Nurturing Learning Ecosystems

The pandemic’s disruption offered us an opportunity to step back and consider what we want schools to be — and what we need them to do. Crucially, it interrupted the growing global emphasis on schools as a factory for producing standardised ‘data’, using testing to force learners into a one-size-fits-all educational approach that is increasingly irrelevant to a world in crisis. However, taking a cue from sustainable ecosystems, this talk will consider a constructionist learning approach in which diversity, engagement, social connectedness, and citizenship — humanisation — is school’s chief aim. Introducing important recent educational research, it will propose an educational vision undergirded by technology in which learners are connected sustainably to their contexts, collaboratively to their communities, and productively to the content they use to solve meaningful problems. This multidimensional approach situates learning in the challenges that will become this generation’s chief work, giving them critical experience as a force for positive change in a chaotic world.