Off the rails?

It so happens that my friend, colleague and fellow Edupunk from two oceans away has set me a little challenge. Amy Burvall has sent me three images, and my task is to create a learning related blog post using one of them. She calls it the #blimage challenge. I'm not one to shy away from any challenge, so I hereby present a post that incorporates all three images.

The state education system can easily be compared to a railway network. Trains arrive and depart from designated stations, passengers embark and disembark, and somehow, the train delivers everyone to their destinations. There is no deviation from the track (unless there is a disaster and there is a derailment - trains run on the rails), and generally there is a prescribed timetable that dictates the schedule of arrivals and departures of all trains in the network. This is a great metaphor for school systems, which generally operate on the same principles. There is a timetable that all school lessons and schemes of work run to. A bell divides activities, and everything is scheduled for a specific part of the school calendar. This is the easiest and most cost effective way to manage the delivery of a curriculum, but is it the most helpful for learners? It doesn't suit all students, just as a railway timetable doesn't suit all travellers. But we comply with them, because there is no alternative. Or is there?

Some prefer to travel in a taxi, or even by using their own personal transport. This transport will depart at the time the traveller decides and hopefully get them to their destination. This is a metaphor for personalised learning, with the personal learning environment supporting an individual's learning. There is plenty of opportunity to deviate from prescribed educational processes, which leads to endless possibilities for personal research and digressions into uncharted territory. Furthermore, unlike traditional formalised education, the personal learner determines his or her own destination. To learn at this level of individualisation, the learner requires several things. Firstly, they need a set of tools they can use to access knowledge, and to communicate with others. In other words, they need technologies that are networked. They need to be able to connect with experts, peers and content.

One of my tasks as an academic working in the field of teacher education over the last few years, has been to develop and promote this kind of alternative, off the rails education. Now and then I deviate into some alternative practices, which have been documented on this blog and elsewhere. Things can happen that are not planned, or may not appear to have a clear purpose. You might say these are 'strainge sessions' (I love the alternative spelling) in the sense that they don't comply with conventional educational practice. In one of my recent sessions I asked my students to use their cameras to create a 'story without words'. They not only had to create the videos or image sets, but determine what exactly the learning outcomes were. It goes without saying that each decided their own learning outcomes, and each got something different from their participation. Each had to solve their own idiosyncratic problems, and each had to think critically and creatively to successfully complete their task (the success criteria were also decided by them). Some teachers might consider this to be completely off the rails. For me it's a necessary, creative approach to support and promote personalised and critical learning.

How's that Amy? Anyone else want to set me an image/blog challenge?

All images by Amy Burvall


Off the rails? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.