Understanding our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy in the Manaiakalani framework can be difficult . Each word seems to have a common sense meaning that we try to draw from our everyday understandings. Yet understanding what each of these terms means is really important if we are all, whānau, learner, and teachers, to engage successfully with this 'pedagogy,' this 'way of causing learning that appears to be so successful.
Regardless of whether we are learner, whānau, or teacher, perhaps the hardest to understand is the 'create' component. Yet it is really important that we do,. It is no coincidence that it is the middle word, it is central to this whole pedagogy.
Why is creativity so important? If you had a chance to read the paper by Professor Peter O'Connor and his team, you will have seen that the act or process of appealing to, feeding. and developing, our human ability to be creative feeds all of our other essential needs - our wellbeing, our learning (whether it be basic literacies, or our more advanced knowledge needs), our sense of self and our identity as human beings. Without these things no meaningful learning will occur.
So what does it look like? What IS creativity? That is a HUGE question, one not easily aaswered, A question that is perhaps more easily answered is 'what do we mean by 'create' in our Manaiakalani pedagogy?'. What would it look like if it were happening? How would I recognise it? These are all different ways of asking the same question, and I am not convinced that there is a widespread understanding of the answer, regardless of how you frame the question. Yet the answer is, I think, not too difficult to understand. It is important that the meaning is 'visible' to everyone, that we can all recognise what 'create' looks like in practice, whether we are learner, teacher, or whānau.
The generally accepted meaning of the term 'create' in the Manaiakalani kaupapa is:
“Combine existing knowledge with original ideas in new and imaginative ways to create a new outcome.” I'd like to take a little time to 'unpack', to explain, to make clear, what that looks like, what that means.
I'd begin by going back to the notion of knowledge proposed by Jane Gilbert in the early 2000s in her book 'Catching the knowledge wave'.
She suggested that we need to redefine knowledge. Most adults today grew up with the idea that knowledge was 'facts' tor 'stuff' hat we needed to know. Jane suggested that knowledge needed to be redefined to be facts, AND what we did with them. Knowing stuff was no longer enough. Rather it was a matter of what we did with that 'stuff'. Note that this DOESN'T suggest that knowing stuff is not longer important. Quite the opposite. Knowing stuff continues to be vital. However that is NO LONGER ENOUGH!! So in the context of the current maths eduction debate, it is saying that you DO still need to know stuff like basic number facts, times tables etc. It's just that this is no longer enough. You need to be able to do stuff with this.
In the Manaiakalani pedagogy, 'create' means to create new meaning with what you know. This does NOT need to be new meaning for humanity. Rather it just needs to be new meaning for the learner. THAT is creativity. So a learner creates new meaning for themselves, and then the question is 'what do they do with it?'
Here is an example drawn from my own economics teaching background. I teach a student how to use a supply and demand graph/market model. That is the 'lean' part of the pedagogy. I then supply the learner with an article on the housing market in Aotearoa that talks about accelerating house prices. The learner takes the market model and uses it to explain WHY house prices are accelerating, and what could be done to solve the problem of accelerating house prices. The learner has 'explained' and 'synthesised'. The learner has demonstrated insight into the problem. The learner has created new understanding for her/him self.
That is 'creativity'. That is the 'create' portion of our pedagogy. To put this in context for the educationalists, this shifts the learner from the Multistructural to the Relational or Extended Abstract levels of thinking in the SOLO framework, or in NCEA terms to the Merit and Excellence levels of achievement.
To 'share' this the learner then writes a blog post that outlines/explains all of this. The blog post is written with a purpose. The purpose is to demonstrate the learner's insight and understanding, it is perhaps written to inform the reader. It is vital to understand that blogging must have a purpose, and that that purpose must go beyond (for example) recording a lesson. That in itself achieves little, The blog post as a piece of writing MUST reflect new understanding, new learning. THAT is its power. And ideally that blog post will receive comment from whānau, teachers, and the world more generally.
This does not exclude the more generally accepted ideas of creativity. Indeed these are crucial for the learner. And creativity is like a muscle: it can be exercised, and in doing so it will strengthen. But more on that soon.
In the meantime, my thanks to Kelsey Clifford, our Education Programme Leader in our Uru Mānuka kāhui ako, for supporting my own growing understanding of creativity. This post in itself is an example of the reflection of the growth in my own understanding of the Manaiakalani pedagogy, an example of 'create'. Kia ora Kelsey.
R Sutton
Tumuaki
Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka Hornby High School
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