Transforming education .... through ICT ...yewk???

What is your big vision for education?

15 years ago I would have talked about a holistic vision for education, seeing its values, philosophies and pedagogies as helping to stretch humanity into a place I thought we needed to be for the survival of the planet and humanity. 10 years ago I realised for many teachers it is too big a shift, and worked with people where they were to help expand their seeing, thinking and actions, mainly through action research. I also began to recognise that"holistic"philosophies were based on a particular value system which I was priviliging and to be open to emergent possibilities. Since then I have been squirming around in my head thinking through integral framing of the issues and wondering whether some of this thinking may be useful for others.

In the last year I have been involved in a project where we asked educational leaders what are their issues and visions around ICT and e-learning in education, inorder to help us better understand the implications of the new promised high speed broadband to education.

ICT... yuk. Technology. Yuk. Useful... but what has this got to do with the soul, with passion, with ethical living in the world, with beauty, mindfulness, generosity, with nature?

Well quite a lot actually. When asked about what high speed broadband can do, it is very easy to talk about the actual technology - high streaming video conferencing, schools being able to upload and download multiple media files, visualisation of data sets into 3D worlds...

When you talk about it that way it can fail to excite many educators. When I started asking these leaders to tell me why these things would be valuable to education suddenly their voices were filled with passion and excitement.... the opportunity to break down the walls of the classroom, ignite creativity in students and teachers, enable global participation and contribution, to find new places to belong, to transform education...etc...

In listening to the leaders I began ot realise that much of what they valued could be mapped onto a spiral dynamic framework. The following diagram gives a spectrum of values which underpin some of the affordances of ICT for student development and learning. Such a diagram can help make explicit the range of things which we value, and help us to realise that they can be from very different value systems. As a whole these provide a very powerful narrative for education. We can use it to see how we are contributing to the whole and value those who are contributing to a different part of it. Part of the challenge is to give examples of what teachers and students doing, making these affordances evident. (Note - this diagram is by no means complete - just tries to give a flavour of the differences and has the danger of caging our thinking in.)

I used this framework to develop "stories" of what students were doing or could do with high speed broadband. I presented these stories with some colleagues at the Broadband for Society Summit and also at a cross-sector e-learning educational forum which was part of the NBN in education research project (see powerpoint). For both audiences the stories acted very powerfully. I believe that was because they spoke to people heart to heart - about what we value. Leaders also liked the framework as a tool for helping us to put what we value upfront.

Subsequent to the forum event I have been reading the work of Schieffer and Lessem on transforming organizations - Part 1, Part 2. One of their suggestions is that transformation is often done without actually understanding the cultural ground of being of where people are at - what they value. We need to start at the "ground" and then go through a process of emerging (holistic world), navigating (rational world) and effecting (pragmatic world).

It is timely to discover such a model to help reflect on what actually happened in the forum and whether we could have facilitated it better. I realise how much the work I did on values actually helped people to connect to the ground of their being - to their heart and their culture. The stories with different layers of affordances cut across differences to speak to people in different ways.

But did we move from our ground?

I also realised that the work I had done on synthesing the interviews - not just around the issues - but also around different perspectives and mental models that people were bringing, helped to create a greater holistic narrative. I developed a framework which indicated the key perspectives we needed to have to look at the issues - pedagogy, educational vision, professioanl learning, student pathways, inclusion, policy and supporting technologies - far more than usually considered in ICT debates. I also used a simple quadrant integral framework to explose some of the mental frameworks that people were bringing to thinking about the issues - cultural, systems, things and experiences, individual innner aspects. A key aim of using these frameworks was to show how the diverse and often conflicting views and lenses actually together made an important whole. We need to be agile in our thinking across all these different ways of seeing and framing the issues.

I think what we observed on the day was the willingness of participants to come to know the differences of each other... to listen out for the interesting questions and to explore them rather than just dismiss them for their lack of pragmatism. Sheiffer and Lessem talk about the importance of opening to the "other" to break down habitual limiting cultural patterns. (Your culture is still the ground of your being but where you transform to is a hybrid space where you have reframed your culture, rather than leaving it behind.)

Towards the end of the day we went into the more rational and pragmatic stages to see where to next. But I felt that something was missing from the day... we needed to also move into a more spacious visioning space - perhaps consider global and local scenarios... and then come back to asking Are we seeing "holistic"enough? Are we asking the big questions... not just some interesting ones.

I approached the research using a causal layered approach... what are the issues and barriers (the litany layer), what are the emerging themes or perspectives (the social analysis layer), what are the worldviews and values, and the next layer is about collective visioning. One day is not enough...

It is fabulous that the theories have now been freed from rattling around in my head.... I now can let go of the need for them to be accurate or sufficient - seeing them as temporary scaffolding that has a timely usefulness to help a particular group have a conversation in new ways....

And so the conversation continues...

And my head is now more spacious for other things to squirm around...