Caleb Anderson: The Education Conundrum - Complementary Opposites

Media have been delighted to run a story on the opinions of five anonymous teachers bemoaning current curriculum changes. The anonymity implies that these teachers would be reprimanded for the positions taken, unlikely, and their unanimity indicates the views of the profession at large, also unlikely.

While I was in two minds whether to comment on what is clearly an orchestrated hit job by the progressive (regressive) left, with an election approaching, I felt it might be helpful to comment on what is really happening here.

Changes to the New Zealand curriculum over the past fifty plus years or so have tended to reflect a tension between seemingly two opposites. And the word "seemingly" is highly relevant to the point I ultimately want to make. There has been a recurring tension between what was once called expository teaching, and what came to be called experiential learning. The former emphasises, in large part, the impartation of critical knowledge, and the latter the importance of the learning experience itself, the former tends to be teacher centred, and the latter student centred. Although there have been many iterations and permutations to these "seemingly" opposite approaches.

For the past fifty year or so, curriculum design has tended toward one or the other of these positions, exalting one, with only lip service to the other, stopping too infrequently at the centre. There have been too many times when the learning process was compromised by too much content, and when content was compromised by too much process.

Neither of these situations served students well.

Both expository learning and experiential learning should be part of any sensible learning programme. You need not only to know things (expository learning), you also need to be able to apply things (exploratory learning). This seems common sense to even lay people. Good programmes do both.

It is also a given that students learn, and achieve, differently, and so any efforts to equalize outcomes will serve no-one well.

So, in light of this, why the constant pendulum swings?

I believe that one of the very biggest mistakes made by governments of the day was to shift teacher education from teachers colleges to universities.

Teachers Colleges were far from perfect, but they were more pragmatic, less ideological, and less introspective than universities. They tended to know what worked, or didn't work, in the classroom itself. They were pretty good at getting the mix (approximately) right. In short, they were more likely to find middle ground, less likely to be stuck at the extremes, less susceptible to trends, and less likely to be captured.

Universities have been relentlessly, and uncompromisingly, active in prioritising political and social justice issues, over core educational issues, or of cleverly fusing the two. This has been the case for some time now, hence the incursions of critical theory, and hence the associated idea that education is not about excellence, or accepting of diverse outcomes, but about critical theory, and about flattening out differences. This has inevitably tended to overemphasise the learning experience (student) over the impartation of core knowledge (teacher) ... or, in other words, exploratory learning over expository learning.

Hence the swings, hence the confusion, hence the steadily declining standards.

From what I can discern, the claims by some teachers that the new curricula are too content (knowledge) heavy may be warranted.

I have also heard of good teachers departing from what they consider to be good practice, to accommodate new content. No doubt this will become less of a burden as teachers become familiar with the content, but there is a real threat that too much content could displace good practice ... i.e. the thoughtful mix of content, along with making that content relevant, applicable and, therefore, learnable and remembered.

Good teachers have always designed and configured programmes with their learners in mind, while remaining mindful that students learn differently.

It is harder sometimes to be in the middle, it's not always where you make your name, where you become noticed, how you get a promotion, or where you can progress agendas, but it is, generally, where the best learning and teaching happens.

The government has brought some much needed change to education by clarifying the content that needs to be taught at different levels of the education system, and the Education Minister has indicated that teachers will get some discretion with respect to content moving forward. I tend to agree with her that simply getting the content into schools first was perhaps the best first step, with the opportunity for tweaking moving forward.

She should be held to her commitment to find meaningful space for teacher discretion.

In short, while I do believe there is a fair bit of mischief in the actions of the five teachers mentioned earlier in this article, and certainly in the media glee to give their prognostications as wide an audience as possible, this should not close us down to the (ultimate) need for balance, for a sensible (not unfettered) degree of teacher discretion on how content is delivered, and for the humility to see that the best option is sometimes a thoughtful mix, not another lurch.

This is simply a matter of not seeing content and process as opposites, but as complementary.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.