Mind the gap!

Teachers should listen to children more. When children ask questions, they are seeking understanding, but sometimes the teacher can be too busy to listen to the meaning behind the question. They fail to 'read between the lines'. I have several horror stories I could tell about how asking questions in class ended up in ridicule for the child and a subsequent 'switching off' from learning - but I won't go down that road today. Read my blog post 'Pay attention at the front!' and you'll get the general idea. Instead, let me say that the 'listening but not hearing' problem is just one of the 'gaps' teachers and students experience just about every day in education - chasms and transactional distances that can open up between intentions of one person and misrepresentations of another.

It's a serious problem. It can lead to war.

In online/digital learning environments, my own research has shown that the gap can be amplified or reduced, depending on a) the skill of the teacher b) their attitude and c) how the technology is being used. Sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but it's actually a lot more complex and nuanced than that. There are gaps in perception about the purpose of education, gaps in how we interpret the problems we encounter each day as educators, digital divides between the haves and the have nots, the cans and the cannots, even the wills and the will nots... We could be here all day discussing these perceptual gulfs in our understanding. A song written by Beatle George Harrison contains the lines 'I was thinking about the space between us all, and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion...' (Within You, Without You). He was right. There is a psychological space between each of us, and although it is impossible to bridge completely, we need to do our best as educators to know and understand our students as well as we can.

Below is a slideshow I presented at last year's Future of Technology in Education Conference (FOTE 2014), at the University of London. The video that accompanies the keynote speech is also available below with the abstract.

2014 fote conference from Steve Wheeler

Digital Learning Futures: Mind the gap!

When I gaze into the future I hurt my eyes. It’s not an easy thing to do, because the future is imaginary and is therefore unpredictable. One of the key variables of unpredictability is human issues such as teacher attitudes and student perceptions. Increasingly, with the proliferation of new technologies in learning spaces, the gaps are widening between teacher intentions and student expectations. This is partly down to social, cultural and demographic differentials such as values and beliefs, but also the result of changes in pedagogy and differing uses of technology. In this presentation I will outline what I see as the key human issues that will impact upon the design of future learning environments.

Images from various sources


Mind the gap! by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.