Theo van Doesburg’s painting Counter-composition XII, 1925/26, from Constructive Concepts by Willy Rotzler – Photo by Alki1, on Flickr
At the moment I am really enjoying a reader I acquired over the Christmas holidays called “Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom practices” edited by Victoria Carrington and Muriel Robinson. I think I might use this book as the basis for doing some blogging. Unlike my rather poor attempt to blog about the systems life cycle and games design this at least affords me the opportunity to dip in and out of the book whenever I like.
In the first essay by Rebekah Willett entitled “Young People’s Video Productions as New Sites of Learning” she outlines a story about a pupil called Jacob who creates his own multimedia DVD with menus and animations and soundtracks. Although obviously an anecdotal example of learning she applies an interesting theory of learning to describe how this pupil has progressed through his project (Willett 2009). She calls it constructionist learning which from what I see on Wikipedia is inspired by Constructivism and although it is perhaps not a good idea to use a simplistic definition of constructionism it is perhaps best understood as ‘learning by making’ (Papert and Harel 1991) or learning by creating objects in the real world.
I would be quite happy as a digital educator to extend that definition of learning by making in the real world to include learning by making in the virtual world. This is where ICT as a subject can come in quite nicely.
For years now my teaching in ICT has consisted of a rather traditional model of “Here is how you do a spreadsheet – use the data I provide you or gather some yourself within the strict confines of the task I set you” or “Here is how you create a database … ” – you get the picture. As a form of teaching it sucks, my pedagogy is behind the times and frankly I am bored of the approach and my pupils are probably bored too. I have definitely felt for a while that a refresh is needed and taking a constructionist approach to my teaching and the learning which takes place in class could be a start.
How to do this is the more tricky part. My initial plan is to start rewriting my ICT curriculum to focus less on just simply rote demonstrations of skills and more on creative ‘constructionist’ long running projects through which skills can be taught. This I feel would teach pupils to adhere more to a standard systems life cycle (or even an updated Rapid Application Development life cycle) and would turn skills acquisition into a more relevant process for pupils.
As pupils are going to be constructing their learning through the projects they work on they will be learning through their own doing in lessons – an important point does come up then which is do I as a teacher still need to teach? Willett does essentially ask this question in her essay, through her analysis of the digital video editing case study she is writing about, as to whether if pupils are learning the skills necessary to complete a project does a teacher still need to teach?
My answer to this is that definitely traditional teacher led learning will still need to take place to ensure that key conceptual elements are taught. Even if pupils are creating their own learning through activities like games programming, digital video editing and the like I still think it is important for teachers to provide contexts and help pupils to see natural and relevant boundaries to what they are doing.
In conclusion I certainly hope that my new curriculum will begin to yield a far more exciting and ‘constructive’ (I had to get that in) approach to ICT learning which should hopefully encourage more pupils to see it as a relevant subject.
