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Image credit: Education Reimagined
"... an equitable education system that honours the uniqueness of each child, family, and community; values each child’s life goals and contexts; and prepares them to provide for themselves and their families... to support each and every child to discover their gifts, passions, and talents and to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life."
Education Reimagined is a non-profit that seeks to accelerate the paradigm shift from school-centred to learner-centred education. In the learner-centred paradigm, learners are seen and known as wondrous, curious individuals with vast capabilities and limitless potential. Shouldn't all parents see kids this way?
This week's newsletter talks about learner-centred education through the lens of parents and dives into what learner-centred parenting looks like.
"Learners are active participants in their learning as they gradually become owners of it, and learning itself is seen as an engaging and exciting process. Each child’s interests, passions, dreams, skills, and needs shape their learning experience and drive the commitments and actions of the adults and communities supporting them."
Learner-centred parenting begins with seeing kids as active participants in their learning. Learning is shaped by the child's interests and passions, resulting in the child seeing learning as engaging, exciting and fun. This sounds simple and obvious but is a radical departure from how most kids currently learn. In Issue 11 of Education & Catastrophe 'No Such Thing As An Average Student', I wrote about the way we have built an entire education system assuming the average kid exists. That kids know the same things, learn the same way, at the same age. They don't. Learner-centred parenting is about developing a child's own agency—growing their capacity to act independently and effectively make meaningful choices regarding their learning so that they can follow their own interests and pursue their own aspirations.
The role of the parent.
First, parents need to partner with their child to create and navigate learning journeys and set goals. Parents need to respect and cultivate the initiative and agency of the child, allowing their uniqueness to be revealed and truly honoured.
Second, parents need to encourage and support that natural desire to learn so that it has the space to flourish. This desire to learn is innate in all human beings, but a mainstream education that caters to the "average child" kills this natural desire to learn. Parents need to do everything they can to avoid the child losing interest in learning.
Third, parents play the role of being a resource to a child’s learning journey, facilitating and providing expertise with regard to the learning challenge at hand. Parents also play a mentoring role: setting a positive example, believing in the unlimited potential of the child, encouraging the child to explore new learning opportunities, and helping remove obstacles that may arise along the child's learning journey.
Learner agency
Learner agency is a learner’s capacity to take purposeful initiative in the matter of their own learning journey, to generate their own ambitions and effectively exercise their own choices regarding who they are as a learner and a person, how they relate to others in their learning community, and which kinds of learning experiences will best carry them to their learning goals.
To foster learner agency, parents need to create learning environments that
recognise the full humanity and learning potential of the child
see the child as the primary driver of their learning, designing and managing their learning journey
eliminate conscious and unconscious biases related to race, socioeconomic background, age, gender, culture etc
trust the child's ability to articulate their learning needs and set learning goals
Socially embedded
Socially embedded refers to a learning environment that fosters relationships between and among the members of its learning community as central to each learner’s journey. It may not be easy for parents to build a learning community that provides the child with a sense of belonging and that focuses on the social nature of learning. Often times, it's easier to find and join these learning communities than to build one from scratch. I've written about Forest School Singapore in previous issues of Education & Catastrophe. There are Forest School chapters all over the world. Parents can also look for homeschool and unschool communities and groups, many of which welcome both parent and child. Self-Directed Life and Sharpening Minds are two examples with roots in Singapore.
Personalised, relevant and contextualised
The learning experience needs to be a match for the child’s unique needs, interests, and circumstances. Parents need to spend time exploring the child's strengths, interests and aspirations in order to establish learning goals that are relevant to those aspirations and personalised to the child's strengths and interests. The learning experience is contextualised so that it is meaningful in the world of the child, such that the child can answer the question 'what does this learning mean to me'.
Open-walled
Open-walled simply means that learning can happen anywhere, anytime, and with anyone. In an open-walled learning environment, learning opportunities that are a match for what the child's interests are, how they learn, and their goals and aspirations dramatically expand. Parents need to look within their community as well as online to expand their child's opportunities for learning. Global citizenship is a significant side benefit of open-walled learning. The ability to learn from and work with anyone in the world becomes more important as the world becomes increasingly connected.
Competency-based
Competency-based refers to learning environments that focus on building a child's ability to do things competently in real-world contexts. It is the difference between knowing something (cold air sinks) and being able to perform useful actions with what you know (installing the AC closer to the ceiling than to the ground). Competency goes beyond knowledge to include skills (the capacities needed to apply knowledge effectively in producing desired results) and dispositions (the behaviours and ways of being needed for a person to engage with the world effectively).
"Competency-based approaches fit naturally with the other elements in a learner-centred environment. Learner agency is easier to empower when the connection is clear between what is being learned and the related knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Competency-based environments also naturally enable personalised, relevant, and contextualised learning, meaning learners take the time they need to achieve levels of proficiency and demonstrate that proficiency in a number of ways, assessed by a variety of stakeholders. Open-walled learning experiences involving internships, volunteer jobs, or field projects integrate smoothly with the rest of a learner’s journey because such experiences easily lend themselves to beingcompetency-based. And, the development of competencies is naturally socially embedded - pulling for interaction with mentors, peers, and others in the community."
To learn more, read the lexicon to “A Transformational Vision for Education in the US".
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Remember, it's hard work being a great parent to your child. You're doing your best.
Till the next issue!