WEEK 9 : CLASSROOMS WITHOUT WALLS!!

I don’t know why, but this week the chorus of one of the PinkFloyd’s protest songs “THE WALL” popped up in my head:

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey, Teachers, leave them kids alone !
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall

Without going to deep into the metaphorical meaning of this song, I wondered whether today we were the same kind of bricks in the wall they were talking about in 1979, keeping our students locked up in educational practices that have proved to be inefficient in terms of learners’ autonomy.

And I thought WAOUAW! We have come such a long way since then.

Nobody would have ever imagined a few decades ago that with technology the walls of our classrooms could just fall or disappear if we wanted to. Creating virtual or extensions of our classrooms is no longer impossible or complicated. Don’t we say that when there’s a will there’s a way? And here we are again this week with some of the great at hand tools available on the web for us.

As “autonomous” learners we can make our own decisions on what to take or what to leave to meet our individual needs. But above all, I was stunned by my fellow students’ creativity when proposing and designing specific activities for their students using the tools.

Why not doing that with our own students? Why not helping them to become autonomous and creative at the same time?

I was on an intensive training this week, and we had been introduced to a famous author/educator public speaker’s views: Ken Robinson. His resonant message is to rethink our educational systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. Indeed, he says that what was suitable for the needs of 19th century industrialization era does no longer fit in our century.

It should be mind-opening to all of us.

We should not renounce to our own creativity and subsequently our students’ because of our multiple institutional or curricular constraints. We can still teach the curriculum, but in ways that would engage our students more actively, nurturing autonomy and creativity in our classroom using technology. We often forget it, but infusing technology in our teaching practices may also mean make our students use technology online or offline.

I think that if we follow our journey we can be the kingpin of a partial upheaval of our current educational systems through our individual rethinking of our teaching practices.


http://www.ted.com/speakers/sir_ken_robinson.html