as
arbiter of knowledge, around the question of how education should be
assessed and accounted for, and around the question of teacher
professional identity. Some of these, although not all, are likely to be
the focus for discussion in this conference, and they act as the general
contours of the debate on the future of teaching.

More interesting, however, is what the sites don’t say, what is

taken for granted so completely that no one is arguing for or against it,
what is seen as so implicit that it doesn’t need to be advocated for or
challenged. What are the ‘holy cows’ that aren’t even considered in the
debates on the future of teaching?

In this snapshot I would say that the following issues are so taken for
granted that they aren’t even up for discussion:

The idea that ‘teaching’ is about teaching children

(there is no recognition of any possibility of demographic
change, the lifelong learning arguments are more or less
absent and part of a different agenda, the possibility of a
fundamental shift in formal education to be education for
multiple age groups isn’t even acknowledged)

The idea that ‘teaching’ is done only by adults, and

only by trained professional teachers (there are still
fundamental resistances to learner voice and to taking
learners’ expertise seriously, there is no challenge to the
traditional relationship between adults and children in the
educational setting; there is also no acknowledgement of the
expertise and knowledge that resides outside school and no
strategies to bring this into educational practice)

The idea that schools are still the fundamental

organisational unit of education (the possibility of
accessing information and knowledge in diverse locations
isn’t discussed, the challenge that technologies pose to the
traditional role of the school or university as repository of
information is unexamined)

The idea that the individual learner remains the

7 Clearly, this analysis needs to be understood for what it is – a survey of search results. A
much more thorough analysis of public debates surrounding the future of education would
be merited to test this analysis further – including analysis of diverse media outlets,
academic conferences and policy fora.
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
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fundamental unit of education (not the individual +
technology or + network) (while there is reference to ‘team
working’ and collaboration, there is no examination of how
what we need to know and how we need to know it might
change if you take the network rather than the individual as
the basic premise for education)

The idea that economic competitiveness is an

unproblematic goal of for (there is zero discussion of the
role of education in developing personal attributes,
community identity, environmental sustainability; there is a
very limited conception of ‘global citizenship’ which doesn’t
analyse the extent to which global citizenship and economic
competitiveness might be mutually exclusive) 8

What are the implications of these assumptions for educational

futures?

The implications of these assumptions are that there are significant limits
placed on how we might re-imagine education.

It means that some ideas are likely to be successful and easily

appropriated into the debate - for example, I’d lay money on ideas being
successful which are about:

Appropriating digital technologies …

To help young people achieve new skills which can be described as

offering new economic benefits …

And which can be easily assessed in ways that allow comparison

between students and states.

But if we are interested in more significant change than this - if we

are interested in educational change that recognizes young people’s social
agency, if we are interested in educational change that acknowledges that
the ways we managed knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries will need
to change, if we are interested in educational change that is able to draw
on the talents of society at a time when economically, environmentally
and demographically things may get a bit tight over the next 25 years -
then we are going to need to challenge some of these underlying
assumptions explicitly.

We are going to have to start addressing some of these fundamental

underlying questions that will shape the future of teaching:

What should the relationship be between adults and children in

education if we take seriously the view of young people as social
actors – could we consider them teachers as well as learners,

8 Arguably, the idea that education should be mandatory is also unchallenged in these
analyses. This, however, only occurred to me after the conference, and so I just mention it
here in passing. It is, however, tied in with the points on adult-child relations, schools as
the primary unit of education and the identity of the professional teacher – all of these are,
to greater or lesser extent, sustained only because education is legally required of young
people.
DRAFT WORKING PAPER PRODUCED FOR THE HANDHELD LEARNING
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experts as well as novices?

What is the distinctive role of professional teachers, as opposed to

individuals and communities with other forms of expert knowledge?
What are the skills that distinctively constitute the contribution of
teachers to learning, over and above subject and disciplinary
knowledge?

What is the role of the school, as opposed to the home and

community and workplace, as a learning organization?

What is the role of education in relation to not only economic but

personal or social goals – and are these goals necessarily
compatible?

It is only by tackling some of these questions – rather than by simply

assuming we all mean the same thing when we talk about ‘teaching for
the 21st century’ – that we can create the basis for a new and more
challenging debate on the shape of education over the next 25 years. This
does not mean that we will inevitably see a future for education that is the
direct opposite of all that we have now – for example, I can see significant
social justice arguments that make the case for schools to be retained, I
can see a new role for teachers that is fundamentally based upon a new
identity as ‘learning specialists’. This willingness to ask these questions
does mean, however, that our analysis will not be built upon unchallenged
assumptions which cloud our ability to identify both the weaknesses and
the strengths of the ways in which we organize education at the present
time.